by Roan Parrish
“Hi!”
I stood, bouncing on the balls of my feet as Dane took the steps two at a time.
“Hey.” And he smiled at me. A full-on teeth-showing smile. The first one, and it made me giddy. His eyeteeth were sharp.
I stopped him on the step below me.
“Can I kiss you hello?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, and the second it was out of his mouth, I reached for him, wanting to feel the smile still on his lips. With several inches difference in our heights, this time I cupped his jaw as I kissed him. I could feel his surprised inhale and I slung my arms around his neck and kissed him again.
Dane pulled away slightly to look at me and smiled once more. He traced thick fingers down my cheek to my throat, and I had to touch him one more time.
“Can I hug you hello too?” I asked softly.
Dane seemed to bring out the squishiest, softest, neediest parts of me. The parts I usually swallowed down, knowing they wouldn’t be welcomed. But somehow I needed to know if he might accept them—maybe even want them.
In response, he pulled me firmly to his body, and I felt that thick muscle against my stomach and chest. I could have let my whole weight fall forward, down the stairs, and he’d hold me up effortlessly. I squeezed him tight, shutting my eyes and letting everything but the sensation of his body recede.
I came back to warm fingers at my nape.
“Felix.”
“Hmm?”
“You okay?”
I nodded against his shoulder and he stroked the back of my neck, then gave my ponytail a gentle tug.
“Should we go in?” he asked after another minute.
I nodded again and forced myself to ease my hold on him. He studied me for a moment, then brushed my cheek. He looked almost shocked at himself, and I realized that if he hadn’t dated anyone in a long time then things like casual touches and kisses, maybe even hugs, might not have been part of his life for a long time.
It made my chest ache, the idea of someone with as much tenderness in him as Dane keeping it all bottled up.
“Thanks for coming here with me.”
“I’ve never been before,” he said.
His shoulders were tight again, as if once we’d stopped touching, the invisible armor he wore had settled back into place.
“For real?”
He nodded. “Walked past a thousand times but never gone in.”
“I love it here. I love museums.” We made our way inside. “When Sof and I first moved here it was one of the things I was most excited about. At first I felt bad only giving a dollar or two, but they say pay what you can, and I was broke. Besides, there are plenty of people who can pay the full price—more than the full price—so presumably they even me out, right?”
“I heard a podcast about sliding scales that said a large percentage of people pay the bottom end of the sliding scale, even rich people, but very few pay the high end of it.”
“Oh. Well, shit. Did it say why?”
“Some people were trying to get whatever it was for the least money possible. Others miscategorized where they fell on the wealth spectrum and truly believed that they were on the low end.”
“I believe that. Like, I grew up pretty broke, and I’m pretty broke now. I bet even if tomorrow I magically started making double the money I make now, I’d still feel like I was broke. I guess you need to reality-check yourself sometimes, huh?”
“Yes,” he said. “Or have someone you trust to reality-check you.”
I slid my hand into his, slowly, so he’d have time to pull away if he didn’t want to hold my hand in public. His gaze flew to mine in surprise.
“This okay?”
Dane swallowed hard and nodded, then he squeezed my hand.
I took a moment to appreciate the Tyrannosaurus rex and Apatosaurus skeletons that soared overhead in the entrance hall, even with people swarming around us. I never tired of the graceful arc of their spines or the delicate clutch of their claws. The way the present was visible through the bones of the past.
“Wow,” Dane said beside me.
“Yeah. Guess they make even you seem small by comparison, huh?” I teased.
Dane turned me to face him with one large hand. His expression was mild, but his eyes flashed.
“You like how much bigger I am than you?” he asked, low voice a barely audible caress, eyes boring into mine.
A throb of hot lust hit me.
“I, um. I. Yeah.”
We stood like that for a moment, Dane looming over me, solid muscle and warm skin, the T. rex looming over him, its articulated bones blooming like a prehistoric palm.
Finally, Dane had mercy on me. He squeezed my shoulder and leaned in close to whisper, “Me too.” He gave me one more intense look, then backed up. I took deep breaths until I got my libido under control, making dopey boner/bones/skeletons jokes in my head to distract myself.
“Can we go see the other dinosaurs first?” I asked.
“It’s your show,” he said easily.
He let me lead him from place to place, listening as I pointed out my favorite exhibits and those that I thought were badly done.
Dane liked all the animals but was especially fascinated by the Hall of New York City Birds.
“Damn,” he said over and over as he read the plaques. He traced the elegant swells of their bellies and the spans of their wings with his finger hovering close to the glass.
“I read an article about passenger pigeons,” he said, in front of their display. “In the nineteenth century there were so many of them they flew in thick clouds, millions, even billions strong. There were stories of them blotting out the sun and nesting in trees until their weight snapped the branches. When they’d fly over towns, people would run inside and come out to find bird shit covering everything.”
