Notes: Had this one pop into my head a while back but didn't know what to do with it since it didn't fit into anything else I'm working on right now, so I thought I'd write it up by itself. It's short and to the point, but I hope everyone enjoys.

The Difference Between Mice and Men

It was early evening and the sun was just starting to set, and the quiet brought on by the rapidly approaching nightfall was broken only by the tunes pumping through the radio perched nearby on an old sawhorse. Vinnie was sitting in the garage alone - so it was just typical that the phone would ring. "The garage is closed," he said after answering it. "Call back tomorrow."

On the other end of the line he heard someone release a huff of air - someone female. "If it's closed, what are you doing there?" Charley asked, her tone light yet scolding.

Vinnie rolled his eyes and leaned back in his chair. "Waiting for you, of course," he reminded her, after taking a sip from the root beer bottle in his hand. His bros were off grabbing more hot dogs, so he'd volunteered to stay behind and hold down the fort. After taking another sip, he asked, "How's your teeth?"

A few hours ago Charley had closed up the garage early, saying something about a dental appointment before getting in her truck and driving off. Things had been pretty boring around here ever since, and he yawned noisily before focusing on the phone conversation again. Charley hesitated several moments before finally answering. "Things got kind of...complicated," she said vaguely.

"Like how?" Vinnie wondered.

"Like, I needed to have more work done than expected and they gave me a little something for the pain."

As she spoke, Vinnie noticed that her voice was rising and falling just a little, almost in a sing-song kind of way. Like she was nervous, overtired, or maybe a little bit giggly. It was hard to tell which. "Turns out I'm a lot more sensitive to what they gave me than they thought I'd be," she went on. "They advised me not to drive myself home."

"Ah," said Vinnie, understanding now. "So you need me to come pick you up?"

There was a pause. "Well, that's where things get complicated again," Charley told him, a hint of sheepishness creeping into her tone. "I, uh, thought I could handle it."

Vinnie felt himself grow blank. With a quiet groan, he leaned forward to rest his elbow on his knee and pressed his forehead into his hand. "Charley-girl, did you get yourself into an accident?"

"No," Charley responded sharply. "I got my truck stuck in a ditch."

"That's practically the same thing," Vinnie pointed out.

"Oh, just come get me already," she said testily. "I'm getting bored out here."

She gave him directions where to find her and hung up. Sighing, Vinnie downed the rest of his root beer and hurried out to his bike. By the time he pulled up alongside the ditch in question a little while later, the sun had finished its descent below the horizon, and it was by deepening shadows that he surveyed the state of Charley's truck. He could understand why she hadn't been able to get out on her own; the ground sloped sharply and the vehicle was now balancing on two wheels.

What made Vinnie lift his eyebrows was the fact that the truck was balancing on the left-hand tires and not the right ones. "Any particular reason you were driving on the wrong side of the road?"

Charley, who was standing a few feet away beneath a scraggly-looking tree growing beside the road, scrunched up her face in thought. "I forget."

"You're just lucky there weren't any cops around."

They weren't all that far from the garage, here on the fringes of the city, so there wasn't a whole lot of traffic. And a good thing, too. Shaking his head, Vinnie turned away from the truck and looked at Charley, who surveyed him in return with a bland, sleepy expression. "Come on," he sighed, waving a hand at his bike. "Let's get you home and into bed."

Instead of moving over and climbing on, Charley gave her head a shake and leaned back against the thick trunk of the tree. "I'm waiting for the tow truck. You can drive me home after they haul me out."

"Hey, I could do that for you," Vinnie said confidently.

Charley narrowed her eyes at him. "I'm waiting for the tow truck," she repeated firmly.

Vinnie wrinkled his nose in annoyance. "How long before they get here?"

"Another hour or so."

"Swell."

The white mouse continued to blatantly pout, but Charley ignored him. She looked a little wobbly, and she covered a yawn as she slid down the tree trunk and sat on the dry grass. "There's a few bottles of root beer in the back," she told him, pointing at her lopsided truck. "They might be a little warm, though."

Better than nothing. After finding two bottles, Vinnie popped them both open, then settled on the grass next to Charley and passed one to her. She flashed him an almost shy smile as she took it, and Vinnie felt his annoyance evaporate as he smiled in return. Resting his back against the trunk, he took a long gulp of root beer, his eyes drifting skyward.

