by Lacey Dailey
“So, you want to go do something?" I grabbed a rag from one of the cabinets and launched into clean-up mode. "I just have to finish sterilizing everything up to code and I’m good to clock out.”
“Burgers and beer before game night sounds good.” He plopped back into Linda’s chair. “Is it cool I just intruded?”
“You didn’t intrude, B. It’s fine. There are no clients.” I sprayed the table.
“Yeah, but still, I don’t want to get you into trouble or anything.”
“If I was gonna get fired, I would’ve been fired years ago for annoying my clients with my question of the day,” I joked, running my rag through the sanitizer Brett seemed to like the smell of.
He let out a rough chuckle. “What was it?”
“How many chickens would it take to kill an elephant?”
“Huh.” He cocked his head. His eyebrows pulled together and the right side of his lips pulled upward. It told me he was thinking. “A fuck ton, that’s for sure. They could probably take it down by pecking the shit out of it, but actually killing it? That’d be a lot to peck. Let me guess, everybody told you it was stupid?”
“Eh. Usually they do. It’s cool though. I don’t mind—"
“Your questions aren’t stupid, Ace. You can ask me anytime, yeah?”
There was that feeling again. The one that came with the crush. Turning me from functional human being to tween girl at a Justin Bieber concert with the snap of your fingers.
Ugh.
It was becoming annoying. How quick one sentence from him turned me into a ball of mush. It wasn’t just that he encouraged me to ask questions. It was that he seemed to pay attention long enough to know why I asked them in the first place.
I smiled and cleared my throat, standing up and moving back to the sink. “One day I’ll run out of questions.”
“Good day for your clients. Sad day for me.”
I looked over my shoulder to find him stretching his arms above his head, yawning loudly. “Still sleeping like shit?”
“Maybe I’m tired because somebody was stomping through his apartment at the ass crack of dawn. Where the hell did you go this morning, anyway?”
“Went for a run. I usually do, you just don’t hear me.” I smirked at him and rinsed my hands again. “You could come with me sometime, ya know.”
“You want me to come with?”
“Sure, if you think you could get your ass out of bed before noon.”
“I could get out of bed for you.”
My hands shook under the stream of warm water. My stomach dipped, and I turned off the faucet, shaking out my hands while I turned to face him. “I’d like that, Brett.”
He nodded and stood up, looking away while aggressively working his fingernails into the back of his neck. “Me too. Thanks for inviting me.”
Studying his subdued expression and the way his voice dropped to almost a whisper, I approached him. “Man, why you saying that like we haven’t been sewn together since that day in the airport? You’re—”
Words failed me when he smiled a little and I got a glimpse of a dimple beneath all his scruff. He stepped closer. Close enough that my fingers brushed his hand and I was sent into a frenzy. As if somebody just plugged me back in and he was my source of power. “I’m what, Ace?”
That question was loaded. I wanted to crawl into a hole to completely avoid it. He was just Brett. That’s all he was. But it just so happened that Brett Maddison seemed to be exactly what my life was missing. Circuit made my life feel full, but it was Brett that made it feel complete.
“You’re Brett,” I finally said, capturing his gaze. “And I don’t want you to be anything less than you are.”
“That’s good,” he whispered, my fingers brushing his hand again.
He held our gaze as if his life depended on it, glowering like he was trying to hypnotize me into telling him all my deepest secrets.
I let it happen until I just couldn’t anymore. I blinked to give myself a break from his intense stare and stepped back. I was too close. Too close to doing something remarkably stupid. Too close to becoming a puddle of incoherent babbles in between begging him to have my babies.
I cleared my throat. “Ready to jet?”
“Yeah.” He seemed to shake off whatever he found from staring at me and schooled his expression. “Let’s go.”
It feels like a date.
Out of all the thoughts swirling around in my head, it was the only one I could truly comprehend. It feels like a date, and it was taking some serious work to train my brain to recognize the truth.
“I have a question,” he blurted, scooping up some Ketchup and plopping a fry in his mouth.
“I ask the questions in this relationship,” I joked, biting into my burger. I licked sauce from the corner of my mouth and waited for him to say something. Looking up into his face, I found him staring at me from across the table. He had a fry in his hand and a look in his eyes I couldn’t quite make sense of.
And then it hit me like a brick in the face.
I said relationship.
“Friendship,” I corrected, making things a million times more awkward. “I meant friendship.”
“Right.” He bit the tip of his fry and dropped the rest on his plate. “I was just wondering how you knew you wanted to be a masseuse.”
“To be honest, I didn’t know. All I knew was that I hated the thought of going to college.”
“So, that’s when you decided to be a masseuse?”
“Not exactly.” I set down the uneaten half of my burger and wiped my hands. “I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. Wren dove right into college and that was weird for me since we always did things together growing up. I had to find something just for me so I grabbed a bunch of brochures and looked up careers that didn’t require a college degree.”
“Why did you choose a masseuse? Because you like touching people?” Our feet bumped collectively under the booth we were in, causing our ankles to lock together like we had magnets glued to our skin.
