He heard a bark of laughter next to him and wanted to wilt into the shorn brown grass that hugged the hangar.
“Wow, Michael, tell me how you really feel!” Carl laughed through his fingers. “That was heartfelt.”
Oh shit—way to impress this man with his style. “I’m sorry. I… you probably love Texas.”
“Not particularly,” Carl told him. “Although I save that level of pure hatred for Florida.”
“What did Florida ever do to you?” Michael asked, lightening up a little. It didn’t sound like he’d put the guy off any, so that was something.
“Nothing personally, although the humidity in the summer is sort of like being mugged by a sweaty manure truck worker with bad breath. But my mother moved to Florida so she and my Aunt Bessie could make each other miserable, and I’m telling you, I avoid the place like a shit-trucker’s armpit. No. Just no. That much bottled vitriol is a bad thing.”
Michael cackled outright, liking this moment very much. “I gotta work on how much I hate Texas,” he said. “’Cause that’s funnier than anything I’ve got right now.”
Carl’s laughter this time was warm: kind. And sort of rumbly: personal. It was personal laughter, for Michael alone. “I’ll be sure to ask you when we return,” he said. “Be prepared. I’ll say, ‘How much do you hate Texas?’ and you’ll have to say something funny back.”
Michael looked at him from the corner of his eye. He had an open, happy expression on his face, and Michael’s stomach tightened. Oh. Oh wow. This was even better than he’d imagined. Now they had a thing.
“Oh!” Carl said as they rounded the corner for the back of the hangar. Since the hangar faced the small airstrip, the acreage out back was mostly long grass. Michael could see some of it had been seeded as hay, and someone had come to mow and bale in early September. But that was a good mile away. The square mile behind the hangar was sage and prairie grasses, with a small grove of oak trees about two hundred yards behind the hangar itself. Michael had been drawn to the area when he’d first come to work; he’d taken his breaks behind the big building and had noted the rich wildlife population. He hadn’t wanted to ask the Salingers, but he’d wondered if it was on purpose. A small stream, perhaps an irrigation ditch, wended its way through the trees and into the distant seeded farmland, and the result was a riot of fauna. Coyotes, prairie chickens, hawks, jackrabbits, feral cats—all of the creatures lived, mated, hunted, and died in this stretch of land, and Michael got to be an observer of it all.
He’d grown up on two hardpan acres in Texas and spent much of his adulthood working on the cracked pavement of a tiny town way outside of Austin. To him this sort of teeming animal sanctuary was something of a miracle.
“Nice, right?” Michael said with satisfaction.
“It’s surprisingly wild,” Carl said, smiling out into the prairie. The lines by his eyes crinkled when he did that, and his face softened a little, making him look like a young, blond George Clooney or a broad-chested Brad Pitt. This man knew how to smile, Michael thought, but he did it quietly and inside.
Carl looked back against the hangar and spotted the little shelter Michael had built for himself. Solid wood, it shaded him from the sun and kept out some of the wind. He’d built a cot that also served as a bench and a small bear-proof icebox to hold his lunch or dinner, a little wooden box to hold books and other essentials, and brought a camp chair because the cot got hard on the back. “I can see why you’d want to spend time out here. What’s this structure here, next to—”
From inside what amounted to an eight-by-eight-by-eight wooden crate with a steel mesh front came an imperious shriek.
“Is that a bird?” Carl’s voice took on awed tones, and Michael smiled, pleased. He’d been crushing on Carl something awful, but until this moment, the idea that they might share the same interests had only been a hope.
“It’s a peregrine,” Michael said, tugging on the sleeve of Carl’s sport jacket to pull him in front of the mews. “See? I found him flopping out here, trying to scream his way past a coyote. Tore the shit out of my hand before I sacrificed a sweatshirt.” He held up the hand that still sported a large bandage on the back, up past his wrist.
“Ouch!” Carl caught his hand for a moment, evidently to take a better look at it, and Michael almost pulled out of his grip.
Then he realized that this was the whole purpose of luring the good-looking guy in the businessman’s suit to the back of the hangar.
He allowed Carl to peel back the bandage briefly to inspect the gashes—halfway to healing though they were—and for some of the warmth in Carl’s big, well-manicured hand to seep into Michael’s smaller, rougher one.
“They’re getting better—I wear gloves when I work to keep them clean,” he said shyly, warmth curling in his belly, and Carl shook his head and looked from the back of Michael’s hand and wrist to the bird in the cage, currently wearing a toeless nylon stocking to hold his wings next to his body.
“Yes, but that’s quite a sacrifice,” Carl said gently. He rubbed his thumb along the knuckles and then lowered the hand but didn’t let go. “The stocking’s a good idea. Where’d you get that?”
“A bird-rescue site online,” Michael said. He sighed. “They told me I should have hooded him, too, but by the time I got to that part, he’d started getting really ruffly and happy when he saw me, because he knew food was coming. I hope I haven’t ruined his chances for going back into the wild.” He liked having the falcon there, and he was proud of his part in helping the bird survive. But Michael had lived in a cage of his own for two years. He knew where that bird belonged, and it wasn’t behind a load of pig-wire and plywood.
Carl studied the creature, frowning, and again the change in his energy when his expression altered was formidable. That frown could darken the heavens, although Carl didn’t appear to know it.
The bird stood not quite twenty inches tall, and his breast plumage, visible through the stocking, was pretty—speckled black and white while the base of his sharp curved beak was an arresting yellow. His eyes, bright, passionless, analytical, studied everything about the two humans looking into his territory, and he opened his beak and shrieked, probably looking for food. Peregrines ate about 20 percent of their body weight every day. Michael kept a terrarium of field mice behind the mews, letting one or two loose on the feeding tray at a time so the bird could hunt even though grounded. But today he had a treat—for the falcon at least. Hadn’t been so much fun for Michael, but then, he existed as a conduit for falcon food at this point, so he couldn’t complain.
“Scuse me,” Michael said, reluctantly freeing his hand from Carl’s. First, he reached into his essentials box and donned a pair of Teflon gloves, the kind ladies wore to prune roses, he’d bought after the initial rescue—after the bird had ripped his hand open, of course. Then he went back to the critter-proof icebox and pulled out a dead jackrabbit he’d spotted off the service road that led out to the small airstrip.
“This here’s super gross,” he told Carl, apologizing. “You don’t have to look if you don’t want to.”