Page 128 of Stags

“This. Us. Like you said, I don’t want to have a baby with you. We had the sex. That’s got to have been enough sex. Let’s just forget about it now. Done. It’ll be easier this way.” She threw herself out of his bedroom.

“Tawny, come on. What do you want me to do differently? You don’t want to talk about it? Fine. We don’t talk about it.”

“What you’re doing right now is the problem,” she said, marching through his apartment.

“What am I doing right now?”

“Placating me,” she roared.

“How dare I?” he said, sarcastic.

She just kept going.

“Tawny,” he called, his voice cracking. “Please.”

Something in that, the vulnerability in his plea, it cut her somewhere. But she didn’t stop. She didn’t let it stop her. She marched out of the apartment without another word and she didn’t let herself start crying until she got into the elevator.

STOCKTON FOUND HIMSELFin a room with his father and his girlfriend more often than he would have liked. At first, it was horrible, too horrible for words.

And it wasn’t as if it got better, exactly, he guessed, just that it got commonplace. He got used to it. He didn’t think about it all the time.

But he and Rora were together after that.

It was easy and nice, and he wondered at himself, sometimes, when he looked around at his life, looked back at all the times when he’d been convinced that this sort of ease and happiness was impossible to attain, when he was convinced he was never going to really attract another woman, not one who’d want to stay with him, not one he could satisfy.

And yet, now, it just seemed so easy, so obvious, so comfortable.

Neither of their mothers were pleased at the arrangement.

Stockton’s mother bemoaned all of it, saying that she knew she should never have allowed Stockton to be raised by Bruin. She was very worried that Stockton was going to abandon her and abandon the family, and she made no secret of her disapproval.

By contrast, Rora’s mother’s dislike of it seemed to only be faint distaste. Rora told him that her mouther would say, offhand, from time to time, “Mark my words, you can’t tie a buck down like an eaglekin or something, Rora. He’s going to flit off and want his freedom. You’ll see.”

But Stockton didn’t flit off and he didn’t regard anything about his relationship with Rora as limiting his freedom.

And then it was December, and it was getting colder, and the season was over and he ran into Athos one morning. The other buck was sans tie in his office, flipping through the pages of a law book—and that in and of itself was weird, because there was no reason to look up laws in books in this day and age. Everything was digitized. The reason the firm kept the shelves of books was for purposes of appearances, near as Stockton could tell.

“Anything I can get for you?” Stockton asked, because he was an intern, and that was his job, to assist the actual lawyers at the firm.

Athos just kept turning the pages, scanning them, but too fast to really be reading anything on the pages.

“Athos?” said Stockton.

Nothing.

Stockton debated just letting it go. If Athos wanted to sit here and leaf through some old book and ignore everything, then fine, that was his business. He even started to leave the room.

And then, sighing, he turned around and went back over to the other buck. He put his hand in the middle of the book. “Hey.”

Athos looked up at him, startled. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing, just I’ve been talking to you with no response for five minutes now.”

Athos slumped down in his chair and reached up to run his fingers over the tips of his antlers. “Yeah, right. Sorry. I’m distracted. Personal shit.” He shook himself, shutting the book. “I need to pull myself together. Looking at this is beneath me anyway. I promised her I would not make trouble for her.”

“Woman trouble?” said Stockton.

Athos put the book back on the shelf on the wall behind him. “Nothing, nothing. You don’t want to hear my stupid sob stories.”

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