Between a Bear and a Hard Place(23)

Off in the living room, King was still grumbling about someone having drunk all of his coffee without asking. He was stomping toward the kitchen – not angrily, but because it was hard for him not to stomp on the hardwood flooring – and as soon as the footsteps went from thumping against hardwood to patting against the tile in the kitchen, Jill heard King let out a single, booming “HA!”

“King!” Jill shouted, over the lurching, groaning, slightly thrashing Rogue. “What’s wrong with him? Why are you laughing?! You’re not the one who laughs. You’re serious all the time. I’m not sure my heart could take it if you suddenly started in with a bunch of jokes.”

“Serves him right,” King offered, with a grim look on his face. He set his coffee mug on the countertop with a heavy thunk of ceramic on granite. “Bastard drank my coffee.”

To exhibit what he meant, King lifted the mug and turned it upside down over the sink. With exaggerated slowness, a single drop of almost syrup-thick coffee slid down the side of the cup and dropped into the metal basin with an audible report.

“That’s... coffee?”

King narrowed his eyes. Rogue’s were still rolling around in his head, and the hair on his arms and the tops of his feet had become a 1970s club fashion choice of coarse golden fur. “He’ll be fine.”

“Fine?” Jill was starting to get worried that somehow caffeine was going to kill one of her mates, although the other was just looking on with a slightly irritated, but mostly bored, expression. “He looks like his heart is gonna explode. How do you make this shit anyway? This doesn’t look like any coffee I’ve ever seen.”

She held onto Rogue, trying to guide him to a chair, which she finally did. The huge, furred-up, half-bear slumped over into one of the chairs with a groan – though it was hard to tell if it came from the bear or the chair, or the floor. He draped himself over the arm rest, and started breathing a little more evenly, if still alarmingly ragged.

“Just like you do,” King said, still unimpressed with his co-alpha’s apparent agony. “I fill the pot with coffee, then pour in water. Turn it on until it boils.” He shrugged. “Suits me fine, if a little bitter.”

“You what?” Jill squawked, surprise tinging her voice along with the concern for Rogue’s continued existence. “That’s not... no, you... I can’t even...”

“See?” King said, nodding toward Rogue. “He’s getting better.”

Better was a fairly loose definition for what was happening to him, but at least the green hue on his face was beginning to reduce somewhat, and his eyes seemed to focus. At least a little bit.

“God damn,” he grumbled. “What... what happened?”

Jill, fists digging into her hips, stood with her feet slightly wider than shoulder width apart, and regarded King coolly. “Why don’t you tell him what happened, King?” she asked. Her voice was exaggeratedly irritated, but she did feel a little irked at the big bear for just standing there laughing – in his own way – as her other mate rolled around going crazy. “Why don’t you tell him exactly what happened?”

King sat down and faced Rogue, very obviously trying not to laugh. This levity was both cruel and at the same time, pretty funny – especially coming from the super-serious Broken Pine alpha. “I told you not to drink my coffee,” he said.

“That stuff wasn’t bad,” Rogue finally sputtered, laughing a little. “But how the hell did it make me... well, whatever it made me do?”

“I make it strong.”

Before either of them could come to terms with what was going on, entirely, the ancient, hardly-working flip-phone that Rogue insisted on using instead of anything made in the last twenty years, started buzzing.

“That thing could be a sex toy,” Jill said, slightly irked at the buzzing.

It kept buzzing.

“Yurk,” Rogue wretched. Puffing out his cheeks and pausing in a halfway-standing position, the big bear went pale, and then his eyes got all fluttery. He paused, holding the sides of his head, and looking about like he was going to lose the contents of his stomach. “Can, uh, one of you get that?”

The humor was finally starting to get to Jill, who decided maybe she could help out instead of just judgmentally staring at her one healthy mate.

“Remember that one time you convinced me that if my head started spinning, the best way to fix it was to drink more vodka?” King asked Rogue. It was starting to sound like a fraternity party. “Well, consider us even.”

Rogue laughed despite his obvious discomfort. As soon as his chuckling started, he also began to look incredibly ill. “Fair enough,” he finally croaked, patting King on the shoulder. “Give me a minute, huh? Just... one of you answer that?”