by Roan Parrish
“Yeah,” Dane said. “Okay,” and I could breathe again. I smiled, flooded with joy and relief at getting to see him.
“Yay,” I said, and heard a soft intake of breath that I thought might be Dane’s version of a chuckle.
“Want to meet me there?” he asked. “In about an hour?”
“Great, just text me the address. I’m leaving work now. I’ll head over. Oh, but—” I started to say, but Dane had already ended the call before I could ask what the hell we were doing.
My phone pinged with an address a few blocks from Dane’s apartment and I headed there, but I couldn’t tell what it was from googling it.
The truth was that I didn’t care. All I wanted was to see Dane, to feel his arms around me. We could be going to debone fish, for all the activity mattered to me.
He was standing outside when I got to the address. When he saw me his eyes were bright and he almost smiled, which was his version of a happy face, and the second I reached for him he drew me into his arms, like maybe—just maybe—he’d missed me too.
He always smelled aggressively clean and warm, and tonight a slight chemical smell clung to him. I buried my face in his shoulder, wondering how long I could get away with staying there. My heart pounded with relief at the feeling of his arms around me.
“You okay?”
Dane was gruff and terse; he had no phone manner and didn’t do small talk. He seemed totally self-contained and strong enough to handle anything the world threw at him, all of which made me nervous and self-conscious…but, fuck, I liked him, and it would feel so good if he could comfort me.
I pressed my face tighter to him, trying to find a way of asking that didn’t sound weak. Dane’s hands were gentle on my hair.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
His voice was low and gut-wrenchingly gentle on the endearment, and to my utter mortification, I started to cry. On the street. In front of what seemed to be a bar.
Dane made a low sound and walked us away from the door and around the corner.
“Shit,” I said, wiping at my eyes. “I’m sorry.”
Dane dismissed my apology and peered at me intently.
“What’s wrong? What happened? Are you hurt?”
His hands skimmed my shoulders and ribs and landed on my hips, like he was checking me for injury.
I shook my head, trying to find the piece of my whirling thoughts that would answer his concrete question.
Sofia hardly comes home anymore. I know she’s busy and they’re getting ready for the tour. And why would she wanna come home to our shitty apartment when she could stay with Coco in her nice place? I’ve never been without her. We’ve always been a team. I’m really happy for her, I swear. But I just…I don’t…
“I don’t like being alone.” It fell out of my mouth, choked and scared, and I felt pathetic.
I couldn’t bear to look at Dane in case his face said he thought I was as pathetic as I did. I leaned against the wall, dropped my chin, and examined the dirty pavement. Someone had dropped a glitter pen and it had been stepped on, blue pearlescent ink smeared on the cement.
Dane made an unfamiliar sound of comfort and his hand slid to the back of my neck.
“Last night I woke up and…I couldn’t breathe and my heart was racing, and I felt like I just don’t know how to do anything if it’s not for Sof or my mom or the kids or…or…Fuck, I don’t know.”
“Sounds like you had a panic attack,” Dane said, voice matter-of-fact but fingers gentle in my hair.
“I’ve never…Nothing like that has ever happened to me before.”
“ ’S scary,” he said simply, and took my hand.
I nodded, tears running down my cheeks. It had been scary. So fucking scary, and somehow just having him acknowledge that made me feel better. I wondered if he was speaking from experience.
Dane pulled me against his broad chest.
“You’ve always taken care of your family,” he said. “Of your sister.” He ran his fingers through my hair. “Do any of them take care of you?”
He asked it so simply it broke me open.
When I lived at my mom’s, I’d always run from school to work to home so I could cook dinner. There was always someone’s homework to check, shoe to find, scrape to bandage, and argument to referee. Then, as we got older, there were tryouts to help them practice for and elections to help them win. I’d worked more than full-time for Sofia’s senior year so she could ace her classes and fill out college applications.
Dane’s warm hands ran up and down my back, through my hair. I didn’t have to say anything. He nodded.
“There was always so much to do, to take care of. I liked fixing everyone else’s problems. Helping them achieve their goals.”
“Less scary than figuring out what you want for yourself, hmm?”
That shook me, but it was true; I knew it as soon as he said it.
By the time Sofia and I got to New York, it was such an ingrained habit that I’d slid right into that role all over again. Not only had I never figured out what I wanted—other than to have enough money to make rent and buy groceries—it had never really occurred to me that I should.
“I…I guess I’ve just never been a dreamer like Sof.”
“You’ve never been in the position to let yourself, sounds like.” Dane’s fingers were gentle at the nape of my neck. “But I don’t believe you’re not a dreamer.”
I made a sound of tentative agreement and pressed closer to him.
“Guy I saw talking all about dinosaur bones and mummy displays has plenty of dreams in him,” he said.
