A Pack Of His Own (Ch. 04)

Chapter Four

Will wasn't entirely sure what to make of his life when he woke up in the morning, but both April and Lacey were both still there. At some point during the night, the two girls must have gotten up and bandaged April's neck. He wasn't entirely sure why he'd done that on both of the girls' first time, but he figured there was definitely a chance he might keep on doing it, so he was glad they'd tended to it and didn't let it get infected. He peeked beneath the bandage, and while it was definitely a wound, it almost seemed like the bite was healing up much quicker than he'd expected it to.

He suspected they were going to need to talk about this new arrangement they found themselves in soon, but he discovered on the first day, nobody really wanted to broach the subject. They were all sort of skirting around one another, none of them starting any real conversation, just sort of going through their daily life.

That night, though, when they sat down to have dinner, April decided she was ready to broach the subject. Will had picked up some fried chicken from a local joint, and when he set it down on the table, April pounced to start off the conversation in the direction she'd clearly been thinking about all day long.

"So, uh, you're, uh, cool with both of us just hanging around here?" April said, clearly unsure where to start talking, so she'd just picked somewhere.

"What do you mean by 'hanging out?'" Will asked them.

"Well, what do you *want* us to mean by hanging out?" Lacey said with a smile. "I was kinda thinking April was just asking to check and make sure that we were both your girlfriend. I know I am, and I know we *talked* about her also taking on that title as well, but, y'know, we sort of caught up in the heat of the moment and didn't put anything down in paper. She's just making sure you haven't changed your mind. Which you haven't. Because of course you haven't. Why would you? Just look at her. She's a completely dead sexy bitch."

Will tilted his head briefly, as if they were having different conversations. "I think I was more of making sure *you* two hadn't changed your mind," he said. "This isn't exactly what most people think of when they say they're in a relationship."

"Sure," Lacey replied, "but most people are fucking stupid. And I don't give a shit what they think. I like dick. I like chicks. I want both. Regularly. And you've got an appetite that I don't think either of us could keep up with on our own."

"You make me sound like I'm some kind of sex machine," Will said with a soft laugh, opening the box of fried chicken, taking out a few pieces. "I'm really not that bad. Am I?"

"I think you don't realize how *intense* you can get, Will," Lacey answered with a smile. She reached into the box to pull out a couple of pieces of chicken for herself. "Don't get me wrong; I love that about you. I promise you, I truly do. But when you get into it, fuck, man, you *really* get into it. And I bet April's a little bit sore this morning 'cause of the railing you gave her."

April blushed and giggled a little bit. "Sitting's a little bit uncomfortable but it's also kind of nice. But yeah, I definitely can't handle that being an everyday kind of thing."

"We don't have-" Will started before Lacey put her fingertip up.

"Nobody has to do *anything*, baby, but we want to do it regularly, and we're here voluntarily, so let your girls be *your* girls, okay?"

And that was sort of the end of the discussion. Will tried to bring it up a couple of times over the next few weeks, but the conversation was almost always immediately brushed aside in favor of other topics. Will also asked a couple of times if April regretted giving up her ties to the local church she'd been a part of, but each time, she'd sort of brushed it off as "a fad," and didn't linger on the subject much longer.

And, of course, he had to go and rent the U-Haul again, as April decided she wanted to move into their place as well. Will hadn't been entirely convinced it was a smart move, but April had pleaded with him, saying that unless she just up and left her old place without warning, the people at her former church might come and harass them once they found out where she'd gone, and she'd rather just avoid all the confrontation for as long as she could.

The first Monday after they'd hooked up, someone from the church had tried to talk to her, but she'd done her best to avoid talking to them, saying she just didn't feel at home in the church anymore. The guy pestering April had eyed Will like he wanted to pick a fight, and Will was ready for it to spill out into a shouting match. It hadn't. The man had started to say something about how Will had no right to corrupt a member of their congregation, but the sentence died in the man's throat unspoken. Will had turned to glare at him, almost feeling like he wanted to snarl, and the man had started to wilt, almost shivering in fear, just from a dirty look.

