“Are you hurt?” she asked, keeping her distance. Good, let her.
“I’m fine,” Reginald said. “Although, Bones might’ve gotten hurt in that fall.”
Real funny.
Reginald brushed himself off, staring at her tits.
Fuck, could you hold off on that honeymoon? I’d like a moment, alright?
Reginald lowered his gaze, grinning and nodding. Okay big brother. You know I got you covered. He looked up at her, putting his hands in his pockets like a teenager. “Hey, so. We have rounds to make this morning. It only takes about an hour.”
“Oh,” she said, sounding surprised. “Do you… I can help. I don’t know much but I’m a quick learner.”
Reginald smiled dreamily at her. “That is… so sweet. But no. Thank you, not yet. We uh…” Reginald slid a hand over the back of his neck and Bones closed his eyes at the warm familiar tingle. “We need to be alone.”
Bones waited in the silence until he wondered if she’d need to buy a vowel.
“Oh,” she finally gushed, more surprised than the last. “Yes,” she nodded a lot. “Definitely, of course. I’ll be here. I can shower? Yeah?”
“Please do,” Bones said.
“Take a nice, lot hong shower,” Reginald added.
Lot hong?
She giggled and Bones felt their cheeks light up with Reginald’s shame. “Hot long. Sorry,” he muttered.
“I can cook again,” Winter's voice lowered. “Sure it’s… nearing lunch.”
You’d like that, Bones?
Whatever, just hurry.
“We’d like lunch.” Reginald plastered on that ridiculous grin. He stepped toward her and she stiffened as much as Bones did, then leaned in for a quick kiss on her cheek. “See you,” he mumbled as he spun and ran up the stairs.
Christ. The surge of happy adrenalin pumping through their body made Bones want to bury fifty dead bodies.
Once outside, Bones sucked in the biting cold air, not caring about the joy invading his world, he was just happy to be away from her. Away from Reginald’s kryptonite.
Bones took over their body, plowing his way to the house while Reginald took the back seat as he always did during chore time. Only, today was very different. Today he was a happy little kid, riding on big brother’s back while being carted around. Full of life, hope and stupid dreams. And Bones couldn’t fight it. Because as much as he needed to protect Reginald, he needed to see him happy. That had always been the end game. Protect Reginald and see him happy, right? Just because that joy worked like a poison in Bones didn't change that. So, he’d suck it up like he sucked up every other poison life threw at him.
Bones made his way to the office and sat at the computer. Opening the laptop, he stared at the calendar, his savior. A surge of joy plowed into him at seeing it. Their special event was today. Fucking yes. He eyed the rest of the week’s schedule. Three burials. Each one meant a two-hour break from her. He scanned the page, waiting for Reginald to see the special item of the day. “You checking the schedule, or what?” Usually, Reginald had his face all up in the screen.
“What? Oh yeah, what we got?”
Bones waited again for him to see it. “Jesus, hello?”
“Sorry, I’m here. Oh, no, the birthdays,” Reginald whispered.
“Oh no?” Bones wondered in shock. “What, you don’t care about the dead kids now that she’s here?”
“What?” he hissed. “No! No, it’s not that, it’s just…”
“Winter is more important.”
“Well she is,” Reginald said.
Bones pursed his lips, nodding slightly. “You’re right, you’re right.” He added a shrug. “You already know how stupid I think it is, anyway. I’ll never find it cute celebrating some dead kid’s birthday we don’t even know, so you won’t get an argument from me.” That was Bones’ usual response, but now… now he wanted to defend the dead kids he gave zero fucks about just so Reginald cooperated.
“I can do the birthday thing before midnight,” Reginald said. “After I spend time with her.”
Bones could hear the guilt in his voice. “Are you sure they’re not going to feel badly that you’re putting some woman before them?”
“Bones, I know you think I’m weird and strange. I don’t celebrate their birthdays for them, I know they’re dead and aren’t aware. I do it for me.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not what you told me,” Bones said. “You said they would feel bad.”
