Chapter Six
Later that afternoon, after they had both caught up on rest, Pip perched on the couch watching reality television with his aunt. He sat transfixed, half intrigued by the aftermath of paternity test results, and partly appalled by the people resorting to sorting out private stuff in front of a daytime TV audience.
When Uncle Joe returned home, Aunt Lauren rose and headed into the hall to greet her husband.
“What’s that?” Aunt Lauren asked.
“I found it on the front step, sitting in a basin of ice,” Uncle Joe replied. “I don’t know how it got there. I was about to ask you the same question.”
Pip perked up his ears and rose from the couch, joining his aunt and uncle in the hall. Uncle Joe held a bundle of newspaper in the crook of his arm, the pages bent and folded around something.
“What is it?” Pip asked, looking at the newspaper curiously.
“Fish,” Uncle Joe said. “Wrapped and sitting in ice on the porch.”
Pip opened his mouth as if to speak, but he found no words. Instead, the thread wrapped around his sternum tugged as realization dawned. “Fish?” he repeated.
“Hmm. I take it they aren’t yours, then? I wonder if this is someone’s idea of a prank. I’ll have to throw them out.”
“No!” Pip’s heart shattered at the thought. He didn’t know how, but he knew they were from the antlered man, and they were meant for him. “No, they are mine, I mean.”
Aunt Lauren and Uncle Joe gave him odd looks, and Pip dropped his head.
“You were with me all day today,” Aunt Lauren said. “When did you have time to go out fishing?”
“Ummm…” Pip drew in a deep breath. He didn’t like lying, but he didn’t see any way around it. Neither of them would believe him if he told the truth. “Remember Kevin? He works in the seafood department?” At their understandably blank stares, he plunged on. Of course they wouldn’t remember him—Pip had never mentioned the guy before. He had to make it seem like they were old friends, though, if he was going to talk his way out of this. “Anyway, we’ve been keeping in touch. He mentioned he was going fishing yesterday.”
Pip continued to babble, thinking on his feet and making it up as he went. “He invited me to go with him, but I couldn’t because of high school graduation, and I didn’t want to miss that. He must’ve come to share some of his catch with me.”
He almost felt proud of his story, invented on the spot, except for the part where he felt awful about lying.
“What a sweet man.” Aunt Lauren cocked her head to one side and looked as if she didn’t exactly believe his long-winded story. “Why wouldn’t he have rung the bell? You know your friends are always welcome here, Pip.”
“I know,” Pip said. “It’s probably because I told him you work nights, so you sleep during the day. He must’ve thought about disturbing you.”
As far as Pip could see, it was the perfect lie. Kevin was a real person, but Pip’s relationship with him wasn’t. Pip didn’t make friends easily, nor had he been drawn into the fold at the grocery store. When he’d earned enough to justify quitting, he’d done so without a second thought. He didn’t belong there.
He began to believe he didn’t belong anywhere. After his night in the woods, not even Aunt Lauren and Uncle Joe’s house felt like home. His soul yearned for somewhere cozy and rustic.
“What a sweet, thoughtful man. You’ll have to invite him over soon,” Aunt Lauren insisted. “I’d love to have him stay for dinner.” And it occurred to Pip perhaps she now suspected Kevin of being his boyfriend, the man he’d spent the night with.
“Speaking of dinner, I guess we’re having fish.” Uncle Joe hefted the bundle. “Heavy suckers. Probably good eating. Do you want to help me debone and skin them, Pip?”
“I don’t know how,” he replied. Relieved to divert the conversation away from sweet and thoughtful Kevin, Pip fell in beside Uncle Joe, and they headed for the kitchen.
“No better time to learn. You can impress your friend Kevin the next time you see him.”
Had Aunt Lauren already spoken to Uncle Joe? Pip inwardly cringed at the thought of them discussing his love life. Did they think he’d spent the night in some guy’s bed? Well, he had, but not in that way.
If only.
Did they think Pip had a secret boyfriend called Kevin?
Uncle Joe set the wrapped fish on the counter and arranged the cutting boards. As he did, Pip stood by the fridge and watched. In his early sixties, with slightly graying hair on his temples, Uncle Joe was youthful and spry in every way. He had the face of a man half his age and the spirit to match, and Pip found his enthusiasm inspiring.
