The beeping stopped as the plow guy jerked into drive again and headed for the other side of the street. Ray shifted from one foot to the other, hunching his shoulders to keep wet flakes from landing inside his collar.
"C'mon, do your thing." It was nasty out—just warm enough to be damp—and Ray wanted to be back indoors already.
Dief made a noise that was surprisingly like a sniff before finally picking a wheel to whiz on. As soon as he was through Ray fumbled for his keys and let them back into the building. The wolf trotted ahead of him back up the stairs.
Fraser, absorbed in the crossword puzzle, didn't look up when they came in.
"You're lucky your dog didn't decide to chase the snowplow." Ray shrugged out of his coat and boots and went back to his end of the couch. The new issue of ESPN: The Magazine was calling his name.
"A thankless task,"Fraser said, a little distantly.
"What—taking the dog out for a leak?"
"Plowing."
"It's not so bad." Ray opened to the first article, creased the cover over, but now he was thinking about snowplows. "I drove one in high school."
"Hmm?" A faint frown creased Fraser's brow. "If that's six across, then what's four down?" He flipped the pencil around and started erasing.
Ray went on anyway. "Mom and dad weren't big on the whole 'allowance' thing, and I wanted to be able to take Stella out. Nice places." The kind of places she deserved. The kind of places that wouldn't make her mouth tighten the way it did at Jack's, where she was the only girl at the counter and hot dogs cost sixty cents and the air was rich with the smell of hot grease.
The dogs at Jack's were probably still only sixty cents. Ray hadn't been there in a while.
"What was your route?" Fraser was still staring at the little crossword boxes. Hearing his voice was startling; Ray's mind had gotten off track again.
"Nowhere special. The neighborhood. I worked nights, eleven to three."
"That's only four hours."
"Yeah, but I hadda get some sleep sometime. I split the shift with another kid from my street." Carlos Dominguez. Who was always wide-awake when Ray dropped the truck off. Came out of his house with a big thermos of coffee, hair wet like he'd set his alarm for 2:30 to shower. Crazy.
"Adinkra."
"What?"
Fraser was writing carefully. "Eight across. 'Symbolic language of southern Ghana.'"
The crossword. "Right."
Ray was just starting to get interested in the interview with Yao Ming when Fraser spoke up again.
"Did you like the job?"
Ray shrugged, although Fraser wasn't looking at him and wouldn't see. "It was okay. Beat flipping burgers or mowing lawns. Pay was decent."
There was a short silence.
"Good time to be by myself, y'know? Wasn't a whole lot of that in the Kowalski household." Not in that tin can of a house. Jeez, a guy could barely be alone in the bathroom for two minutes without somebody banging on the door looking for a tissue or something.
"Mmm. I must say, time alone was not at a premium when I was at school, but I can imagine that you must have...enjoyed it." Fraser was gazing deep into the puzzle again.
"Got a lot of thinking done."
"About?"
"Stella, mostly." Ray felt himself quirking a grin at the memory. "Where I was gonna take her with all the money I was making, which wasn't a lot, but it was better than nothing, right? I saved up a while to get her this little gold chain for Christmas that year. It was gold--I thought it was such a big deal." Stella hadn't thought so much of it, but she was sweet enough to wear it anyway. For a while.
Yeah. He'd thought about Stella a lot.
'Course, he hadn't just thought about Stella. Sometimes, when they were fighting or she was being bitchy, he'd thought about Rob.
Rob whose leather jacket had dimes hammered onto the shoulder studs. Rob who'd introduced him to Wire, and to grass, at the same time, handling the album with almost exaggerated care to keep it from getting scratched. Ray remembered lying on his back on the floor of Rob's bedroom, head spinning from the smoke and the sounds. He used to think maybe he'd start a band, back then.
Fraser put the Times magazine down on the table carefully and then stretched, reaching his arms way up and then rotating his head to one side, then the other.
"As it happens, I drove a plow whilst at school, too. In a manner of speaking," Fraser added hastily.
"Really?" Ray put the magazine down.
"It doubled as the Driver's Education vehicle during the summer. No one learned to drive during the winter; the truck was too precious. Had one of us damaged it..."
"I thought you lived in the boondocks."
Fraser scratched his eyebrow. "We weren't far from town by local standards, but we certainly weren't nearby. Only the very center of town was plowed. The rest of us used snowmobiles or dogsleds anyway."
From the corner Dief whined.
"You hush," Fraser said. "You didn't like the other dogs then; I can't imagine why you miss them now."
