back door, coffeepot over there, cups above the sink. Help yourself."
Dan hesitated; he had been trying to put this moment off as long as possible. Might as well get it over with. He stripped out of the beat-up old Army coat and hung it where Derek had indicated.
Underneath, he was wearing a T-shirt with the straps of the prosthesis over the top. The prosthesis was the old-fashioned kind, probably unchanged in general style since the 1950s: a plastic flesh-colored forearm and elbow, a pair of metal clamps for grasping and manipulating objects, and straps that let him use his shoulder muscles to open and close the graspers. He had a fake hand that went in place of the clamps, but he hated wearing the damn thing because it was next to useless for picking things up.
He took a deep breath and turned around to see them both looking at him.
"What?" Dan said. "Never seen a guy hang up a coat before?" He went over to the coffeepot. "Things have changed a bit since you saw me last."
"I guess so," Derek said. "Shit, man."
Dan shrugged and got himself down a coffee cup. He used the prosthesis to open and close the cabinet door, trying to be casual and feeling a little like he was going through some kind of test, a job interview of sorts.
And also just showing the other guys that he could still do everything he used to do.
As best he could, he generally tried not to buy into any of that bullshit about only being half a man or whatever. He was still the same man he'd ever been; he was just a one-armed version of himself.
But he also wasn't the kind of guy who was cut out for sitting at a sedentary desk job.
And there were very few employers who were willing to consider a one-armed man for any kind of physical work when there were plenty of two-armed men who wanted the same jobs. To most human employers, he couldn't explain that shifter strength and durability helped make up for it; he could sling around bags of cement one-armed that would have taken normal men two good arms to carry. But how could he tell an ordinary human boss that he was twice as strong as a normal man and his bones didn't break as easy? They could look right at him and see that he wasn't suited to work in a warehouse, do security work, go into law enforcement.
His therapist at the VA had tried to talk him into retraining for a new career. But there wasn't anything he wanted to do. Or more accurately, there was just one thing he wanted to do: work with his hands. And he couldn't do that anymore.
This was his last chance. At least here, among other shifters, he didn't have to justify his strength and skill.
And he'd procrastinated about as long as he could by stirring milk into his coffee. Dan looked over at the other two. "So this isn't how I was expecting my job interview to go, but ... are you still hiring?"
A moment of blankness passed over Derek's face. "Oh, right. Yeah. The job."
"Fuck, man," Dan snapped. Ben covered Skye's ears, although since she was dragon-shaped, not much ear was visible anyway. "I mean ... damn!" Okay, so he hadn't been around little kids in a while. "If you don't want to hire a one-armed guy, just say so."
"Wait, wait, hold on. That's not actually the problem." Derek took a seat at the kitchen table, in front of the open laptop, and adjusted the baby in his lap. "The bodyguard agency is kind of a ... a work in progress, I guess you could say."
"The problem is we haven't got enough work for even one bodyguard right now, let alone three," Ben said. "And I think you can see why." Skye had crawled up on his shoulder and was chewing on his hair.
"We used to have Gaby's mom living with us and looking after the kids, but she met a guy at seniors' bingo night who was up from Florida visiting his grandkids," Derek explained. "So now she's down in Orlando most of the time. It's made getting the business off the ground a little bit tricky, since both of our mates work."
The stubborn hope that Dan had been clinging to all the way out here began to crack and fall apart. "Guess I should've called ahead," he said, trying to make a joke out