Cutting boards arranged, Uncle Joe unwrapped the newspaper and removed the first of two whole fish from inside. He rinsed it in the sink. Pip had no clue what kind of fish it was. Big and meaty, its scales shone silver and flashed with green beneath the kitchen light like gemstones. Pip had seen aquarium fish before, but nothing so big and defined. It looked beautiful.
He blushed and folded his arms across his chest to hold himself. The man in the woods had brought these fish for him, he just knew it. He was doing his best to provide for Pip, even though Pip hadn’t asked him to. First the wine, bread, and cheese, and now the fish. What was his goal?
Did he collide with Oli’s car, and if so, was it on purpose to get vengeance for the gang's actions in the wood? Or had the crash been nothing more than a coincidence?
Since the man had left gifts of fish, Pip was pretty sure the collision couldn’t have been a coincidence.
“Fish have tiny little bones, so you need to be careful when you’re filleting them. If you know the proper way to do it, you can get all the bones more or less every time,” Uncle Joe said. He set the fish down on the cutting board on top one of the newspapers, then selected a long, thin knife from the knife block and wielded it expertly. “You want to make sure the bottom of the fish is facing you, just like this. Can you see from over there, Pip?”
Pip nodded. “Yes, Uncle Joe.”
“Good, good.” Uncle Joe pointed at the fish’s head. “The first thing you want to do is take off the head. You want to get your knife right under the gills and slice downward at a diagonal until you go through the bone, and then you’re going to flip the fish around and do the same on the other side until you can take the head off.”
In silence, Uncle Joe did as he’d said. The blade of the knife sank easily into the fish, and in a few seconds, Uncle Joe set the head aside.
“Then you want to get rid of the tail. That one’s easy. You just slice down where the tail meets the body. Done.” The knife came down, and Uncle Joe moved the tail aside. Only the meat of the fish remained—the gift.
Pip bit his bottom lip, far more flustered than he had any right to be. He didn’t even care for fish all that much, did he?
His soul corrected him. He did like it. He always had, even if he’d shied away from it before.
“Once you’ve got your fish prepared, you’re going to want to get your knife behind the gill cover. That’s, uh, well, that’s the flap of skin protecting the gills, near where we cut the head. It’s usually a little stiff. You want to lift it away from the body and cut downward until you hit the backbone. You’re gonna run the knife along the ribcage and separate the meat from the ribs.”
Uncle Joe worked quickly and effortlessly, letting the blade do the work. Pip watched, only partially interested in the process. His mind wandered, thinking about the man who’d left the fish for them. The provider. The hunter.
The hunter. It seemed to fit.
The name stuck, and he rubbed his arm to chase away the thrill he felt.
The Hunter. It fit him. A pack of trained wolf-dogs at his disposal, an urge to provide, and a protective streak. The Hunter sought justice; he’d tracked down Oli and his buddies to make them pay for their crimes. It all came together clearly to Pip. The man was a hunter in every sense of the word.
As he distractedly thought about the Hunter, it began to physically affect him, and his temperature rose and face flushed. He hoped his uncle wouldn’t notice.
“You’re going to continue this all the way down by the fish’s vent, and once you’re there, you’re going to pull the fillet back from the ribcage. Easy, right?” Uncle Joe separated the fillet from the ribcage and set it aside. “Then you repeat with the other side until you have two fillets. We’ll have more than enough to feed us for a few days with this amount of fish. It looks like your friend Kevin did a good job out there. Wonder what kind of lures he uses.”
“I’ll let you know if I find out,” Pip said. “Do you think the fish is going to be good?”
“It’s fresh, that’s for sure.” Uncle Joe started on the second fish, dividing it into two fillets. When finished, he discarded the refuse and washed his hands. “You want to see how to debone ’em, too? It’s a little more nuanced than getting the meat off the bones. I think you’d be good at it—you’ve got a good eye for detail.”
“All right. What do we need to do?”
“We’ve got to get some needle-nosed pliers, for one,” Uncle Joe said. “Wait here for a second while I go grab some. It’s been a while since the last time I filleted a fish, but I’ve still got some food-prep-specific pliers hanging around somewhere.”