Ray was trying to picture Fraser learning to drive, but it wasn't easy. It was hard to imagine Fraser as a teenager.
"That was the last year they left the plow truck unlocked," Fraser mused.
"Oh yeah?"
"Jenny Aluviaq was discovered to be pregnant in early spring. Apparently she and Tom Finn, the postmaster, had...trysted there on a rare stormless fall day."
Ray snickered. "Even if it had a bench seat, betcha that wasn't real comfortable."
"Well, it was private. Jenny had four siblings and Tom lived with his wife and two children."
"Private, yeah. I get that."
Fraser looked like he was about to say something, but didn't.
Ray waited.
Fraser continued to say nothing, and in fact looked away, and suddenly Ray felt himself grinning widely.
"No, I never brought company, Fraser. Thought about it, but—" Ray shrugged. "It wasn't Stella's style."
Fraser was smiling, too, now. Not precisely at him, but near him.
Feeling suddenly cooped-up and snowed-in and a little reckless, Ray kept going. "Rob might've, if I'd asked."
"The boy who shared your shift?" Fraser sounded curious but no more so than usual. Damn: it had sailed right over his head.
"No, that was Carlos. Rob was..." Ray stopped. Suddenly this seemed like maybe not such a good idea. He looked away, he looked at the wolf, nose pillowed on a paw, because it was suddenly easier to face Diefenbaker than to look at Fraser. "Rob introduced me to punk."
"Ah," Fraser said, and there was a world of something in that ah. "But you never asked him to...join you." Ray glanced up, and saw that Fraser was watching him intently.
Ray took a deep breath and went for it. "I thought about it a few times, when me and Stell were on the outs, but I never got up the courage."
Fraser licked his lips and Ray fought the temptation to mirror the action. His mouth was dry all of a sudden. And Fraser's lips were wet.
"Oh?" Fraser tilted his head, still staring him down. "And what would you have said?"
"Huh?" Ray felt dazed.
"To your...Rob."
"'You...'" Ray cleared his throat. "'You wanna come with me some night?'" His voice sounded hoarse to his own ears.
He hadn't noticed Fraser moving, but suddenly they were closer together than they'd been. Their knees were almost touching. Ray's palms were sweating where he had them pressed against his thighs.
"'I could...show you some things,'" Ray murmured. "'It's real quiet out there in the snow.'"
Fraser was so close that Ray could almost feel his heat. "And if he'd said yes?"
Heart beating like it wanted to push right out of his chest, Ray closed the gap between them.
Fraser's mouth was hot, he tasted like the pizza they'd had for dinner a few hours before, his hand was splayed across Ray's back amazing and firm through Ray's sweater, and holy shit: holy shit, he was kissing Benton Fraser on his living-room couch. Knees tangling awkwardly now, like he'd imagined his knees tangling with Rob's across the leather bench of the 1975 Dodge pickup the snowplow had been bolted onto, except he'd never tangled with Rob, not really. Not like this.
His tongue was in Fraser's mouth. Fraser moaned, which Ray could feel everywhere.
And then zzzt! The power went out. The lights; the coffee-pot; the cd player. Even with his eyes closed, Ray could feel the dark.
Fraser pulled away enough to bite gently at Ray's jaw, moving a wet kiss down Ray's throat.
"Quiet out here in the snow," Fraser murmured.
Ray felt himself grinning. "Told you."
"And dark. How are you going to show me things in the dark?" Fraser sounded...arch. Edible.
Ray pushed him back against the couch and let himself slide down onto the floor between Fraser's knees.
"Ahhhh," Fraser said, sounding surprised.
Then, much later, "Oh. Oh. Ray."
Then, after that, almost plaintively, "I'm afraid I can't--get off the floor, Ray. I can't reach you down there."
Ray didn't last long, especially once Fraser unfastened his jeans and slipped a large, capable hand inside. Capable of wringing his orgasm out of him in about ten seconds, actually.
There was no question of driving Fraser home. The storm was still going--ice pellets now, by the sound of things--and besides, they were half-naked and sticky. And Ray wasn't done with the kissing yet.
They wound up wrapped together in bed. Having somebody in bed with him again was amazing. That it was Fraser was almost unbelievable. Except that it was real; that was Fraser's chest, Fraser's ass, Fraser's mouth.
Mmm. Fraser's mouth.
After a while the kissing slowed and Ray felt himself starting to nod off.
He fell asleep to the distant beeping of the snowplow, backing up and making another pass.
The End