The Winter Courtship Rituals of Fur-Bearing Critters by Amy Lane

Author:Amy Lane [Lane, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

Crawford wondered if he should have… primped more for Ben’s visit, but then he figured that if Ben couldn’t take the business, and Crawford, as they were, well, things probably wouldn’t work out anyway. For a moment he thought that maybe he’d go back to banging Stanley when he made deliveries, but the thought of Ben not liking the business just made his heart too sore to think of Stanley at all. That night Crawford took a look at his orderly, colorful little shop with its white walls and brilliant rainbow of yarn colors and his clean, no-nonsense mill next door, and decided that this was his home, and maybe a little bit of optimism wouldn’t be out of order.

Apparently something was, because as he settled down to his afternoon spinning (he was spinning up the variegated teal roving that Aiden had dyed the day before), he actually broke his thread, which was unheard of almost since he’d first taken his foot to the treadle nearly twenty years before.

“What in the fuck?” Ariadne said. She’d watched him do it as she’d chattered on about her husband trying to paint an ultrasound in rainbow colors and failing because he kept getting the details too fine, and suddenly she couldn’t stop staring at Crawford’s bewildered expression or talking about what a dumbfuck he was.

“Jesus, Crawford! You… what the hell were you doing? I mean, you never break your yarn. That’s such a rookie move! And you’re working with what? Merino and alpaca? That doesn’t break! Well, what are you waiting for! Splice it back together and reaffirm my faith in the universe! What were you thinking about when you did that?”

Crawford smiled, and the look he gave her must have been mighty helpless in texture, because suddenly her face got all soft.

“Really?” she asked quietly. “You were really thinking about him?”

“How do you know who he is?” Crawford asked, looking at the frayed ends of the yarn-to-be between his fingertips.

“Because you said ten whole sentences about taking him shopping for weatherproofing, Craw. That’s something of a record. You took a week-long trip to Denver last year that didn’t get talked about that much.”

“He’s coming to visit tomorrow,” Crawford said apologetically. “No. It’s not a date. He’s just being neighborly.” His hands started moving independently, and he licked his palm to make the spit-splice work better.

“Are you sure about that?” Ari asked gently, and Craw gave the wheel a couple of pumps to get the spinning past the break. That done, he stopped spinning, because it was clear he needed to have this out, or he’d never get his spinning even.

“He likes baby bunnies,” he tried, wondering if even Ariadne spoke enough Crawford to put that connection together. “He likes baby bunnies. He thinks they’re cute. He scratches the sheep on the head like a kitten. Ariadne, do I look like the kind of person who would do that?”

Suddenly his big, battered, lanolin-soft hands—the hands that could spin and knit and repair a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.