Turncoat

On the first Friday of August, I lay in Turn’s arms, held safe like some precious work of art. His snore, a subdued rumble, fanned my back same as it had every night of the two months since I’d moved in.

The air conditioner in the south-facing window went from low speed to high. Sometimes that wakes me up, but this time I’d already been awake. Why?

Dogs took to barking. Big dogs with booming voices. The sort of bark Turn would have if he were a dog, and if he ever bothered to bark before he tore off an intruder’s favorite limb. But Turn was here. The barkers would be Hayes and Curry, the friendly Rottweilers across the street—on the next street over, actually.

Their bark went from a cheerful hey, there! to a menacing hey, you! in an instant.

What made that pair angry? What had even caught their attention here in the dead zone of the night?

I slid out from under Turn’s heavy arm and felt my way to the window. A box truck trolled the road: creep and stop and creep. Like it was delivering papers, or searching for an address. I watched it, still too sleepy to identify what was wrong.

A bar of bright yellow light speared across the lawn. Old Miss Georgie, whose apartment took up most of the downstairs of this old house, had also come awake. The truck picked up speed and moved down the road.

Miss Georgie complained how people would dump dead appliances here, knowing their trash wouldn’t be allowed to sully our Historically Significant lawns for long. She swore she would someday get photos of the miscreants.

I guess we’d almost witnessed it, she and I.

I squinted at the truck’s back-door design, but the street was too dark. Those trucks are common downtown, supplying the snack machines. Not so often in the middle of the night though, or in a residential district.

“KT?” Turn had noticed my absence.

I went to him, nestled my back against his slightly too-warm bulk.

He snuggled in tighter, regardless of the heat, stroking from armpit to hip. Turn likes to pet me. Sometimes I feel like a six-foot cat, and I wish I knew how to purr.

He brushed his fingers up to my waist, and back to rest again on my thigh. “Bad dreams?”

“Not...” Yes, I remembered bits of one, although it hadn’t been what awakened me. “Are you sure Father doesn’t know where we are?”

“He might, by now. It doesn’t matter.” Turn’s calmness didn’t belittle my nightmare. He just wasn’t afraid. Turn’s an accountant, but big enough, tough enough, smart enough to hold his ground in any company. And being FBI didn’t hurt.

I shivered, rolled onto my back, and pulled him to rest his weight on me, as if his muscled bulk could protect me from all the slings and arrows.

“I can cut back the AC.”

“It’s not the AC, Turn. Just hold me tight, okay?”

He did.

I wasn’t big or bad, and I wasn’t FBI. My police folder back home in Jacksonville probably has my shrink’s phone number with a box around it and arrows pointing toward it. They said I was at high risk for “suicide by cop.”

So no, I didn’t have to be calm. I just had to get through one day and then another, knowing that with the crowd Father was reputed to be running with, down in Mexico, my chances of outliving him were rather high.

He wasn’t my father, of course, but I’d grown up thinking he was, and calling him Mr. Turner wouldn’t lessen the confusion. Not with Turn, his actual bio-son, prodding my navel with something that had just gone from dick to cock.