“If they were alive, I’d meant.”
“And they’re not, so?”
“It was rhetorical!” Reginald cried. “But since you never liked doing it, I’m sure you’ll have no problem waiting.”
“Just so we do it on the day,” Bones said. “And don’t forget,” Bones tapped the special item.
“I know.”
“Another one you can wait to do, I see.” What a little shit.
“Bones, really? I had to twist your arm to do this stuff,” Reginald reminded. “Why are you attacking me?”
“This isn’t attacking,” Bones shot back. “I just don’t want you to think you can neglect your first obligations just because you have a new toy.”
“Toy,” Reginald muttered with a tired sigh. “I’m not going to neglect anything, Bones.”
“Or do it half-assed,” Bones warned.
“You know I can’t do anything half-assed. Neither of us can.”
He relaxed a little at hearing he still had the parts of Reginald that would buy him time away from his new female fancy. Neither of them were capable of doing anything half-assed. And the calendar was God of their OCD. Calendar items were carefully weighed and considered because once entered, it became non-negotiable. Set in stone.
Bones regarded the remaining blank squares on the sparse calendar, silently willing Thomas, the faithful Grave Procurer to enter jobs as he stared. How was he supposed to stay in business burying three bodies a month?
“What’s wrong now, Bonesy?”
“What’s wrong,” he muttered, flopping a hand at the screen. “We’re in the dead of winter, and look at the bodies.”
“Don't do that.”
“If you look at the books, you’ll see we've had less during these months.”
“We need supplies for the calendar stuff,” Reginald said, sounding depressed. Normally he’d be ecstatic and Bones would be the bummed one.
“Then we better get a move on,” Bones said, thrilled.
“Right.” Reginald shot them to their feet as though ready to run. “I don’t want to be gone too long, we have a lunch date.”
The date word made Bones’ skin crawl as they headed for the door. “You don’t want to cling, you know. You'll drive her away.”
“What do you mean?” Reginald asked at the door.
“Women get claustrophobic, Reggie.”
“With men?”
“With relationships. They like to have a lot of space.”
“How do you even know, you hate women,” he reminded skeptically.
“Reggie. Just because I hate women doesn’t mean I don’t know them and understand how they think. I’ve been around the block a couple hundred times.” Bones opened the door, tired of talking about women. “We’ll go into town, get your… supplies for your… thing. We also need more oil for the shovels and another blade for the grinder. I'm behind on sharpening.”
Bones grabbed his black wool coat next to the door in the living room and slid it on. “What about stuff for… having company?” Reginald asked.
On the front porch, Bones paused and scanned the graveyard, hating to hear what Reginald was getting at. “Like what?”
“I don’t know, I mean… she’s a woman. We’re men.”
“Okay?”
“I’m sure they have different needs.”
“Well, she’ll have to spell them out,” Bones said, moving down the steps.
“I was just thinking since you knew so much about women, you could sort of make some sug
gestions. Like maybe she wants different soap or something. She doesn’t have any clothes.”
Bones held back a snort then it hit him. “I’m sure if we comb the aisles at the store, we’ll see things a woman might need or want.”
“Great idea,” Reginald said, seeming to forget the time it would require.
“Could take us a while,” he said.
“Oh, right,” Reginald muttered. “Maybe we can do it from the computer,” he said, as Bones made a beeline for the sidewalk. “Like you do with a lot of your stuff.”
“Good, you can do that when we get back.”
“She could help,” he said happily. “Bones,” Reginald called, reaching his right hand toward the tombstones along the walkway.
Bones usually didn’t mind giving in to Reginald’s little obsessive quirks but today they irked him. He corrected his steps, taking Reginald closer to the headstones. “Ever figure out why you like to do that?”
“Not really,” he said, tap-tap-rubbing the surface of each plot as they passed it. “I haven’t given anything much thought since her.”
No shit.
“What about you?”
“What about me what?”
