Leatherbound

The boots were waiting by the door when Kade got home.

He hadn't left them there. He never left them there. The apartment had a closet with a shoe rack he'd built himself, level and sanded and stained walnut, and the boots went on the top shelf, laces tucked inside, toes pointed at the wall. Every night. That was the rule.

But here they were. Black leather, scuffed at the toes, heels worn down to a slant on the outside edge. Sitting on the mat like a dog that had heard the key in the lock.

Kade stood in the doorway with his grocery bag and stared at them. The radiator ticked. Down the hall, someone's television murmured through the wall, a laugh track, then silence.

"You're losing it," he said out loud, because saying it out loud made it a joke instead of a symptom. He was forty-two years old. He had a job, a lease, a therapist he saw every other Thursday. He did not have haunted footwear.

He stepped over the boots and carried his groceries to the kitchen. Milk, eggs, the good rye bread from the bakery on Halsted. He put everything away with deliberate care, opening the cabinet, closing it, lining the cans so the labels faced out. When he was finished he looked down the hall toward the front door.

The boots hadn't moved. Of course they hadn't.

He took off his work shoes and set them on the rack, then went to the living room and turned on the game. The Bears were down by six. He didn't care about football, not really, but the noise filled the apartment and the noise was the point. He cracked a beer and sat in the big chair, the one with the cracked leather arms, and let the announcers wash over him.

His feet were cold.

He looked at them. Bare feet, wide and furred, claws trimmed short. The floor was cold too, this old building, radiators that clanked all winter and never quite got the chill out. He should put on socks. He should get up and put on socks like a normal person.

Instead he thought about the boots.

They'd come to him three months ago, at the bar on Halsted, the one with the blacked-out windows and the bear flag over the door. He'd gone in for one drink, maybe two. He'd been lonely in the specific way that only a Tuesday can make you lonely, and he'd wanted to sit in the dark and watch men who looked like him, big men with beards and bellies and harnesses, and feel like he belonged to something even if he didn't talk to anyone.

The boots had been on a stool at the end of the bar. No one sitting there. No one claiming them. Just a pair of black engineer boots, worn soft as butter, standing upright on the vinyl like they were waiting for a bus.

Kade had asked the bartender whose they were.

"Yours now," the bartender said, and poured him a whiskey he hadn't ordered.

He should have left them. He knew that. He knew it the way you know a lot of things, in the back of your skull, where the knowledge sits and waits to be ignored. But he'd been drunk and sad and the boots were exactly his size, and when he pulled them on in the bathroom stall they'd fit like they'd been made on his own feet. Better than that. Like his feet had been made for them.

He'd worn them home. He'd worn them every day since.

Now he sat in his chair with his cold feet and the game muttering on the television and he did not look down the hall. He drank his beer. He watched the Bears lose.

When he woke up, it was dark and the game was over and his feet were warm.

He sat up fast. The living room was dim, just the blue glow of the cable box, and he could see his own legs stretched out in front of him, and his feet were in the boots.

He hadn't put them on. He hadn't gotten up. He'd fallen asleep in the chair, and now the boots were on his feet, laced tight, the leather hugging his ankles like a hand.

Kade's heart did something complicated in his chest. He reached down, slowly, and touched the laces. They were knotted. Double-knotted, the way he did them himself, the way his mother had taught him when he was six years old. Two loops, cross, pull through.

He hadn't tied them.

He pulled at the knot. It came loose easily, and he worked the laces free, and he pulled the left boot off. The leather made a soft sound, almost a sigh. His foot was warm and dry and there was a red mark around his ankle where the boot had pressed.

He held the boot in his lap. It was just a boot. Black leather, worn, the kind of thing you'd find in any leather bar in any city, nothing special, nothing alive. He turned it over. The sole was scuffed, the heel worn. Inside, the footbed had molded to the shape of his foot, dark and smooth.

He put it back on.

He didn't decide to. That was the thing he would think about later, in the small hours, the thing that would keep him up. He didn't decide. He just watched his own hands pull the boot back onto his foot, and it was like watching someone else's hands, someone who knew exactly what they were doing, and the laces tied themselves, or his hands tied them, and then he stood up.

He walked to the bedroom. His body did it. He was there, inside it, but he was also somewhere else, somewhere back in the chair, watching himself walk down the hall with a steady, easy stride, the boots creaking softly on the hardwood.

He stopped in front of the closet. He opened it. He hadn't worn the rest of the gear in months, not since the last time he'd gone out, not since before the boots. The leather breeches hung on a hook, black and tight, and the harness was coiled on the shelf above, and the jacket, the gloves, the cap. He'd bought them all years ago, when he was younger and the scene had felt like a home instead of a costume.

His hands reached for the breeches. They were cold and stiff and they smelled like the inside of a leather shop, that smell of hide and oil and something animal.

He put them on. They were tight. They were always tight, that was the point, but tonight they felt tighter, like they'd shrunk, like they were holding him rather than the other way around. The harness went over his shoulders, straps crossing his chest, the buckles cold against his fur. The jacket settled onto his back like a second skin. The gloves slid on, and his hands stopped being his hands and became something else, something black and shining and smooth.

The cap last. He set it on his head, and the brim shadowed his eyes, and he looked at himself in the mirror on the closet door.

A liger looked back. Big, broad-shouldered, the stripes faint under the leather, the mane cropped short. He looked like a man who knew what he wanted. He looked like a man who could walk into any bar on Halsted and take whatever he came for.

He didn't feel like that man. He felt like a man standing very still while something else wore him.

The boots were warm on his feet. The leather creaked when he shifted his weight, and the sound was almost like breathing, in and out, slow and patient.

"You're not real," Kade said to the mirror.

His reflection smiled. He hadn't told his face to do that.

He turned away from the mirror. He walked to the front door. His hand reached for the knob, and the gloves were soft and tight and his fingers moved without him, and the door opened onto the long dark hallway of the building, and the stairs, and the street beyond, where the bars were lit and the men were waiting and the night was cold and full of the smell of leather.

He stepped out. The door closed behind him. The lock turned.

He hadn't brought his keys.