Nobody from the church came to bother them again for a while after that.

As Christmas approached, both Lacey and April wanted Will to come home with them for the holidays, but Will insisted that he didn't want to leave the area, and that he certainly wasn't ready for the sort of grilling any parents were going to give him if he went back with them. April and Lacey were both from Kansas City, which was almost ten hours by car but only an hour and a half flight, assuming they did the drive from Boulder to Denver Airport, which Will had agreed to do as long as the girls shared flights there and back.

He was very pleased to see that whatever animosity had grown between the two girls while they were apart, their shared experiences had quashed that beef immediately, so much so that they'd fallen back into normal rhythms and patterns that he imagined they'd developed over their time as high school friends, before they'd come to college and April had had her dalliance with Jesus. For anyone who didn't know better, it seemed like they were two old friends who'd never had anything come between them.

Once April had moved into the house with him and Lacey, the three of them were always sharing the same bed. Oh, each of the girls had their own bedroom with their own bed in it, but as Lacey had told him, that was mainly for show, in case their parents ever swung by the campus. As proud as Lacey was that she was having Will balls deep at every chance she could, she didn't *quite* feel comfortable with being open about that to her parents, not yet anyway.

He drove the girls out to Denver airport on Dec. 19^th with the understanding that he'd come back and pick them up again on the 26^th. The weather was cold and sharp, but at least there wasn't any precipitation when he drove them out. They'd had themselves a wild night the evening before, something Lacey and April told him would need to tide him over for a week, something he found rather laughable. The girls seemed convinced he was some ravenous creature, when he felt like they were usually the ones instigating sex with him.

When he got back to the house after dropping them off, he noticed something odd about his place. In a line across the driveway, and in a line laid out in front of his front door, there were two heavy rows of purple flowers laid on the snow-covered ground. He didn't want to drive over them because he wondered if they were thorny and might puncture his tires, so he parked his car along the side of the street, hopping out to go deal with it.

Will kept thick gloves in his car, so he pulled them on and then moved over to the long row of purple plants along the driveway. He didn't recognize them but he wondered if they might be poisonous, so he grabbed handfuls of them and carted them over to his green waste trash bin, flipping open the top before chucking the flowers into it. Whoever had come by had certainly had a *lot* of the damn things, as it took Will four trips to get all of them from the driveway, and another two to get all of the ones resting in front of his front door. Before he closed up the bin, though, he took his iPhone out of his pocket and snapped a picture of the flowers, then ran the image through Google image search. Turned out they were called aconitum, and they were definitely poisonous, although it was only minorly so on skin contact.

With all the flowers cleaned up, he got back into his car and pulled it into his garage before heading into the house, enjoying the fact that he had the whole place to himself, at least for a little while, although he knew he wouldn't have long to enjoy it.

As he did on every break, he knew he was going to be locked into wall-to-wall work at the diner, doing everything he could to keep his coffers full enough for whatever next disaster lay just around the corner. It was something Will had learned all too well, that there was always another crisis he would need to solve just around the corner.

The first night at the diner with the girls gone, however, something strange happened at the diner, something Will still wasn't quite sure what to make of. Someone had tried to rob the place. At least, that was what Will *thought* had happened. The entirety of it hadn't made a whole lot of sense.

It had been just past 1 a.m. and the diner wasn't all that busy, something Will was thankful for. He'd been a little bit dreading the possibility that the place could be crawling with women, like it had been the previous vacation, but instead, it was just a handful of students who also hadn't gone home and a bunch of the diner's regulars, the sort of grizzled locals who were happy to come into the place any time, completely unphased by college students. There'd been Steve and Gary in their usual booth in the corner, arguing about who'd been the hottest woman on True Blood; Mike and his new girlfriend Linda had been in the booth closest to the door, Lizzie and Rita were the only coeds there to peep on him so they were both sitting at the bar, and Billy was manning counter duty, although more often than not he was watching Baywatch reruns on the television screen that hung on one wall.

