The Winter Courtship Rituals of Fur-Bearing Critters Read Free Page A

She was three months pregnant and so thin that you could already see the fullness at her waist. She claimed that her back kept tightening up with the strain, and Crawford had taken her out of the mill for the duration of the pregnancy. She’d put up a gratifying fight on that one, but then she’d thrown her back out just doing laundry and had to concede. Something about the weight distribution was just wonky, and Crawford was coddling her like a blind kitten.
    This baby was as close as he was ever going to get to fatherhood. It was going to be loved.
    “Yup. I’ll add one more item to the layette,” he said mildly, and Ariadne’s eyes lit up.
    “Yeah? Because this mysterious layette is killing me! You won’t tell me colors or… or styles or….” Her eyes got big. “You’re designing it, aren’t you? The whole thing, from the fiber to the colors to the designs, right?”
    Suddenly she popped out of the chair and squealed, throwing her arms around his neck and making girl noises. “You are you are you are! Oh, Crawford, I can’t wait to see it!”
    Crawford’s eyes widened with a little bit of alarm. “You’d better wait! It’s going to take me forever to knit!” It was, too. He’d started spinning and dyeing the yarn in small batches and taking it to his little house, which sat about fifty feet from the back of the shop, toward the livestock acreage but not too close to the alpaca pens. In the evening, before he fell asleep, he watched television or read and knitted quietly on the tiny socks or the matching hat he’d already started. He figured when December hit and he needed to see bright oranges and yellows, greens and blues, that it would be the time to work on the blanket, so it could sit in his lap as he worked with the fingering-weight yarn. But that project was going to have to wait for a night, he thought helplessly as he watched the singles spin out between his wide, blunt fingers. This thing, this soft, sturdy, natural thing, it was calling him, loud and clear.
    Ariadne was smiling at him, oblivious to the uncomfortable thing growing on his heart like singles on a bobbin. “I can wait for ya, Craw—I always could.” She looked at what he was spinning curiously. “That’s sort of neat—rustic, natural colored. Very nice.”
    Crawford still blushed when she complimented him, and she did it often for just that reason. “It’s fleece,” he muttered. “I met the new neighbor.”
    Ari smiled prettily at him when he looked up, and he blushed more.
    “He’s gay,” she said almost gleefully.
    Oh crap. “I am aware,” he muttered. “How did you know?”
    “Because Gertie told me when we nursed her through the flu that last time.”
    They both sighed. They missed Gertie.
    “Why’d she tell you that?” Seemed like an odd thing to bring up.
    “Because she suspected you were and she wanted me to know it was okay.”
    Crawford let out a sigh. “Well, that would be a load off my mind if she wasn’t dead and all,” he snapped. God. Why did it have to be about the gay? He could live most of his life a sexless eunuch (except for the little thing he had going in Boulder with a man who had a lot of other little things going on and who mostly gave Crawford a one-off once a month out of pity) if people would just pretend he didn’t exist. He was happier that way.
    “Crawford!” Ariadne clapped her hand over her mouth and looked at him in horror, and Crawford did his best to tuck his misanthropy back under his belt.
    “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “That was a shitty thing to say.”
    “It totally was!” Her eyes were still big and horrified, and he winced. She was the only person on the planet who talked to him at all, and seriously, why would he want to go and freak her out like that?
    “I just….” He sighed and glared at the singles in his hand. God, he loved spinning. Usually, the even keel of it, the sweetly repetitive motion of treadle, wheel, and yarn, kept his bastard in