It feels like a date.
“Nah.” I smirked. “That’s just what I told my mom. I think I chose it because I liked the idea of helping people. It sounds kind of lame, but massage therapy makes a world of difference in the lives of some people.”
“People walk around in pain all day long and you have the ability to stop it. Changing people’s lives could never be lame, A. No matter how you do it.” He sat back in the booth, the vinyl making an obscene noise. “I think that’s why I wanted to go into biochemistry.”
“To help people?”
“Yeah. I had these huge aspirations of becoming a healthcare scientist. I wanted to study diseases and figure out how to cure them. I used to stare at myself in the mirror while wearing my lab coat and feel my chest puff up with pride. Six years ago, all I wanted to be was someone worthy of wearing that coat.”
“And now?”
“Now, I just want to be someone who is worthy at all.”
“Brett.” I fought the impulse to reach across the table and take his hands in mine. His face was twisted like he smelt something rank or found something to be disgusting. But I knew my best friend well enough to know the only thing he was disgusted by was himself.
“I don’t regret it. Withdrawing from classes, I mean. I don’t regret it.” I wasn’t sure if he said it for his benefit or for mine. “Everybody there was so high strung. Stressing out over homework and tests. Studying during lunch and in the halls between classes. The students looked like they either wanted to cry or jump off a bridge. College is not life or death, A. I got so sick of placating the people who thought it was. I know what death looks like and a C minus on a fucking test does not even compare.” His chest went crazy beneath the long-sleeved T-shirt stretched across it.
Breathe, baby.
I squeezed both my ankles, tightening my grip on the place we had contact. I would’ve rather slid into his side of the booth and held him against my chest, but we were in a
public place, and I wasn’t about to bring attention to the fact that he was on the verge of some sort of attack.
I didn’t know a lot about anxiety, but I suspected Brett struggled from some form of it. He was on edge all the time, coming across as agitated and restless. His sleep pattern was strange, and he popped Tylenol to get rid of the headaches he complained of daily.
And maybe it was because he was my best friend and I was a masseuse trained to look, but I couldn’t help but notice the tension he carried in his shoulders. The way he rolled his neck and stretched his arms above his head, searching for the relief he could never find. What’s more, he seemed to lose his breath whenever he thought about the future or got thrust too far back into the past.
Brett couldn’t handle more than what was happening in the present moment.
I squeezed our ankles together again. “Breathe.”
His eyes found mine. They were hazy, like he was thrust into a part of his life he didn’t want to relive and wasn’t sure how to come back from. I held his gaze and let him stare, hopefully he was working out that what was in front of him was okay to hold on to. I wanted him to reach for me. To anchor himself to me so he could stay in a moment that didn’t make his lungs compact or sweat run down the side of his face.
“Ace,” he said my name like it was something he was desperate to keep safe.
“I’m sorry, B.”
“For what?”
I studied his eyes, waiting for the haze in them to disperse before I said what I’d been thinking since the second I met him. “For everything you went through when Sage disappeared.”
The grip on our ankles became so tight, I suspected there would be bruises. “I… I didn’t… nothing happened to me.”
“You lost your sister, Brett.” There were better times and places to have this conversation. A bar during happy hour was not an ideal choice, but everybody was so busy with themselves, nobody was paying any sort of attention to us. And fact was, when Brett and I looked at each other, the rest of the world kind of just became null.
“But she came back.”
“Not until you'd already grieved her.”
“I never grieved her,” he said it so softly, I was positive he was admitting it to himself and not me.
“I’m so sorry, B,” I said it again, this time, I wanted to be sure he wasn’t just hearing me, but feeling me.
“Don’t.” He shook his head. I thought I knew Brett before he moved in with me. But the last couple of weeks with him have unlocked the gates to a universe I wasn’t special enough to enter until now. I learned quickly that if there was one thing Brett despised, it was talking about himself as if he were worth talking about.
“Nothing happened to me, A. It all happened to her and she’s out going to school, dating Wren, living her life.”
“You think because Sage seems okay you have to be okay too?”
“Why would I not be? She was the one who lived through hell.”
“I’d argue you went through hell too. Just a different kind.”
His eyes cleared and the grip on our ankles loosened, but he didn’t let go. I lost his gaze when he turned his head and dipped his chin. His throat bobbed harshly.
I grew miserable watching him swallow down the hurt. His face portrayed so much pain, as if he were choking down a handful of metal shavings. I yearned to pull him against my chest and hold him. To take it all away. The misery faded into hopelessness when I remembered I couldn't do that.
I went for distraction instead.
“So, you don’t want to go to college anymore." I threw out. "That’s totally fine. You can look up programs like I did. See if anything sparks your interest.”
For the next several moments, there was nothing but quiet. His ankle moved against mine, as if making sure I hadn't left. With a rough noise in his throat, he looked up and the traces of anguish fled his face. “You’re telling me you looked up massage therapy, thought it sounded interesting, and then signed up?”
“Basically, yep. Getting certified took a bit. I had to take a course online, pass a state test and all that hoop-lah.”
