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"I want to."
"Fine, but if you ever treat me differently because of this--"
"I'd like to think you know me better than that."
He eases back, his voice lowering. "Yeah. Okay. So, Jacob ... I was ten. He was seven. We'd wander in the woods for hours. Our parents taught us how to find our way, and we were always home by dark. Then one day we see these people. I'm curious. I make Jacob stay back while I check them out. It's a group, camping and hunting. For three days, I come back to watch them. Jacob's freaked out. He wants to tell our parents. I say no fucking way. I threaten to leave him at home next time. On the third day, he's still whining, so I tell him to get out of my damned face, and I stomp off, exactly like you thought I did yesterday. And that's when it happens."
"They take him."
"No." He inhales and straightens and meets my gaze. "Not him. They take me."
"And then what? You escape and..." I trail off. I mentally retrace his story, and I realize there's more than one way of looking at it.
"Your parents..." I say. "The Daltons aren't your parents. They took you. From the forest. From..."
"Yeah."
I blink, and I'm trying so hard not to react, to act like this is no big deal. Huh, guess I got that backward. Interesting.
But it is a big deal. A huge deal, because losing a little brother would be tough, but to be the one lost himself, to be taken from his family ...
"So, yeah," he says. "That's where I come from. Out there. I was one of them. Still am, in a lot of ways. It's not as if the Daltons rescued me from parents who beat and starved me. At first, I fought like a wolverine. I kept thinking my parents would come for me. But if they tried, I never knew it, so I figured they'd given up on me. I was pissed about that, and then, well ... life was easier in Rockton. The Daltons were good people. I didn't ... I didn't have the experience or the self-awareness to really understand that what they'd done was wrong. Everyone said they did a good thing, rescuing me from the savages, and how lucky I was, and by the time I was old enough to know that wasn't true?" He shrugs. "The Daltons were my parents by then. There was no point going back, because I didn't belong there anymore. I didn't quite belong out here, either. I'm just ... somewhere in between."
I think of all the times I've been with him in the forest, and how different he is there. All the times he's sat out on the back deck at the station, and we joke that he is an outside cat. But it isn't really a joke. He is that feral cat who'd been brought indoors, and maybe life is easier inside, but he'll never stop feeling the pull of the wild. But he'll never quite be able to live out there again, either.
"That's why the council's threat is such a big deal, Casey. When I say I couldn't live down south, I'm not being difficult or stubborn or dramatic. I could not live there. I'd go back into the forest first. But it's not just the council. What if I meet someone here? Someone I want to be with? Someone from down south, who'll expect me to go with her after her term's up, but I can't, and if she wants me, she has to stay here and live a life that's as wrong for her as hers is for me."
"And that's happened," I say. "In the past."
"I met someone, fell madly in love, and then she left and broke my heart?" He snorts a genuine laugh. "Fuck no. Might make a better story. But no. When I was a kid, the women here..." He looks at me. "Maybe this is more than you want to hear?"
I tell him to go on, and then I shift back and motion for him to come sit on the bed with me, and that seems to surprise him, as if maybe I'd want him out of the room, across the town, somewhere far, far away. But he sits beside me, and relaxes against the pile of pillows.
"When I was a kid--teenager, young adult--well, there are women here, obviously, and like you've seen, things are different, freer or whatever."
"Despite the overall lack of women, I suspect there were still some who were happy to teach a young man a few things about sex."
"Yeah. When you're eighteen, nineteen, that's pretty much heaven. Considering my age, the women never expected more than sex. But then I got older, and they started wanting to help me. Fix me. Like the poor guy who's never been off the farm, and they're gonna give him the confidence to get out there and make his way in the world."
"Which couldn't be further from what you wanted."
He nods. "I'd keep it casual, but they'd still start talking about how I could go back south with them, how they'd help me adjust. A few years back, I had a rough time with a woman who misunderstood, so I said fuck this shit. I've got more important things to do anyway, with being sheriff now and..." He scratches his chin. "And that's not what I'm trying to say at all. Where was I?"
"Thinking that the second tequila shot was a bad idea after all?"
A laugh. "No shit, huh? Okay, so ... Right. I can't leave, and I'm not ever going to fit anyone's definition of normal, and that's what I meant when I kissed you."
"Uh-huh."
He squeezes his eyes shut and gives his head a sharp shake. "Let me untangle that. When I said I didn't want that kiss to turn into sex, I didn't mean I didn't want sex." He pauses. "That didn't untangle it at all, did it?"
"Not really." I sit up a little more. "You don't need to explain--"
"I'm going to. It just might take some time. Sex, yes. With you, yes. But not like that. Not first-kiss-to-sex in sixty seconds flat, and then that's it and that was fun and let's get back to work. That's what I didn't want. The way it was going. Where it was leading. Not the sex part but the..." He struggles for a word.
"The casual part."
"Exactly. Right. Thank you. Yes. That's not what I wanted with you, and if I start there, how do I go back and say I want more? And, fuck, I can't want more, because I can't give more, and if I can't give more, then it's not fair to say I want more and..." He pinches the bridge of his nose. "And I really shouldn't have had that second shot."