“You give any of your problems any thought?”
“What problems,” Bones muttered as they went along the line of twenty-five graves. Which problems he should’ve said.
“Quirks,” Reginald corrected.
“They’re not quirks.”
“Ah damn, I missed,” Reginald hissed.
“Jesus Christ Almighty,” Bones growled, backtracking to the previous grave for Reginald to molest it the exact way he needed to. “You good?”
“Got it,” he said, lightly.
Bones stomped onward. “Wonder what she’d think of you having to do that.”
“It’s not that weird,” Reginald said, tap-tap-rubbing the last grave.
“No? What about what you’re doing today?”
“I think she’d find it nice of me,” Reginald said after a moment.
“No doubt.”
“What do you think she’d think of you stealing stuff from the graves?”
“Those things aren’t yours,” Reginald argued.
“I’m not taking them, I’m relocating.”
“So you’re saying it’s okay for somebody to take your stuff and relocate it to another location where you have no clue?”
“It’s not like I’m taking a vehicle Reggie, they don’t miss this stuff.”
“So why do you take it?”
“What’s wrong with understanding each other?”
“Do you hear yourself? Are we fucking married now?” Bones reached to shove the key in the ignition and Reginald bumped his hand, making it slide off. “Oh, cute,” Bones muttered, shoving it in and starting the truck. “Are we a baby now? Are we going to cry?”
“I’m just talking to my brother, what’s so wrong with that? Brother’s talk, don’t they?”
Bones pulled out of their spot and sped through the parking lot, coming to a skidding halt at the road. “Okay, Reggie. Let’s talk about all our shit, is that what you want? What else does Reggie want today? Does he want ice-cream? Cookies? Does Reggie want to go to the circus? What else can I oblige Reggie with today?”
CHAPTER FOUR
Reginald sat there, needing to bite his tongue but not wanting to give Bones the pleasure of knowing he needed to. He understood he was in a hard spot with Winter. He needed to be patient and merciful, but God, he was being a real prick. A prick that did care enough to allow him to have the woman he was in love with, he remembered. “I’m sorry Bones.”
“I'm begging you to stop apologizing,” Bones said, speeding onto the road. “You’re either blinding me with joy or killing me with kindness.”
“How about we compromise?” He owed him that much but the open-ended suggestion was risky with Bones and made Reginald nervous to suggest.
“Sure,” Bones said. “How about not have sex?”
“Anything but that,” Reginald said, not having to think. “Can’t you just…”
“Close my eyes? Yes, I can but my dick doesn’t need to hear or see.”
“I mean… can’t you do what I do when you… do whatever you do?”
“Sleep too hard?”
“Yes. Meditate maybe? Some kind of hypnosis technique?”
“You know what?” Bones said lightly, turning onto the main street in town. “I think it’s time I have that confession.”
“Confession, what confession?”
Bones pulled into the hardware store parking lot as Reginald’s mind began spitting up morbid possibilities. He pulled into a parking spot, shut off the truck, and sat there. “How bad is this?” Reginald whispered after many seconds of Bones silence.
“Bad.”
Dread slowly morphed into sick premonition as Bones stared ahead, his knuckles white from strangling the steering wheel. “Say it Bones. Say it quick.”
He opened his mouth, but nothing came.
Reginald cringed deeper inside at what he felt coming.
“I do things…” he finally said. “When you sleep.”
“What Bones, just tell me.”
He took a slow, deep breath. “Just… look…”
Bones closed his eyes and images flooded their mind, flickers of strange pictures in bright color. Oh God. Terror gripped him at seeing it was Bones he was looking at. In their shower. Blood running off him.
“What…” Reginald gasped, peering harder. Bones stared down at his trembling, bloody hands in the images. “Why is there blood?”
“I don’t know.”
The images suddenly stopped, leaving Reginald dumbfounded and floundering in the now empty space. Bones’ answer registered then. “What? You don’t know, what do you mean?”
