3. Chapter 3
Bullshit, But Cute
Meredith
There was a naked man bleeding on my porch, and my first thought, God help me, was that I hoped he hadn’t cracked his head on the boards on the way down, because those boards were new and I’d just paid a guy in cash to lay them because I didn’t want to do it.
My second thought was to get him inside before one of my neighbors came out for their evening snowmobile ride, and got an eyeful they’d bring up at every party for the rest of my natural life.
“Okay,” I said, out loud, to no one, because apparently that was where I was at now, narrating my own bad decisions. “Okay. Big naked bleeding stranger. Sure. Great. Love this for me.”
He was heavier than he looked, which was saying something, because he didn’t look small.
He was six-foot-something of solid muscle gone loose and unhelpful with unconsciousness.
Getting him from the porch to my couch took every ounce of upper body strength I had plus a few choice words I don’t usually say out loud in my own house, or anywhere for that matter.
I got a towel under him before his blood could ruin the cushions, which felt like an insane thing to prioritize given the circumstances, but, hey, a girl has priorities.
The wound was high on his shoulder, a ragged furrow that looked exactly like a bullet graze, close enough to have taken real meat if it’d landed two inches to the left.
My stomach twisted and churned when I saw it, because I knew that kind of wound.
I’d grown up around that kind of wound. I did not, currently, know of anyone besides my brothers with a rifle sighted anywhere near these woods.
“Fucking Cole and Jake,” I muttered, reaching for my phone, and then stopped.
What was I going to say? Hey, did you shoot a stranger and leave him to run naked through the woods to my porch?
No. Absolutely the fuck not. Not until I had more information than a man passed out cold on my couch could currently give me.
So I did what any sane, responsible woman would do with a bleeding stranger in her living room. I got out the first aid kit, cleaned the wound, and hoped he wasn’t a serial killer.
He came around somewhere in the middle of me taping gauze over the worst of it. His body jerked under my hands hard enough that I nearly lost a finger to his shoulder. His eyes opened wide. They were the color of wet slate, fixed on nothing, then on me.
“You’re bleeding on my couch,” I told him, because it seemed important. “I patched you up. You’re welcome. Try not to move too much because I’m not done.”
He stared at me like I’d spoken in tongues. “Where?” His voice came out wrecked, low, like he hadn’t used it in a while, or hadn’t used a throat shaped quite like this one before. “Where is this?”
“My house. Congratulations, you found it, naked, bleeding. If you meant to ask what time? I dunno. Stupid o’clock in the evening, in December, and you’re going to tell me exactly how that happened before I decide whether to call the cops or an ambulance.”
“No cops.” He said it fast, almost too fast, pushing up onto his good elbow.
My hand flew to the emergency kit as if I might need to defend myself with the contents.
I spared a glance. Gauze, black pepper to stop the bleeding, duct tape to seal the wound water-tight, and a handful of antiseptic pads.
Great, I was so screwed. “No. Please. No one can know I’m here. ”
“Well, you’re not off to a great start to earning my trust, buddy.”
“My name is not Buddy.”
“Whatever.”
“My name is Dash.” He said it like it should have a meaning to me. Was I supposed to nod and go, ‘oh, right, Dash, of course.’ He cleared his throat. “I don’t… I don’t know how I got here. Where is here?”
“Told you. My house. Outside Fairbanks.”
His face went blank. It meant nothing to him. His face contorted in concentration, like he was trying to fit the pieces of a puzzle together, but the edge pieces remained missing. Something in my chest went uneasy in a way I didn’t care to explain.
“That’s not…” He shook his head, wincing when it pulled at his shoulder. “That’s not a place I know.”
“Well, it’s a place you’re currently in, and my house is here, and you’re on my couch bleeding, so I’d get familiar with it, right quick.”
He looked down at himself then, really looked, at the towel I’d thrown over his groin (because I absolutely did not look at what he was packing - and man, was he hung) at the blood, at his own bare skin.
His eyes narrowed like it was the first time he’d noticed any of it.
Something crossed his face that I can only describe as pure, wide-eyed panic.
“This isn’t my body,” he said.
“I mean, it’s definitely a body, and it’s definitely yours, so…”
“No.” His hand came up, fingers spread, staring at them like they’d betrayed him. “I had… you don’t understand.”
“Tell me then.”
“I was four-legged. I had hooves. I ran on hooves through the cold white stuff, and now I have hands, this isn’t…” He looked up at me, and the wildness in his eyes had tipped over into something closer to terror. “What happened to me?”
I sat back on my heels and studied him for a long moment, because I only saw two options.
Option one: I had a man with the worst concussion of his life on my couch.
Option two was much weirder, straight out of one of the paranormal romance books I secretly loved reading, and I was not, at whatever time it was, prepared to consider the second one.