I remembered what it felt like standing in the lobby of the Museum of Natural History and looking up through the skeletons of creatures that inhabited a world so ancient and so lost to our own that past and present collided. I remembered how it felt the first time I saw them. The thrill that had run through me. The way the world outside had looked different to me when I’d left.
And vaguely I remembered wanting. Wanting to be a part of bringing worlds of the past alive for others the way they’d been brought alive for me.
“Saw Riven’s announcement about your sister,” Dane said calmly. “Think maybe that’s what caused the panic attack?”
“I don’t know, maybe.” He rubbed calming circles on my back. “Things are all different now.”
And it really sank in. Even if Sofia hated touring and came home not wanting to be in the industry anymore—even if she never sang again—having her back wouldn’t change the fact that now I knew that something was missing for me.
Dane said, “Once you look a truth in the face, you can’t shove it away again. But change isn’t necessarily bad.”
I concentrated on his big, strong hand on my back, the steady solidity of his thigh between mine, the kindness in his voice. Having him in my life was a change, and it was anything but bad. Dane was used to telling hard truths, and it made me feel good that he respected me enough to tell them to me.
I pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “No, not all bad.”
“You’ll figure it out,” he said. “I’ll help you. If you want.”
I finally looked up at him, and the tenderness in his expression bowled me over. It washed away my uncertainties about how he felt about me because here, in this moment, he was right there with me. I ran my fingertips over his lips and he pressed a kiss to them.
“You’re wonderful,” I said. “Sorry I went all to pieces on you. And what the hell are we doing here, anyway?”
Dane ran his fingers over my cheek, expression calm.
“You still wanna go?”
“Go do what?” I wheedled.
“Come on,” he said, and tugged my hand.
“Wait, wait. Do I…uh. Do I look okay?”
His eyes glowed.
“You look gorgeous.”
I could feel myself flush.
“I meant, uh, does it look like I’ve been…Am I all snotty and gross?”
Dane wiped the last bit of moisture from my eyelashes with a gentle thumb. He grasped my chin and turned my face this way and that, like he was checking me over. Then he kissed my lips and ran a hand over my hair.
“You look fine. It’s dim in there, anyway.” Then he made a face. “Though I think you have gum in your hair.”
“Perfect.”
I reached back to find it and he caught my hand. He turned me around and touched my hair.
“Is it awful?”
“No.”
I could feel him messing with my hair, then there was a single instant of pain, and Dane held up three strands of my hair with a bit of gum clinging to them.
“Ow. Thanks.”
He dropped the gum to the ground and held out his hand for me.
“If I become the victim of sympathetic magic from that hair, I know who to blame,” I grumbled. I slid my hand into his and we went inside.
It was dim and crowded in the bar, and since Dane didn’t drink, I had no idea what we were doing here until I saw the chalkboard sign announcing the night’s activity.
“Oh my God, Quizzo?”
I gaped at Dane, shocked.
He shrugged his huge shoulders and looked a little sheepish. It was fucking adorable.
“Said you wanted to come with me to whatever I usually did,” he said.
“It’s great, I was just surprised! I’ve never done this before. So how do we sign up or join a team or whatever?”
“Oh, I don’t do that,” Dane said, matter-of-factly.
“Uh. No? Okay. What…do you do?”
But my question was lost in the din as Dane made his way to a small two-top in the corner, farthest from the crowd. A minute after we sat down, a bartender set a glass of water on the table in front of him.
“Hey, Huey,” she said. “Something for you, sweetie?” she asked me.
“Oh, uh, gin and tonic?”
“Coming right up.”
“They know you here.”
I couldn’t help but notice that no one else was getting table service. Dane shrugged again.
“It’s my Friday thing.”
The person running the Quizzo stepped up to the microphone and the crowd quieted. Each table was ringed by a clump of people who seemed to be a team, and they each had a printout.
I had a million questions, but I was too curious to see what Dane would do to ask any of them. He sat there, legs crossed at the ankles, watching the scene.
The bartender delivered my drink and slapped a sheet of paper in front of Dane with a wry smile and a wink.
“Are those the questions?”
He slid the paper over to me. I guessed it was an answer sheet, numbered and with a blank for each answer.
“So you participate in Quizzo unofficially?”
He nodded.
“You are so weird,” I said, and grinned at him. The corner of Dane’s mouth quirked, and he grabbed my chair and dragged it closer to him so he could talk without raising his voice.
“You can play along,” he said, indicating the answer sheet.
“You don’t wanna be on a team with me?” I asked. I gave Dane a calculated pout, but I was just glad to be here with him and see another piece of his puzzle fall into place. He dragged my chair even closer and kissed the pout off my lips.
The game began.
Dane slid a small, worn notebook out of his back pocket and flipped it open. I peeked at it and stared up at him.
“Are those…What are those?”
“Questions,” he said, verbose as ever.