Then two guys had busted in through the front doors with shotguns.

"Everybody be cool, this is a robbery!" the taller guy shouted.

"Yeah, don't you dare fucking move," the shorter guy hissed. "Or we'll put a fucking slug through you! Wallets, cell phones - get'em out and put'em on the table!"

Will heard the commotion from the back, but they hadn't moved to see him yet, and he wasn't entirely sure what to do. Some part of him wanted to call 911, but he also knew that the advice from the police was that if you were being robbed, it was best just to go along with it and not to make too much of a scene about it.

He couldn't see the two guys too well, but from what he *could* see, they were sort of Abbot and Costello in trenchcoats and ski masks - one tall, lanky guy and one short, fat guy. At least these clowns had realized there were security cameras in the diner and had chosen to wear balaclavas. Both of them were shaking a little bit - adrenaline or drug withdrawal, it was hard to be sure which to chalk it up to.

"You, counter jockey!" the first one, the tall guy, yelled. "Open up the register and get out all the fucking cash! Go get the fucking cook out here before he calls the cops."

The short guy lifted the partition and moved behind the counter and over to the window, pointing the shotgun through it at Will, although he didn't look too steady with it. Hell, Will was a little worried the damn thing would just go off accidentally. "You! Fryboy! Get the fuck out here!"

Calling the cops was clearly off the table. Will turned down the heat on the grill, made sure there wasn't any food on it, then headed over to the swinging door so he could step out into the aera of the diner behind the counter. Maybe he should've had his hands up, but for some reason, Will hadn't thought of that. It just didn't occur to him.

"Wallet and cell phone, cook," the fat guy sneered at him.

"No." The single word hung in the air like he'd just slapped the short man.

"The *fuck* did you just say to me?"

"You can have my wallet if you want," Will said. "I think there's like fifty bucks or whatever in it, but you aren't gonna get my phone. I gotta pick up my girlfriends when they get back after Christmas, and all their flight information's on it. Plus, if they're running late or early, they're gonna call me on it, and if you have it, how's that gonna fucking help anyone? It's like four or five generations old anyway, so I doubt you'd even get like twenty bucks for it from a pawn shop, assuming they're even gonna take it, which I doubt they would anyway. It's nothing to you, but it's everything to me, so I'm not letting it go."

The short guy seemed so taken aback, he didn't even speak for a second, so tall guy decided to chime in and try and help his buddy out. "Moron, you see we've got shotguns here, don't you?"

"I surely do," Will said, his hands well out at his sides, away from anything. "And if you want to be facing a Murder One charge over twenty bucks, there's not a whole lot I can do to stop you. But I'm not going to give up my phone." He slowly reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet, tossing it onto the counter. "Still, I'm a man of my word. There's my wallet. Why don't you take it and high tail it out of here before things get even worse than they already are?"

Both the short guy and the tall guy started to get very nervous, not by the fact that Will was just straight up telling them no, but that he seemed so ridiculously calm about it. The amount of stillness and tranquility Will was exuding, it seemed to intimidate the two men, and they were the ones with weapons. Neither of them seemed at all certain what to do, and Will would later swear that he could smell the nervous sweat lingering on both men.

(He also might've admitted, when pressed hard enough, that he *liked* smelling the men's fear.)

"I don't like this," the shorter guy said, his eyes starting to frantically dart around the diner. "We oughta just fucking go."

"But what about the *money*?"

"*Fuck* the money," the smaller man hissed. "Something ain't right! Go go go!"

And just like that, the two men armed with shotguns left the diner, taking nothing with them but their wounded pride. Not a dollar stolen, not a phone lifted, not so much as a plate knocked over. The staties thought it was the damnedest thing, and they must've watched the security tapes half a dozen times, trying to make sense of it all.

