The Witness Wore a Puppy Tail, chapter 20 (Patreon)

Ken dragged himself into the living room and didn’t make it farther than the couch before he collapsed. 

“I now get why you sleep on the couch sometimes,” Robert said as he followed. He sat on the far end of the couch. “I’m exhausted.”

“Adrenaline crash.” Ken leaned forward and rubbed his hands over his face. “It’s never pretty.”

“Yeah, but I still feel wired. It’s weird. I want to crawl in bed, but I don’t have the energy to get there, and yet I can’t close my eyes without feeling this overwhelming urge to jump up and do something. I am so fucked up.” Robert let his head fall back and he stared at the ceiling.

“You’re so normal. Hell, in Africa I felt like that most of the time. Welcome to the world of high-stress jobs.”

“It sucks.”

“Yep.”

“I’m too tired to even jerk off tonight.”

Ken’s brain whited out for a moment. Bringing Robert home definitely had a downside. “Can you maybe put the sexual innuendo on pause?”

Robert rolled his head to the side and half opened his eyes. “I’m pretty sure that was the opposite of sexual innuendo. That was me saying that I have zero interest in ever having sex again, and that’s actually a pretty disturbing feeling for me because I have a healthy sex drive… which apparently I’ve misplaced.”

“Yeah, well stress does that. The guys I served with were either oversexed or temporarily and passionately invested in asexuality. The production of stress hormones highjacks the sex hormones.” Ken forced himself to his feet. "Beer?" Ken asked as he headed for the refrigerator.

"Oh hell, yeah," Robert agreed enthusiastically. “Are you pulling my leg?”

“About the lack of sex drive?” Ken called from the kitchen. “Nope, although that’s usually something that sets in after a month or two of stress.” Ken’s dick had gone on strike for the last half of his Africom assignment. At the time he’d been relieved. He’d done two years of community college before he’d joined the Army. Gay people accused him of being a sellout for admiring a beautiful woman, and women considered him a challenge to convert back to heterosexuality, but the second he looked at a man, they took it as proof that he was a whoring bastard. And neither side of the fence would believe he had the ability to be faithful. Asexuality was actually a pretty comfortable place after that drama.

Ken returned to the sofa and handed one of the beers over before he sat again. "Want to catch some news?" Ken asked as he reached for the remote.

Robert shook his head. "I think I've reached my limit of senseless violence for the day."

"Hard damn day," Ken agreed. The silence that filled the room was comfortable. Robert picked the edge of the beer bottle label and Ken stared at the blank wall, perfectly willing to just let himself mentally drift. The clock ticked just loudly enough to create a rhythm, as though the house had a heartbeat. Ken let that lull him into a half-sleep where the stress of the day slipped away. He'd done what he could, and he wasn't arrogant enough to think he had any hope of controlling the rest.

"You heading right to bed then?" Ken finally asked. Ken was strangely reluctant to head to bed himself.

Robert shook his head. "I should.” He stopped. For a man who had an endless river of words most of the time, he had gone worryingly silent. 

"It's not your fault."

"I never said I thought it was," Robert blurted too quickly to be convincing.

"You thought it loud enough," Ken said. Robert wouldn't make eye contact, which just confirmed that Ken was right. 

"I thought it, too, at first," Ken admitted. "When someone dies, you spend all this time wondering what you could have done different, but life isn't like that. You do the right thing, and you hope that it works out the right way. When it doesn't, you have a beer, make peace with the fact that life sucks and move on."

Robert silently listened. Ken’s last serious relationship had been a transwoman he’d met not long after leaving the service. She’d been at the VA for a checkup and she’d smiled at him. Ken still remembered that shy smile. They’d dated four months, and then they’d had their first real fight. He’d found a girl in a garbage bin after someone had called in suspicious activity in an alley. 

The girl had been tossed away like garbage, her leg broken so badly that it folded backward and her eyes staring up at nothing. After work, Ken had ignored Chloe’s phone calls and gone to the shooting range. Then he’d ignored her texts and gone home to sit in the dark. And when she finally came over, Ken gave her the bare bones of the story and asked for some time to process. 

Instead Chloe had parked on his couch and told him to talk through his feelings. She had demanded he serve up his emotions on a platter, and when Ken had given her a little piece of his pain, she had clucked and coddled him as though he were broken. He’d ended up screaming at her, and she had never forgiven him for his lack of emotional control and his inability to communicate like a human being. He was fairly sure she had used those exact words. Toxic masculinity might have been mentioned. After that, Ken had decided relationships were too much work and one night stands were too dangerous.