“Okay,” I said, slowly choosing my words with care. “Let’s back up. What’s the last thing you remember before you woke up here?”
“My fields,” he said. His answer came without pause, as if it was the one last solid memory he had. “I was walking my land.”
“Good, we know you’re a farmer.”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“There was a change in the air.”
“Like a storm?” I frowned. “We haven’t had any storms, just a bit of snow.”
“No. Nothing like I’d experienced before. I heard bells.”
“Bells?”
He nodded. “There was a sled. And a man in red… fat, loud, bells everywhere, and he took me, and then I woke up with hooves, and there was pain, and then…” His gaze cut to me and his eyes focused, as if I’d become the only clear thing in a room full of static.
“Then you. I smelled you before I saw you. You smell like...”
“Whoa, Buddy.”
“Dasher. My name is Dasher. I told you.”
“No, you said Dash.”
“My full name is Dasher. But like I was saying, you smell like…”
“Okay, Dasher, let’s not finish that sentence.”
“... like home,” he said anyway, and had the nerve to sound wounded when I recoiled.
“Buddy, uh, Dash, I don’t know what drugs you’re on, but I have never once in my life smelled like anyone’s home, and I’d like to keep that streak going.
So how about you tell me the rest of this before I start looking for the number of whatever hospital handles head injuries and hallucinations.
” I tilted my head. “Or maybe a psych ward.”
“It’s not a hallucination,” he said with conviction.
“I’m not from here. Not from this world.
I was taken…” his eyes narrowed, then shut, and he tilted his head as if he were struggling to recall something.
“I was taken for service,” he said. “He said something about service. I don’t know what that man did to me, but I woke up an animal, and something in that animal knew you before I ever laid eyes on you. ”
I stared at him.
He stared back, his face serious, blood soaking through the gauze I taped down, and somewhere in my chest a small, unhelpful, deeply inconvenient part of me thought: Well, he’s certainly pretty, for a lunatic. Grippy sock vacation, here he comes.
“Uh huh,” I said. “Sure. And let me guess… the guy in red. Big coat? Round in the middle. Real fond of bells?”
“Yes.” He looked hopeful, like I’d finally caught up. “Do you know him?”
“Everybody knows him, Dash; he’s Santa Claus. You must have seen a billboard. We’re close to the North Pole, maybe fifteen miles away.”
The hope died on his face, replaced by something closer to insult. “That’s not… I don’t know that name.”
“Of course you don’t.” I reached for the tape again, mostly so I’d have something to do with my hands that wasn’t gesturing at him, flipping him off, or making the universal crazy person signal.
“Look, I don’t know what happened to you today.
Maybe you got jumped, maybe you’re on something, maybe you fell off a truck bed and hit your head on the way…
I genuinely don’t care which, but I am not going to sit here and pretend a man in a red suit abducted you in a magic sled and turned you into a moose, or one of his reindeer. ”
“I wasn’t a moose.”
“You were shot at like one.”
“Someone shot me.”
“Grazed you. High on the shoulder. Which, by the way, is a real bullet wound, from a real gun, which means whatever’s actually going on with you, it’s not entirely in your head.
” I tied off the gauze and sat back, wiping my hands on my jeans.
“Maybe they are out to get you. So here’s what we’re doing.
You’re going to stay on this couch tonight, because you’ve lost blood, and I’m not sending a half-conscious man back out into the cold, alien or otherwise.
In the morning, you’re going to tell me who to call, or I’m calling the sheriff myself, and we’ll let him sort out the moose story, which is bullshit. ”
“I’m not lying to you. I’m not from this planet.”
“I didn’t say you were. I said you were bullshitting. It means I don’t think you know you’re doing it.”
“You don’t believe me,” he said.
“Not even a little. I think you hit your head hard and need to rest.”
“You will believe me.”
“Sure I will.” I stood, brushed off my knees, and pointed a finger at him with all the authority of a woman who’d spent too much time elbow-deep in a stranger’s gunshot wound.
“For now, you’re going to lie there and not bleed on anything else.
I’m going to get you a shirt that isn’t a towel, and see what else I have that might fit you. ”
“Thank you.”
“I’m assuming that whatever alien planet you’re from, they had the decency to invent pants.”
“We had them, but they were optional. Clothing interferes with the shift.”
“Wait, what?”
“Where I come from, we can grow bigger to charge predators.”
“Of course it does.” I was halfway to the hall closet where my brothers kept some of their stuff, positive that something Cole left would fit him. “I’m going to text my brothers and tell them to stay away, because the last thing I need is them coming here and finding you.”
“Thank you,” he said. “You are kind.”
I told myself the small, warm curl low in my stomach was leftover adrenaline and nothing else. It had nothing to do with the man on my couch, or the way he said you smell like home like it was a fact instead of a line.
Bullshit. Definitely bullshit.
Pretty bullshit, though. I’d give him that much.