A Hope for Rauri Ch. 02

There's still idiots out there like the war ain't never stopped or even slowed down. They still go on, neighbor against neighbor.

The Jawhawkers were running anybody who they thought might be southern sympathizers off their land even before the war, like what happened to the family that I used to work for.

After Captain Quantrill's raid on a town called Lawrence over what the Jawhawkers did to some people there and a place called Osceola, a Union general ordered that the borderlands be cleared out and the rest were run off and then it was all legal, what they'd been doing for years anyway. So there's nobody there. Why?" he asked.

"Just wanted to know," she smiled, "If it doesn't have a name, then we'll just have to give it one. Let's see, ... from what you said, there's just that farmhouse left there -- if it hasn't fallen in.

I know, we'll call it Bum Fuck.

Yeah," she smiled, liking it, "Bum Fuck, Missouri."

He laughed a little, "Why in the hell would you want to call it that?"

"I dunno," she grinned as she looked off into the distance ahead of them, "I wanted to call it something nice."

He almost dislocated his neck when he looked over at her in shock, "Nice?"

"Well it is to me," she smiled over at him, "the way that you do it for me, anyway.

Lots of men want that," she said, "But they never put a thought into it when they come to do it with a whore. They just want to plough into you and bang you as hard and fast as they can until they're happy.

You never do it that way. You're nice to me and you do it so that I can like it too. That and the way that you are with anything else that we do, well, it makes me want to be in love with you. I know we're only a couple of people who can be friends. I know that now and I like it.

I also know that if neither one of us finds the one that we want, or if we have to keep hiding and if they DON'T come to kill us, then we'll probably just live like that. I know we could probably be fine like that."

She looked over across the space between them, "But I think we're not the ones for each other. We're just the ones that we have right now."

He looked over and nodded, "I don't know what it is. I have this feeling that I don't belong, or I don't fit in."

"Me too, Wes," she sighed as she reached for a canteen, "But I know that you fit in me just fine, and I hope it's enough for you.

I know it's enough for me."

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That had all been a long time ago, Wesley realized. Almost a century and a half. Shauna Kavanagh was still his dearest friend and they'd long ago ironed out their wrinkles about who and what they were.

They'd had their long talks about her strange dreams and what they both really were. Shauna didn't mind it. She even liked it like that.

These days, they worked together at his business when they needed to and they even made love together every now and then, but mostly, they were about the rarest kind of friend to each other than any person could ever be lucky enough to have.

It had been a long and careful talk between them, but when Shauna had asked him for it, Wesley had bitten her to strengthen her even more and cared for her until she could care for herself. They'd each taken humans -- that is, regular ones, as lovers now and then, but they both knew where that would lead, and anyway, it never worked out or lasted very long.

He smiled to himself and pressed her number on his speed dial list. He knew that he was going to need her help with this job.

"Hello?"

"Hey, Shauna," Wes smiled, "You doing anything now?"

He heard her fingers skittering across the keyboard of her laptop, even from where he was.

"Nothing Wes, just girl stuff. Filing my nails and washing my hair, mostly. Sometimes, I get a little bored with that and do it the other way around -- washing my nails and filing my hair. What's new?"

"I need to see you in the morning. I'm about a hundred miles away or so, but I've just picked up some work for us. I got something here that's gonna test your Irish."

He heard her chuckling laugh and it brought him memories of her pretty throat.

"Does that mean that you've done something that'll make me angry with you again, or are you trying to tell me that you're in the mood for one of our four day love fests again?" she smiled.

"I was thinking about flying you a little past your ancestral homelands. We're gonna need to be in Scotland in less than a week."

"Whatever you say, Wes, as long as I get to have you in a bed at some point in it, now that I've talked myself into the mood."