"Have to move on," he repeated, not sure who he was really talking to.

Robert just nodded, either agreeing or just letting Ken know he'd heard. But the words didn't seem to shake anything loose; Robert still sat and stared into the dark. He balanced his beer bottle on his knee, bouncing it slightly as though it were a baby that needed burping.

"It's just weird. One minute he's there and looking totally freaked, and I'm really getting furious because I pretty much figured he'd done something stupid, and the next..." Robert waved a hand vaguely, but Ken knew exactly what he meant. The next minute Wilson lay on the street with brains lay scattered across the road and his arm bent unnaturally. He'd give a lot to spare Robert, but life didn’t work that way.

"Shit happens.” One minute you were alive—the next, you were dead. One minute you were doing your job, and the next a wall fell on you. One minute you were determined to make a long term commitment to your right hand, the next you were lusting after someone you couldn’t have. Yeah, life was strange.

"Between the business of life and the day of death, a space ought to be interposed," Robert said in one more turn of conversation that didn't make a whole lot of sense to Ken, so he just sat in silence.

"George Herbert, the guy who wrote 'The Quip'," Robert finally explained.

"Ah yes, that George Herbert." Ken nodded knowingly as he took another drink of beer.

"Not a clue, huh?"

"Nope."

"The merry world did on a day, with his train-bands and mates agree to meet together, where I lay, and all in sport to jeer at me." From the rhythm of the words, Ken got that Robert was quoting something, but it sure didn't sound familiar. Then again, Ken was quickly becoming used to not knowing what the hell Robert was saying.

"Don't pray when it rains if you don't pray when the sun shines. Leroy Satchel Paige." Ken toasted the dark, lifting his bottle toward the ceiling before he took a drink.

"The pitcher?" Robert asked, and Ken looked over in surprise.

"You know sports too?" At this point, Ken was starting to think Robert had a chip in his head that allowed him to Google shit. Ken was no slouch when it came to education. He was using his GI bill to pay for his psychology degree and he could pontificate on the differences between mission-oriented killers and spree killers. He could explain the social influences that led some men to confuse silence and consent. When he was talking about his field of study, he had all sorts of knowledge. However, Robert seemed to know a little about everything.

"I love baseball.... and basketball. I play a mean game of hoops."

Ken studied Robert. The man had a solid frame, but he was too short to be a major player on a basketball court. Ken had a good five inches on him. "I would have pegged you more for curling," he finally pronounced.

"Har-har. I hate the cold." Robert mock shivered.

“And yet you choose to live in Chicago. And here I thought you were smart,” Ken teased, and then the silence was back, settling over them. Ken hadn’t pulled the front curtains, so he watched the headlights pass on the narrow street. Each time a car came, long shadows filled the dimly lit room.

"Herbert's right, you know. I need to make space here, deal with this," Robert eventually sighed.

"Just don't start blaming yourself," Ken warned. "Life's about choices. I chose to be a cop and try to protect the city. You chose to get involved in a dangerous situation because you thought it was the right thing to do. Wilson chose to give your name to the gay-bashers."

"He did not choose that," Robert insisted angrily. “He’s just a moron. He was just a moron.” Robert sighed.

"He didn’t intentionally put a target on your back, but he did something stupid. He must have. Then he chose to run rather than face you and admit that he screwed up and nearly cost you your life."

"Instead, it cost him his." Robert's head fell back against the couch, his neck arching so that Ken could see the Adam's apple in silhouette as it bobbed.

"His decision."

"He didn't choose to get hit by a car."

"No, he didn't," Ken agreed as he leaned back himself so that his body mimicked Robert's. "That was the accidental part."

"My head gets this, you know?" Robert asked helplessly. He ran his fingers through his short hair and ended up sort of clutching his head.

"Yeah, I do," Ken agreed. The head and the heart weren't always on the same page, especially in situations like this. He waited as the clock ticked off the time, but Robert didn't move.

"Do you want me to go upstairs?" Robert asked. “You know, get out of your way.”

"You don't have to." Ken didn’t say that he enjoyed the company.

"Good, not done with my beer yet." Robert held up the nearly-empty bottle. Then he fell silent. Maybe he was watching the cars pass on the road, too. Ken finished his beer and then sat with the empty bottle balanced on one knee as he tried to avoid thinking about all the ways he was fucked. And that wasn’t even counting the damn case.

Chapter 21, 22, 23: https://www.patreon.com/posts/witness-wore-21-21192263 

Chapter 24: https://www.patreon.com/posts/witness-wore-24-21260957