He left the kitchen, presumably for his fishing box. While he did, Pip stood by the counter and looked out the kitchen window across the backyard.
If the Hunter knew where he lived, did that mean he’d spied on Pip and his family? The back door was close, barely an arm’s distance away. With a simple turn of the knob, Pip could be outside and across the lawn, and from there…
From there, what? He shook his head, clearing away his wild thoughts of escape. He’d do better to stay in the house while he figured things out and saw what tomorrow brought with it. Not only did he know nothing about the Hunter, he had no way of knowing if the man meant him well.
Gifts didn’t automatically make him a good person. It could be a trap, Pip told himself, even though his heart didn’t believe it.
“Found them,” Uncle Joe said. He returned to the counter with two pairs of pliers in hand, handing one pair to Pip. “Now, what we’re looking for is something called pin bones. What you can do is run your knife against the grain of the fish, and you’ll sometimes see them poking out. We need to go in with our pliers and pull them out. It can be easier if you skin the fish first, but in this case, I want to cook with it, so we’re going to leave it on.”
“Oh.” Pip glanced down at the fillet. The tiny pin bones were little more than white pinpricks against pink flesh. He watched as Uncle Joe pulled free the first one, then nodded and set to work. They pulled bones in silence.
For now, he’d wait and bide his time. It didn’t matter what the Hunter made him feel, or how many gifts he sent. Pip decided on caution.
That night, he fried the fish with Uncle Joe and ate the tasty dinner at the family table, but now and then, he turned his gaze to the window. As his mind fixated on the mysterious man, Pip wondered if the Hunter was also thinking about him.
Bedtime couldn’t come soon enough; all Pip wanted to do was hide away in his room without risk of being disturbed. Finally, he escaped to his room and turned on some music low enough that he didn’t keep others from sleeping, but it would mask any noise he might make. He had the time and the privacy required to turn his thoughts to remembering and wondering about the naked man who sat on a bed with him. About his first kiss and what might have been. What there could be in the future between them.
How it would feel to kiss and then take things further. Much further.
What it might feel like to touch the man in the way Pip wanted to touch him.
Pip imagined himself back there in the cabin among the furs, but this time he’d bravely reach out to the Hunter. Pip’s solid cock ached for contact, just as it had then. He’d kept his desires hidden, but now, in his mind, he freed his fantasies. He gripped his rod in his hand and jerked it, all the while imagining he was in the hands of the stranger.
After waiting so long and thinking about the man so much through the day, the release came soon. Pip’s abs contracted as he jerked forward. The climax ripped through him, its evidence shooting across his chest and stomach in great arching spurts.
There for a moment, Pip had been able to return to elsewhere.
To the cabin and the antler man.
So needed and so good.
What would it be like with that man for real?
With thoughts of the man and what might be, Pip fell asleep.
The next morning brought glorious sunshine streaming through the thin fabric at his bedroom window. Pip awoke in his own bed and stretched out, savoring the comfort of his mattress and the warmth of his sheets before he rose and showered. Today was the day to start landscaping work for old Mrs. Nohart.
Pip dressed, grabbed a quick breakfast of orange juice and toast in the kitchen, then headed out the door. Aunt Lauren still slept, and Uncle Joe had gone to work. As he carefully closed the front door, something out of place caught Pip’s eye. A brown leather pouch sat on the swinging porch bench. Pip glanced from side to side, locked the front door behind him, and went to investigate.
The imperfect stitching of the attractive, handmade pouch added to its unique beauty. A beautiful wooden button secured the front flap. Pip opened it. Thick fur lined the inside, but it was otherwise empty.
Pip’s mind went back to the hut he’d bunked in that night, and the fur throws that made up the bed. The pouch appeared handcrafted from the same stuff.
Heart skipping a beat, he re-buttoned it and slung it over his shoulder. In his heart, he knew the Hunter had left this gift for him. No one else would leave something like this.
A small, pleased smile stretched Pip’s lips. He left the porch, glanced around one more time to make sure the Hunter wasn’t waiting for him, then made his way to Mrs. Nohart’s house. No matter who wooed him, or what it meant to be wooed by a man he wasn’t sure was actually real, he had a job to do. Pip wouldn’t let Mrs. Nohart down.