I cringed. “I get why Hitchcock didn’t go with carrier pigeons, then.” Dane smiled. “I wish the display was better here. I hate how some of them have cotton eyes instead of glass. And you don’t really get a sense of their movement. Which makes sense for the dinosaur skeletons ’cuz the stillness gives you an impression of their weight and size. But it seems like the birds should look more…fly-y, you know?”
He nodded. “You really like this stuff. The displays.”
“Yeah. When I was in elementary school we took a class trip to the Geology Museum at Rutgers. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Like the world in another time, or from another vantage point, come to life. On one hand it’s just stuff, stuck in boxes. But it’s also, like, a way to actually walk through history or other places.”
I came home from that field trip and told my mom about every single thing I’d seen. She listened and asked questions and never got bored, even though I talked about it for weeks.
“After the field trip, our homework for science class was to pretend it was a thousand years in the future and someone was coming to a museum so we had to make a diorama of what our world looked like. Oh man, I spent weeks on the thing.”
Dane was looking at me intently.
“I kinda kept making them for a while,” I confessed. “They were terrible—shitty paper cutouts in shoe boxes my mom would find for me in the hotel where she worked. But I loved the idea that what you chose to include in the space of the exhibit would tell people as much about the creator as it did about the world. What you chose to exclude, what you put in the center. So many museums have these super-high-tech, interactive exhibits these days. Which are cool, I guess. But I still like these the best. Where if you position things just right, even if they’ve been dead for thousands of years they still seem like they could come to life any minute.”
“Feel that way when I read sci-fi,” Dane said. “It’s a world that doesn’t even ex
ist, but while I’m reading about it, it feels like I live inside it.”
We spoke quietly as we moved through the still rooms with sarcophagi.
“Do you still make them? Dioramas?” he asked a few minutes later.
“Nah, not for years, though this place always makes me want to. There’s no room in our apartment anyway. It’s a one-bedroom, so half the living room is my bedroom.”
It wasn’t ideal, but Sofia and I were used to living in tight quarters. She and Ramona had shared a room growing up, and I had shared one with Adrian and Lucas, so we were well-practiced at navigating around each other.
“Hey, did your article say if carrier pigeons still really carry messages?”
“They’re extinct now,” he said. “Overhunting. The railroads provided access to them. They were so populous that their numbers made hunting them easy. Went from billions of them to none.”
“Jesus, that’s horrible.”
He nodded. “That’s humans.”
* * *
—
“Do you want to get some food?” I asked as we left the museum.
Dane hesitated, shoulders tight again.
“I’m supposed to go to the gym now.”
He said it as if it were an unchangeable appointment, but I was pretty sure he just worked out a lot. Then I realized that he was looking for a natural way to end our date without hurting my feelings by saying he didn’t want to hang out anymore.
“Oh, sure, okay, of course, no problem.”
I made my voice breezy and light and reminded myself that it was only our second date and it was fine to keep things short. He hadn’t agreed to an all-day hangout.
Dane frowned and cracked his knuckles. He looked back at the museum. He looked at me and shook his head.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
“Huh?”
“Okay, let’s get food.”
But he didn’t sound happy about it, and I cringed at the idea that he’d say yes because he could tell I was disappointed.
“No, I don’t wanna mess up your schedule. I should probably go home anyway.”
He made an uninterpretable sound in the back of his throat and steered me toward a park bench.
“We can,” he said. “I mean, I want to.”
He sat stiffly, shoulders bulging beneath his shirt, jaw tensed. I sat cross-legged on the bench next to him, equally uncomfortable.
“Guess I’m a little stuck in my ways,” he muttered. It sounded innocuous, but his jaw was so tight I could see the vein in his neck pulsing.
I wasn’t sure what to say. Dane’s hands were white-knuckled fists.
“Keeping to a schedule…makes things organized. Keeps me in control.”
“Of what?”
He leaned back against the bench slowly.
“Everything.”
I slid my hand over his clenched fist where it rested on his knee. He didn’t relax, but he didn’t move his hand away either, so I left it there.
“When I first started NA—” He glanced at me quickly like he was double-checking that I remembered, and I nodded. “It was all about not using. Just getting through each day, then another, then another. Seemed like it’d be that way forever. Then later, when I could pay attention to other stuff again, I went to meetings every day. Sometimes more than once a day. Mostly to have something to structure the day. Something I knew I had to do. Made me feel…”
He scrubbed his free hand over his head and sat up.
“Anyway, Reggie and I—my sponsor—came up with this whole schedule. Meetings. Gym. Grocery store. It helped. After a while I added other things. Cooking. Working at the bar. A daily schedule. When I break it, I get all…”
I slid my hand from his fist to his wrist and felt his rapid pulse under my fingers.
“Scared?” I offered.
He shrugged, like that wasn’t a word he would’ve used.
“I can do it, though. I do it sometimes. Something comes up with a sponsee, or an emergency at the bar.”