The early autumn sky was already starting to darken, with a star or two trying to shine high overhead. Beside him, Charley suddenly let out a quiet sigh, and when he looked at her again she was staring down at the bottle in her hands. "Sorry about all this," she mumbled. "It's probably not how you wanted to spend your evening."

"Hey, it's cool," Vinnie told her, smiling again. "We'll look back on this later and laugh. These are the kind of moments you save up to tell the grandkids one day," he joked.

He was only trying to lighten the mood, but after he'd said it he cringed and got ready to backpedal, in case she thought he was being a smartass and making a wisecrack about their grandkids. Well, he did mean their grandkids, but not "theirs" their grandkids...if that made sense.

But instead of smirking, or elbowing him and telling him to knock it off, Charley released another sigh and slunk a little lower against the tree trunk. "You need to have kids in order to have grandkids," she mumbled.

"Well, yeah," Vinnie said uncertainly, not sure what the significance of her pointing out the obvious was.

It was tempting to make a crack about also needing someone to make them with...but the look in Charley's eyes stopped him. She suddenly looked so very tired, and deep within her green eyes he could see a sadness rising, pooling until it crept into the rest of her face. And with it came a kind of longing he couldn't quite name.

"I can't, you know."

"Can't what?" he wondered.

A ghost of a sad smile touching her lips, Charley took a sip of root beer before answering. "Have kids."

For a long moment all Vinnie could do was stare. He could tell by the look on her face that she wasn't joking - not in the least little bit. The mood in the air had shifted dramatically, growing heavy around him. Serious. It made him squirm uncomfortably. "You, um, never mentioned that before," he finally ventured.

The pretty mechanic let out a snort and tossed her half-empty bottle away. "Yeah, well, it's not really a subject you casually drop into everyday conversation," she muttered.

Scowling slightly, she folded her arms around herself and slumped further against the tree. She looked so small and vulnerable right now, and Vinnie got the strong feeling that if something like strong painkillers weren't involved, she would never have so much as considered sharing this with him.

It made him feel more than a little funny. Like he had stumbled onto something he had no business seeing or hearing...but at the same time he felt strangely special. After a lengthy silence had passed, he finally asked, "Have you ever seen anyone about it?"

Charley scoffed quietly. "You mean doctors? Specialists? Of course I have. It's just the way I am; nothing to be done about it. No way to fix it."

Her tone had turned bitter - frustrated. Her eyelids suddenly drooped and she let them close for a minute or two before opening them again. "Haven't talked about it so long," she said softly, sounding like she was mostly speaking to herself. "Not since college, I think. People don't really want to hear about it, usually."

That special feeling returned. "I don't mind," Vinnie told her honestly. "You can talk about it all you want, if you need to."

She scoffed again and rested her head back against the tree trunk. Her eyes studied the deepening blue of the sky for a moment; the light of the stars reflected in them. "Guys on this planet are funny," she mumbled. "Even if they swear that kids are the last thing they would ever want...it still bothers them when you say you can't give them any."

With a scornful chuckle, she tightened her arms around herself as she drew her knees to her chest. "Guess you can't blame them," she went on, with forced lightness in her voice to vainly mask the dampness gathering in her eyes. "Nobody wants damaged goods."

She grew quiet after that. And Vinnie had absolutely not idea what to say. He wasn't good with difficult situations; the only way he really knew how to deal with them was to crack a joke. He didn't dare - not now. This wasn't the time or place for humor. But he didn't want to just let the silence grow to unbearably awkward levels, the two of them anxiously hoping for the tow truck to arrive so they could escape from this moment. And then they'd both wake up tomorrow pretending this conversation had never happened.

He didn't want it to come to that. He didn't know how, but he wanted to take this unhappy moment and turn it into something else. If nothing more, he wanted to make those tears threatening to fill her eyes go away. But unfortunately in situations as awkward as this he had a bad habit of saying something stupid.

Hoping he'd save himself - and her - from that kind of embarrassment, he cleared his throat and decided to mention the obvious - or what at least was obvious to him. "You know," he faltered, "I would think that when you tell a guy something like that he would want to, um, you know..."

"Swap fluids with reckless abandon?" Charley supplied coolly.

Cringing inwardly, Vinnie closed his rambling mouth and nodded. Note to self, he thought, too much medication makes Charley-girl blunter than usual.

