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His eyes flash. “And I won’t have you besmirching the good name of PETA! Although,” he concedes, “my evil mustache was a big selling point.
And I liked the eyepatch. Can I get an eyepatch?”
“Do you want me to be pregnant?” Otter asks me. “Is that all I am to you? A baby factory?”
I ignore him and look at the Kid. “Well, if you hadn’t so rudely interrupted what is obviously a masterpiece in the making, you’d have found out that you also had a robot arm and dark secrets of your own. But since you stopped me, you’ll never, ever know what those secrets are. It’s time to go to sleep.”
The Kid rolls his eyes. “What secrets? Like I would have had an evil twin brother or something? Lame.”
“No,” I say, even though that was totally it. Dammit. I thought it sounded cool. “Bedtime.”
“Well, I did like how I was in charge of PETA, even if you made it evil.” He yawns and falls back onto his pillow. “Can you leave the light on low? I’m still not used to the new house.” I nod and flip the lamp to its lowest setting and kiss him gently on the forehead. The Kid is out even before I shut the door behind us.
As soon as we’re in our bedroom, Otter spins me around and shoves me face-first up against the wall,
holding my hands above my head, pressing his body up against mine and grinding wonderfully into my hip. “I’ll show you pregnant,” he growls near my ear as he licks the nape of my neck.
“That sounds so wrong when you say it like that,” I manage to whimper before his other hand is down the back of my jeans and doing neat things to my ass.
Huh. If this is the reaction I get to one of my stories made up on the fly, maybe I should be a writer after all. Or something. I can’t quite seem to focus right now, and what was I saying? What were we talking about?
Shit.
Here we go again.
1.
Where Bear Goes to War
WE WERE at war, he and I.
I’d inadvertently fired the opening salvo on the day forever known as the Big Move (It’s About Time). It was not intentional, but I’ve learned that maybe the first shots never really are. Of course it wasn’t intentional; who in their right mind would want to face the wrath of the smartest nine-year-old vegetarian ecoterrorist-in-training on the planet?
Not I. Much greater men than I have fallen to him.
It was one of the last boxes in the apartment, and there were only a few things left to pack. I’d gone into the bedroom to make sure we’d gotten everything, that nothing was left behind. It’d startled me, if only for a moment, to see how empty the room was: divots on the floors showing where bedposts had rested for years. Faint outlines of posters on the walls. A stain in the corner that I just knew wasn’t going to allow me to get the damn deposit back (and I really didn’t want to know what it was; it was a greenish-bluish thing that screamed “bad tenants.” I thought maybe I should at least try to clean it, but it looked too gross, so I just left it alone). I was struck, oddly, by a sense of sadness at the empty space before me. I don’t adapt to change very well, even if it’s a good thing. So much had happened here, so much that had changed everything about our lives, that it seemed important that I stop and at least send up a grateful thank-you to who’d ever take it.
So I was distracted, okay? It wasn’t intentional. I swear.
I noticed something light blue near the closet. A shirt that somehow had gotten missed. I picked it up, rolling my eyes at the MEAT ISN’T NEAT
slogan across the front. I don’t know how the hell he’d missed this; it was literally the most favorite thing he owned. Well, that and the random collection of other shirts he started ordering online with my credit card (once he’d learned that all it took was punching in the numbers into the website and he could order whatever he wanted—you’d have thought that Jesus had come back and told him that vegetarians are the next step in human evolution; he’d been that excited.) Every few days a new box would show up at our door, containing shirts with such winners as GIVE ME TOFU OR
GIVE ME DEATH or one with Gandhi’s face and his quote underneath:
“You can judge a society by the way it treats its animals.” That one had made me feel a little guilty. And way creeped out, because Gandhi’s eyes seemed to follow me everywhere, like he knew, just knew I was thinking about pulled pork.
But it was when that last one had come that I had to draw the line.
Imagine, if you will, sitting down for breakfast one randomly bright and sunny morning, and your little brother walks into a room wearing a shirt that says WANT LONGER LASTING SEX? BECOME A VEGETARIAN!
Seriously? Come on. Seriously!
I was in the middle of saying something to Otter when the little shit walked into the kitchen, pretending not to notice me noticing him. My spoon had dropped from my hand and clattered onto the table, and Otter had followed my line of sight as the blood drained from my face and my jaw dropped open. And did that big bastard help me? You bet your ass he didn’t.
Otter started bellowing great gales of laughter and pounding the table with his gigantic paws, causing it to rattle and shake. I glared at him for a moment and then looked back and waited for He Who Was About To Have His Internet Privileges Seriously Revoked Forever to turn around.
You would have thought the Kid was the greatest method actor in the history of the craft. He calmly took a packet of oatmeal from the cabinet and laid it on the counter. He took a bowl from the dishwasher and placed it next to the oatmeal. He walked to the fridge and took out his filtered water and walked back to the counter. He tore open the packet and dumped the oatmeal into the bowl. He threw the packet into the garbage. He unscrewed the cap on his water and poured a bit into the bowl. He screwed back on the cap and walked back to the fridge and put the bottle inside and closed the door. He walked back to his bowl and walked over to the microwave and clicked the button and set his breakfast inside. He closed the microwave and set the timer for three minutes. While it counted down, he watched it with disinterest, glancing down at his fingernails, picking at something on his arm. He fixed his hair in the reflection off the microwave and got a spoon from the drawer. The timer finally dinged, and he took out his oatmeal and blew on it, grimacing slightly as if the bowl was hot. He grabbed the spoon and walked toward the table. He pulled the chair out and sat down, spreading a napkin in his lap. He politely asked Otter if he was done with the first pages of the newspaper. Otter—who by this time was gasping for air with tears streaming down his face—waved his hand in the Kid’s direction. The Kid picked up the newspaper and muttered to himself about this and that (depending on what day it was, it could be anything from the economy to gay marriage laws—that last he’d really taken an interest in, much to my horror) and opened the newspaper. He picked up the spoon and stirred his oatmeal for a bit, blowing on it to cool it further.