I peered at the small, cramped writing, and Dane let me flip through the notebook. Each page was dated and contained a list of abbreviated questions and a row of answers marked with symbols for which I found no legend. Finally, flipping back far enough to see where the code originated, I gleaned that the symbols corresponded with whether or not Dane had known the answer, whether or not any of the teams had known the answer, and some kind of math that I decided indicated precisely how much smarter Dane was than everyone else.
“Wow,” I said.
Dane cleared his throat and scooped the book back into his lap.
“Sorry! I didn’t mean wow like Wow, you weirdo. I mean, okay, I did. But I think it’s cute!”
Dane leveled me with the flattest look I’d ever seen.
“Cute.”
I grinned at him and slung one of my legs over his massive thigh.
“Yup. You’re adorable.”
He harrumphed, but put the hand not holding a pen on my leg.
What quickly became clear was that Dane didn’t need any kind of math to calculate how much smarter he was than the other teams, because he was ridiculously smart.
I knew he watched Jeopardy! religiously, enjoyed documentaries, read things I’d never heard of, and listened to a hell of a lot of podcasts, but I hadn’t realized he knew everything.
“Holy Jesus, I’m dating a genius,” I said, when he murmured the answer to yet another question. I bit my lip when I realized I’d just said we were dating, but Dane didn’t seem to notice.
He just snorted at my characterization, but I thought he looked pleased.
“No, but seriously, how do you know everything?” I hissed.
“Don’t know everything.”
“Mm-hmm, okay.”
“These questions aren’t very hard,” he said by way of explanation. “And they reuse them sometimes. Been coming here a while.”
“Oh, so you don’t really know things, you’ve just memorized tons of facts about things? You know that’s how everyone learns things, right? By learning them?”
Dane smiled and ruffled my hair.
He watched Quizzo and I watched him. He knew every answer, writing them down before they were announced, annotating each with his code, and absently stroking the edges of his notebook. He finished his water and the waiter didn’t come back, like this pattern had been set long ago.
Dane came here every Friday night, but he didn’t speak to anyone except the bartender, didn’t play the game, and didn’t seem to interact with anyone. He knew all the trivia already.
“Dane?”
“Hmm?”
“Why do you come here?”
He shrugged.
“Like it.”
I pulled his leg toward me with mine and he looked at me.
“Been coming here a while.” I nodded and waited. “Started at a time when I…really needed things to do. To distract me. Keep my mind occupied.”
“Part of your routine,” I said.
He nodded.
“When I was still shaky. Liked it. Kept coming.” He looked away, and I was pretty sure that was all I was gonna get. “Wish they’d get some new damned questions, though,” he grumbled.
I smiled and slid my arm through his.
“Will you tell me about it?” I asked.
He froze, so I knew he understood what I meant.
“ ’Bout what?”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
He shrugged and I let it go. It probably wasn’t the right venue for a serious conversation, anyway. Of course, I’d recently wept in an alley, so…
The last question was announced, and Dane sat up straighter. When it was read out, he snorted, and instantly wrote the answer in his notebook.
But when the announcer said the answer, Dane had gotten it wrong.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “You don’t know everything.”
He smirked.
<
br /> “He’s wrong,” he said.
I shot him a look.
“It’s okay not to know everything.”
“I don’t know everything. Far from it. But his answer’s wrong. Let’s get outta here.”
Dane stood and sketched a wave at the bartender on our way out. I tripped after him, trying to google the trivia question without banging into anyone.
“Oh good lord,” I said, staring at my phone. “You’re right.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dane said.
“He really does know everything,” I grumbled to no one in particular.
* * *
—
Back at Dane’s apartment, he said, “You hungry?”
“Yeah.”
The tiny voice in the back of my mind that said he cooked for me at home so he wouldn’t be seen with me in public was quiet, since we’d just been in a crowded bar together. Maybe it was just one more control thing.
“What are you making?”
“Pierogis. Passed a stand selling them today and it smelled really good. Remembered there was a recipe in this book Whit and Theo got me.”
He brandished a square, hardback cookbook studded with Post-it notes.
“Yum.”
I followed him into the kitchen and sat on the counter. Dane put water on to boil and began cubing potatoes.
Once the potatoes were in the water, Dane paused and then addressed the cutting board.
“Still have nightmares that I’ve relapsed. Wake up thinking I’m back there. Then.”
He glanced up at me as if to check that I knew what he was talking about. That I understood he hadn’t ignored me in the bar when I’d asked to hear about his experiences with addiction, he just hadn’t wanted to talk about it there.
I nodded for him to go on, and he squared his shoulders like he was preparing himself to wade into battle. When he spoke again, his voice was the monotone I was coming to realize meant that what he was saying was hard for him. Frightening.
“I’ve been sober for ten damn years, but I still have nightmares. About that feeling of…of…needing something so badly that it blots out everything else. Blots me out. I was trying to run away from myself.”
“Why?” I asked.