"What did you *say* to them?" one of the two state troopers asked Will while his partner interviewed some of the other people who'd been in the diner at the time.

"I just refused to give up my phone," Will said calmly, sipping from a mug of hot chocolate he'd made for himself. He didn't have the shakes like he was coming down off adrenaline. If anything, he almost felt like some part of him regretted that the two men *hadn't* pushed their luck. Not once during the entire encounter had Will felt like he was in danger. "I think they were expecting everyone to just go along with it, but if I didn't have my phone, I was going to have a hard time picking up my girlfriends from the airport in a few days, and it's not like my phone's worth shit anyway, so I told them they could have my wallet, but they weren't going to get my phone. That, I dunno, it seemed like it scared them or something."

"Scared them."

"Seemed like it, anyway," Will confirmed.

"The two guys with the shotguns?"

"I think they were terrified one of them was going to have to pull the trigger," Will shrugged. "Shit, might've even been empty weapons. I never really felt all that threatened by them, truth be told. Maybe that's why I didn't feel like giving them my phone. Figured they were just a couple of tweakers spazzing out."

"It was a damn stupid thing to do, kid," the officer told him, but Will only shrugged once more. "You trying to get yourself killed?"

"Man, my phone has everything in it, okay? My whole *life* is in this shitty little thing. I lose it, and everything's gonna get messy in my life for weeks until I can get a new one. You think I've got money lying around to just scoop up new phones whenever I want? Based on me working at place like this during Christmas week instead of taking a holiday?"

"Won't be a good holiday for anyone involved if you end up getting yourself shot, kid."

Will just shrugged yet again. "You've got the security recordings; you've got statements from everyone here. Nothing was taken. Can I get back to work? You don't know the owner of this place, but he'll lose his shit if we hold up business for a few hours when nothing actually happened."

"Someone robbing you doesn't count as anything actually happening?"

"Someone *thinking* about robbing us but not actually *taking anything* doesn't," Will countered. "Consider what a hard time *you're* having believing all of this. My boss is gonna think we staged it or something to try and avoid doing work."

"Sounds like a dickhead."

"Off the record, you wouldn't fucking believe..."

The two state troopers took another ten minutes or so, interviewing other people about what they'd seen, but all the customers basically told the same story, without any more real detail than Will's version had contained. Both the cops and the state troopers had no more understanding of what had happened than after they'd watched the tape. Will had clearly been telling the truth, for as little sense as the whole thing made.

Billy had seemed pretty shaken by the whole thing, but after talking with Will for a few minutes about how unlikely it was that the two robbers were going to come back (not to mention how *stupid* of them it would be to do so, considering there was a cop car still basically hanging around in their parking lot) and that Billy had no reason to worry.

The next few days were mostly quiet, but Will tried not to get complacent about anything. The last thing he wanted was some other wackadoodle lunatic stumbling into his life, especially while he was trying to keep his head down while the girls were away. That was proving much harder than he'd anticipated for some strange reason.

Each of the girls had called on the 23^rd, Lacey first and then April a few hours later. Will was pleased to hear that the two had rebonded during their flight home, and that they were getting along incredibly well once more. Whatever animosity had been between them had been entirely settled and Lacey thanked him at least half a dozen times for helping her get her friend back. His phone call with April had been filled with similar thanks, but also had been a little bit more affectionate on April's part, insisting that while she knew it was just for a short while, she really did miss him, missed having his warm body to press against as she fell asleep. He reminded her that she'd be back in just a few more days, and that she should enjoy her time with her family.

It was that little admonishment at the end that had sparked a brief bit of tension between the two, as April was reminded that Will had no family to be spending time with. She immediately started to sniffle and cry before Will talked her down from her panic attack, reminding her that he'd made peace with his loss, and that she didn't need to feel sorrow on his behalf, but should instead treasure the time she had with her own family. She said she would do everything she could to enjoy her time with her parents and siblings, but that she was still very much looking forward to being back home with him.