“What if…” I ventured. “What if I went with you to the gym and we got food after? Then you don’t have to change your schedule and we can still hang out.”
His eyes cut to mine sharply.
“Too much? We can just do it another day,” I said quickly.
“You’d do that?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I mean, fair warning—I’m not really a gym person, so I’ll probably just embarrass myself, but, sure.”
Dane stood quickly and pulled me upright. For a moment I thought he was going to push me away but he just hadn’t quite known his own strength.
“Yeah,” he said, voice rough. “Okay.”
Chapter 5
Huey
I went at my routine hard, trying to lose myself in the mindlessness that I could usually achieve when I pushed my body. But I couldn’t stop scanning the gym for Felix.
So he wouldn’t have to work out in street clothes, I’d torn a few inches off the bottom of an undershirt and dug out an old pair of bike shorts that I’d only worn once when I realized how uncomfortable they were. On Felix, they were baggy.
He’d arched an eyebrow at the bike shorts, then tied his hair up in a ponytail and given his reflection a rueful shrug.
He looked ridiculous.
I couldn’t stop staring at him.
His flush glowed against the white of my shirt, which kept slipping to the side, showing the elegant curve where his neck met his shoulder. The thin shorts hugged the pert swell of his ass even though they were loose around his thighs.
When we got here, he’d waved me away, saying he’d do his own thing. It turned out to be a leisurely stretching session that demonstrated he was quite flexible, then running on the treadmill for a while at an easy, loping pace, then more stretching.
The whole routine suggested someone who possessed no need to do more, go faster or heavier. No sense of competitiveness, no urgency, no ego.
After he finished stretching, he made his way toward me, running a finger along a barbell. I was nearly done with my arm and back routines and was going to finish with some ab work. Felix’s ponytail had half fallen out, strands curling around his face and clinging to the sweat on his neck. He was lightly flushed and held himself with loose-muscled post-workout ease.
“Have you always lifted weights?” he asked, gaze curious, appreciative. It sent a dim tingle of lust through me to see how much Felix seemed to enjoy my size. I’d spent so long wishing I could disappear.
I nodded. “Since high school.”
I’d always been big for my age—tall and broad since puberty. I put on muscle easily, and when I began lifting at thirteen, gaining in strength meant gaining in power. Gaining control.
After addiction blasted my sense of control to smithereens, lifting had felt like I was wrestling myself back.
“You wanna try?” I asked as Felix’s eyes roamed the equipment.
He gave me a half-smile and wrinkled his nose.
“Nah, I’m okay.” He looked me up and down slowly. “You carry on, though.”
* * *
—
We went back to my place afterward, and I was almost disappointed when Felix emerged after a shower wearing his own clothes again. As I took my own shower, I couldn’t stop picturing what his wet hair might look like during a shower, plastered to the curve of his skull, dripping down his neck. How he’d close his eyes and melt against me under the relaxing heat of the water.
I’d said yes to him every time I should have said no. Already he was making me shatter my routine into a thousand pieces. A routine that was the only thing that had held me together all these years.
Yes, he’d offered to come with me today, but he wouldn’t be enthusiastic a
bout accompanying me to the gym forever. He wouldn’t appreciate dinners being interrupted by the calls I always took from my sponsees, or the late hours I kept some nights at the bar. He’d understand for a while, probably, because he was kind. Rachel had been kind too. But eventually, he’d want someone funnier, prettier, younger. Easier.
I grabbed the Sharpie out of habit after drying off, but nothing seemed right. With Felix in my apartment, the need to buoy myself up with words was less pressing. He was the first thing in forever that made me feel good rather than fine.
Back in the living room, Felix startled sheepishly when he saw me. He was watching Secaucus Psychic.
“Hope you don’t mind,” he said.
“Help yourself.”
When I crossed behind the couch, he dropped his head back and reached his arms up, palms open to me. Everything about him was open. Unsure exactly what he was asking for, I slid my hands into his. He tugged and closed his eyes. I let my lips meet his, a strange, disorienting upside-down kiss that was all sweetness. But everything about him heated my blood, and the gentle ease of his mouth was no different. Neither was the long stretch of his smooth throat or the way he squeezed my hands as he deepened the kiss just a little.
With a satisfied “Mmm,” Felix pulled away and smiled at me.
“I’m starved. You wanna eat?”
My stomach gave an embarrassingly loud growl, which Felix took as assent. He turned off the TV and climbed over the back of the couch, like he was taking the fastest possible route to me. My skin buzzed with his proximity the moment before he snaked his arms around my waist.
I froze, then my skin heated as he gave me a tight squeeze. His cool, damp hair brushed my throat and I could smell my soap on his skin.
“What do you wanna eat?” I asked.
I felt him shrug and he turned his face into my shirt, relaxing in my arms. I let my hand hover over his hair. I had the urge to slide my fingers into it and press him so tight against me he couldn’t move away.
“C’we stay here?” he asked, words muffled against my chest.