Hungry

Romance short. A journalist observes a hunter skinning a deer.

1.5k. Just a bit of romance and slice-of-life between a hunter and a journalist observing his work.

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It’s a fine day, temperate, and the air is a pleasant weight on his shoulders, a light breeze coming under his hat and playing at the edges of his hair. The breeze has helped him in the course of the day, sending his scent in the other direction, and with his rifle rested on the downed trunk of an old tree to keep it stable, he’d been able to aim down the crest and send a bullet directly through one eye and out of the other of the buck.

The sound of the shot rings out over the vicinity, making a cloud of birds burst up from a nearby oak, and Aubrey glances over their way, watches them fly and shift on the wind before they go back to whatever their business was.

He makes sure the buck is dead, that its heart is no longer beating and that it’s fully gone — sure, it’d be cruel to move the thing without making sure it was dead, but it’s a real safety issue, more than anything else, picking up one of these things where it might not yet be dead — and pulls it up by its limp front legs, throwing it over one shoulder and marching back up the hill.

Mr Peele must have seen him from the window as he’d come back into town, because he’s already in the street, and he stares at the buck over Aubrey’s shoulder, his lips parted, his eyes staring.

“Y’okay there, Mr Peele?” asks Aubrey, and Mr Peele nods his pretty little head, making his soft, wavy hair bounce and shift. It’s a pretty yellow colour, looks real silky, and Aubrey’s thought about it from time to time, what it might be like to run his fingers through it.

Mr Peele’s the same age as Aubrey, really, can’t be more than one or two years off, but they’re different kinds of people, live very different lives, and it’s easy to think of him as younger, or just untried. Mr Peele’s daddy is a real accountant with a fancy office, and Mr Peele is a journalist, writes all kinds of little stories and exposés and shit for the local paper. Aubrey’s no big reader, but he skims through the paper at times, and sometimes he keeps an eye out for Mr Peele’s by-line. Mr Peele’s got soft, delicate hands, the cleanest fingernails Aubrey’s ever laid eyes on, and his suit is so perfectly pressed, there ain’t no crease on the thing that wasn’t intentional, Aubrey doesn’t think.

He’s got a funny way of writing, a kind of dry wit the way he reports on some stuff, especially when he’s talking to some fella and the guy obviously doesn’t know he’s being made fun of, that he’s being quoted in a way that makes people huff out a little laugh under their breath or through their nose, but he doesn’t really talk like that, when you’re talking to him. He’s a quiet fella, kinda low energy, but glum or sad, more just reserved.

Still waters run deep and all that.

Aubrey had just been in town to get his rifle serviced at the gun store — he services the thing well, yeah, does like his daddy always taught him, but he’s never been real confident about taking the thing apart to really fix her up, especially not when he’s out in the field and isn’t in a real clean environment like the backroom — but he’d dipped into the general store to pick up some gum and some fruit, and Mr Peele had been in there.

“Why don’t you talk to Mr Redd here?” had asked the store clerk, old Tom Pecker’s nephew.

“Talk to me about what?” Aubrey had asked, handing over a five-dollar bill and waiting patiently for his change as the clerk rang it up.

“Mr Peele’s doing interest stories,” Pecker had said, and Aubrey raised his eyebrows.

“Interest in what?”

“Well, just sort of day in the life things,” Mr Peele had replied, and he’d come over all nervous all of a sudden, reaching up and pushing his pretty hair back from his pretty, clean-shaven face, looking up at Aubrey with his eyes all big. “We’re trying to get more magazine pieces, it, uh… You hunt bounties, don’t you, Mr Redd?”

“I have been known to do it, but I’m a hunter by occupation, Mr Peele,” Aubrey had said, not bothering to hide his disdain for the question. “I only ever hunt a bounty when Sherriff Benson asks me.”

He can’t remember how exactly the conversation had gone on after that, but it had been Pecker’s suggestion that Mr Peele write something about how to butcher and skin a buck or some other animal, and Mr Peele had agreed so breathlessly and so eagerly that Aubrey had had no real opportunity to shut him down.

“You sure about this, Mr Peele?” he asks now as they walk along. “You’re looking mighty green.”

“I’m just pale,” says Mr Peele, his pretty lips pursing, and he follows along as Aubrey leads him a little ways out of town, holding a bucket full of water in one hand and an empty one in the other.

There’s something to be said for the way Mr Peele stands back as Aubrey hoists the deer up and sets its blood to drain into the empty bucket, the way his hand trembles just slightly as he flicks open his notebook and makes his little notes with a fancy-shmancy pen.

It’s almost like a dream, feels strange and disconnected and kind of filmy at the edges, as Aubrey goes through the usual motions — opens up the chest, takes out the organs, saws through the legs and sets them aside. When he skins the thing, when he sections out the meat and butchers the animal, laying everything out on the wooden table and wraps it up in parcels of paper, Mr Peele watches him, stares, fascinated.

To his credit, as green as he gets at times — at his greenest when Aubrey is elbow deep in the corpse — he doesn’t gag, and he doesn’t vomit, neither.

“Will you eat all that?” asks Mr Peele, the first time he’s spoken, and Aubrey shakes his head.

“Told Lou McHale I’d be butchering this one for him, that I’d bring it parcelled out already for him after showing you. Normally I’d just bring the whole animal, and I’d bring in my skins on top. I don’t care for wastage. If Lou wouldn’t buy all this from me I’d just hand out what I didn’t eat. You want some of it to take home?”

“I don’t much eat venison,” says Mr Peele. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know how to cook it.”

“I’ll cook for you,” says Aubrey.

Mr Peele’s face goes from faintly green to faintly pink, and Aubrey feels a kind of shift in his waters, a sort of silent pull toward him. He doesn’t know that Mr Peele is all that at home with the company of other men, or at least, men like Aubrey — rough men, hard men, dirty men.

“Oh,” says Mr Peele. “You will?”

“Sure,” says Aubrey, and takes a step closer, the two of them in the clearing together alone, and when Aubrey dips his head in close, Mr Peele freezes, stiff and seeming almost dizzied by the attention, by how close Aubrey is to him.

He shivers at the ghost of Aubrey’s lips over his, and jumps when Aubrey presses the folded pelt into his hands, makes him feel the skin, the soft hairs all over it, and when Aubrey pulls away, his eyes are shiny, his jaw agape.

“Mr — Mr Redd,” he says achingly when Aubrey steps away and folds the pelt into another piece of paper, tying it up in string. “I thought for a moment you were going to kiss me.”

Aubrey almost laughs, and to stop himself from doing it out loud, he stares in the other direction, into the trees, keeps his back to the other man.

“Oh, yeah?” he asks, and doesn’t chuckle, although the urge burns in his chest, catches in his throat. “A funny thought, that, kissing another man on the mouth just ’cause they’re skinning a deer together.”

“Ha,” says Mr Peele faintly. “Funny.”

Aubrey supposes he’s a virgin, that he’s not at home with the way two men can touch each other anymore than he is a man and a woman. It occurs to him to bend him over this table now, or maybe, tonight, that he’ll lay this deer pelt out and fuck him on his back on it, let him feel the texture on his bare shoulders, his bare ass, jolt the way he did a second ago just touching it with his fingers.

“Let’s go back into town,” says Aubrey softly. “And I’ll cook for you in those rooms of yours, Mr Peele. How’s that sound?”

“Yes,” says Peele, eagerly, hungrily.

Aubrey wonders how long it would take him, left to figure it out on his own, exactly what he’s hungry for.