“I mean…” Bones said quietly and carefully. “That sometimes… I wake up on the back porch… covered in blood.”
“Oh God,” Reginald barely said, clenching their eyes shut.
“I’m sorry, Reggie. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“Us,” Reginald corrected. “Us, I’m in that too.”
Bones hung his head. “It’s not you. It’s me. It’s always been me, Reggie.”
Reginald scrubbed his brow, needing to add logic to the nightmare. “You have… no memory at all?”
“None.”
“Do you feel any different when it happens?”
“No.”
Reginald mentally paced around all the horror parts, a pile of wriggling bad news on the floor of their mind. He needed to make sense of them but that would mean touching and seeing it. Then he realized. No matter how he fixed or arranged the mess, it would still paint the picture he’d forever want to un-see. How could Bones hide something this… detrimental from him? “Why didn’t you tell me!”
Bones scraped at his bottom lip with his teeth. “I didn’t want you to know. I was… trying to find out.”
Hope flooded Reginald at that good news. “You were? How?”
“Every night, I try to stay awake Reggie. As long as I can. I search for answers.”
“Did you find any?” Reginald wondered.
“Sleep walking. That’s the only thing that fits.”
“But the blood… what about that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it… human?” When he didn’t answer, Reginald looked around, eyeing their surroundings. “God, Bones. What are we gonna do, we can’t let that happen again. Why didn’t you fucking tell me, Bones, I could’ve helped you!”
“How!?”
“I don’t know, tie you to the bed!” Reginald cried, closing his eyes against the shooting pain in his head. “Oh wow. Wow, wow, wow.” Reginald shook his head. “You sleepwalk to God knows where and do God knows what, and you don’t bother to tell me. You just rinse off all the evidence.”
“And you sleep right through it.”
Reginald’s brows shot up in shock. “You’re… was that blame
in your tone?”
“No,” he muttered.
“Yes, it was.”
“Well, you say it like—”
“Like it’s insanity?”
“No, like I’m a monster.”
“Uhhhhhh,” Reginald said, loud and incredulous. “This is purely a clinical observation, Bones. We can’t paste flowers on it when it’s covered in blood! But if you had told me, we could have worked on it together at least.”
“I’m sorry!” Bones yelled, hitting the steering wheel. “Okay, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you but now you know, now what? Now what the fuck do we do, now that we have a woman involved in our lives?”
“Winter,” Reginald grit. “She has a name. God, Bones you knew this when we met with her. What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking…” Bones tugged at his earlobe repeatedly, his mouth open. “I was thinking I had kept you prisoner long enough. I was giving you something back, for…” Bones swiped his hand over their mouth. “For staying. For not leaving.”
Reginald’s body sagged, and he closed his eyes. “Ah, Bonesy,” he whispered, rubbing the back of his neck and squeezing. “Where would I go?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged a little. “Just away, I don’t know.”
“I would never leave you, I told you that.”
“You like her a fuck of a lot and… I wanted to try to give you something. I didn’t realize it would go this far.” Bones took a huge breath and put his elbow on the door, rubbing his mouth. “I’m stuck, Reggie.”
The shake in his voice sent Reginald racing to save him. “We,” Bones. “We’re stuck. We’re in this together, don’t you hide shit from me, you hear? Don’t you do it. Tell me you won’t, promise me!”
Bones grit his teeth, his breaths coming faster. He gave one nod. “I promise,” he said. “No more secrets.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Winter was down to nervous pacing. She’d showered, cooked. Cleaned the basement. She’d even organized all the antiquated shit. And boy, there was a lot. But now she was ready to scream. Felt like she’d been down there for days. She needed out, she needed air. Was it night? There were no windows. Where in the hell was he? They, she corrected. Two people in one body. Remember that. Oh, she remembered it, that was the problem. How was she supposed to… be with Reginald when Bones was always there? It was a no brainer when they were there before her, but now that she had space and time to think, well… yeah, weird as shit is what it all was.