Closing her eyes and shaking her head, Charley let out a quiet laugh - a bitter one. "This guy I knew back in high school sure thought it was a good idea," she commented, her tone flat and humorless. "Convinced me to give it a try right there on the football field, back behind the bleachers."

A jealous knot quickly tightened in the young mouse's stomach, filling his mind with visions of tracking this guy down and planting a nice heavy boot in his groin. He hastily pushed any sign of irritation out of his expression and said, tentatively, "And?"

Charley opened her eyes slowly, her green orbs glistening with moisture. "And then he never spoke to me again."

She shrugged, like it all didn't matter, but Vinnie's heart flooded with sympathy until it hurt. His flash of jealousy forgotten, he found himself hoping that the loser in question had at least had the decency to give her a darn good time, there on the lawn. But he wasn't going to ask...because judging by the pain in her eyes, he was pretty sure he already knew the answer.

He wasn't sure he even wanted to know the answer to the next question that came into his mind, but it was up and out before he could stop it. "That wasn't your first time, was it?"

Charley shrugged again, a rueful smile spreading across her lips as she lifted her eyes to his. Unshed tears glittered on her eyelashes like dewdrops. "First and only. Great, huh?"

She tried to force a laugh - but she wound up pushing out a sob instead. Her face contorting in embarrassment, she hastily ducked her head and, sniffling, swiped her hand across her eyes. Vinnie's heart was a sympathetic, throbbing ache again. "Only?" he repeated quietly. "What about Jack?"

Sniffling again, Charley continued to wipe her eyes and didn't look up as she answered. "Jack was...safe. He didn't try to pressure me. I think he could sense that there was something else there - something I wasn't telling him."

Releasing a shaky sigh, she let her hand drop. "He probably thought I'd tell him eventually, but...I just couldn't. I didn't want to have to face it. So it's no real wonder we didn't work out, huh?" she said, laughing weakly. "Relationships can't survive without trust."

"And the funny part about it all is that I'm not even sure if I want kids," she went on, swallowing thickly. "Once in a while I wonder if maybe I do, but most of the time I don't. But sometimes I worry that I only tell myself that so I won't have to think about it. I make myself forget and pretend like I don't care when I see somebody else with kids. Maybe I don't, or maybe I do - I don't know. I just don't know."

She looked at him again and tried to smile through the tears...but a second later she was pressing her hand to her mouth as she bit back another sob. She hunched forward, like she was trying to curl up into a ball, and before he realized what he was doing Vinnie was reaching for her. As his arms went around her he almost expected her to squirm away, but instead she rested against him, pressing her face into the fur of his chest as she sniffled.

The flow of tears mounted steadily, until she had broken down completely and was sobbing freely in his arms. Vinnie wasn't even sure what she was crying the hardest about; her failed relationship, the jerk behind the bleachers, or the fact that she couldn't have kids. Maybe she was crying about all three things - or none of them. Maybe it was just the medication at work, here.

It didn't really matter. He kept holding her to him tightly, rocking her wordlessly and stroking her hair from time to time. Gradually her sobs receded, and the tears slowly faded after them, until the only thing that remained was an occasional sniffle. By the time the tow truck finally showed up, Charley had fallen asleep.

Vinnie lifted her carefully and placed her in the front seat of the truck, then (after paying the tow truck guy for hauling the pickup out of the ditch) coaxed his bike into the back. He drove slow and it was late by the time he parked in front of the garage. His bros were back, and lights were on and music was playing inside. Vinnie decided to give them a brief explanation later; for now, he lifted Charley out of her seat and carried her in the back way, heading up the stairs to her bedroom.

Charley fidgeted and mumbled something as Vinnie placed her gently on the bed, then stilled and went on sleeping. In the shadows, Vinnie let his gaze drift over her face before he reached down and started pulling off her boots. He then lifted her feet and tugged the blanket free before tucking it up under her chin.

And then, because she was too sound asleep to notice and his bros weren't looking, he tenderly smoothed her hair back from her face and pressed a soft kiss to her forehead. "You know something, Sweetheart?" he asked, his voice only a touch louder than a whisper. "I think I must be different than the guys on this planet. Because now that I know all the things you told me tonight, all I want to do is try even harder to make you smile."