“Still was quicker than college.”
“Truth.”
He studied me beneath honey colored lashes. “And you’re happy with your choice? Never looked into any other choices? Never regretted it?”
“I love my job, B. I don’t make a ton of money and I work with grumpy old people, but I’m making a difference. That’s enough for me.”
I knew right then I was lying to him. Massage therapy would never be enough for me. It was enough to hold me over until I walked into Circuit. But alone? Randall Hardwood and Tranquility Spa would never be enough. The more time I spent around Brett, the more I resented the button I couldn’t push.
“I envy you,” he blurted.
My eyebrows shot up to my hairline. “Why?”
“Because you were so sure of yourself. I’m not sure of anything. I took forever to order this damn burger." He poked the top of the bun.
I chuckled. “You take your time making choices, so what?”
“So what? Ace, I already spent money to drop out of college twice. The first time I had a real excuse because my sister disappeared. This time around, I’m just being a ninny.”
“You are not being a ninny. It’s not what you want to do so we’ll figure out something you do want to do.”
“We?”
The look in his eyes did me in. There was hope, apprehension, and confusion lumped into one heavy gaze that had me feeling things I'd never felt for Orlando Bloom. Brett wanted to be a ‘we.’ Whether it was just as friends or if this was really a date, he didn’t want to be alone.
“Yeah. We. I’m the best person to help you figure your shit out.”
He snorted. “A couple of college dropouts trying to figure out my future together. Nice.”
“Technically, I never dropped out. I never actually went. I thought about applying but then came to my senses. I barely passed high school.”
“According to Wren, it’s because you couldn’t stay out of trouble.” He smirked, grabbing his bottle of beer and taking a long swig.
I watched the muscles in his throat move with the force of his swallow and suppressed the urge to jump across the table and sink my teeth into them. “Exactly. Could you imagine me in college? Way too many opportunities to flunk out.”
He laughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You probably would’ve been arrested.”
“My mom would have been so pissed, man. She was pretty laid back growing up, but I would’ve gotten my ass handed to me if I was arrested.”
“I should meet your mom.”
It feels like a date.
“She doesn’t live here.”
“I know.” He rolled his eyes. “You moved closer to the city after high school and she moved farther away. Whatever. But it’s not like she’s in Europe. She lives an hour away, man. I’m just saying, I wanna meet her. You’ve met my mom. It’s only fair.”
I chuckled, leaning back in the booth and pushing my fingers through my hair. “Next time I visit my mom, you can come.”
“That’ll be next century. You’re an awful son.”
I grabbed an onion ring from my plate and chucked it at his chest. He cackled and picked it up from the place it fell on his lap, shoving it in his mouth.
“She ever date or anything?” he mumbled, crumbs flying from his mouth. “After your dad left?”
And just like that, Brett flipped my off switch. “Nope. Not really.”
Talking about my father always exhausted me. Like somebody lit my internal processor on fire and I slowly stopped functioning. I rarely talked about him. Everybody knew what an asshole my father was, leaving me, my sister, and my mama like that. But nobody really knew the gory details and that it still made me feel all fucked up. Wren knew because he was there, and Brett knew after we shared a bottle of Tequila and a heart to heart bro talk on the floor of my apartment. We hadn’t
spoken about it since, and I held no plans to rectify that.
He swallowed his onion ring and took the last sip of his beer, gaging my reaction to that question. He seemed to understand I wasn’t about to open that can of worms. It was selfish of me, really. After we just spent the better part of an hour talking about his demons, I couldn’t even talk about mine.
But that was the thing about demons. It was easier to look someone else’s in the eye rather than your own.
“You want to get out of here?”
“Yeah. Let’s bounce.” I stood up and reached for my pocket.
“I got it.” He chucked some cash on the table before I could even touch my wallet.
“Brett.”
“It’s cool.” He nudged my shoulder. “You can get the next one.”
I swallowed thickly and followed him out the door, suppressing the urge to hold his hand.
I wished this was a date.
5
Ace
Curiosity killed the cat.
An old famous proverb that first surfaced in the late 1500s when some old dude wrote it down and used it in a play to be performed by the great William Shakespeare. Centuries have passed and we still use it. It’s the go-to saying people use to warn others when they’re getting too nosy or too close to an answer they might not want to hear.
Curiosity killed the cat.
It wasn’t something I could argue with. The amount of trouble I got myself into by asking the wrong things at the wrong time or butting into conversations I had no right to be in was endless. Some people found it rude when my questions got too blunt. Or invasive when they became a tad too personal. Or just super fucking annoying when they sounded pointless and didn’t seem to have an answer. But it wasn’t that I was trying to be a jerk. I was just curious. Not knowing the answer to everything I asked bugged me immensely. Maybe that made me annoying, or maybe I sounded pretentious because I demanded answers from people I had no business even talking to. Half the time I asked a question, I hated the answer I was met with. But that was part of the gamble that came with asking a question. Curiosity killed the cat, sure. But there was a second part of the saying people clearly forgot about.