Take a Hint, Dani Brown

by Talia Hibbert

  It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It’s okay. Zaf caught his self-recriminations by the throat, threw them aside, and focused on making himself feel better, not worse. He knew what to do. He’d done it countless times before. So he thought, as clearly as he could, Zaf. You’re having a panic attack. But that’s okay.

  Then he sank down onto the ground and breathed.

  Chapter Ten

  A lot of people considered Dani oblivious, but that wasn’t true: she simply chose to ignore the things that didn’t interest her in favor of the things that did. People, as a group, were therefore pushed to the back of her mind in favor of more relevant topics, such as snacks and poetry and panel research. But Zaf had a strange tendency to squeeze through the bars of her mental cage (which made no sense, since he was bloody huge) and stroll into her zone of focus like he belonged there.

  Which is why Dani noticed the instant his breathing changed.

  It wasn’t that she could hear it—not with her ears, anyway. They were on the pavement outside the boxy, modern building that housed Radio Trent’s headquarters, the traffic behind them busy enough to drown out the sound of one man’s inhalations. And yet, when that slow, steady rhythm faltered, Dani felt it, somewhere deep inside her own chest. Zaf sucked down his next breath as if dragging in the oxygen against its will, and she turned as if pulled. Then he bent down into a crouch, right there on the street, and she did the same without a second thought. It felt as if some shining tie was braided between them and if one of them couldn’t stay upright, neither of them could.

  “Sorry,” he told her, his voice strained and rough as sandpaper. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t you dare,” she said softly.

  “I’m just—I just need to—”

  “You can tell me later. Right now, do what you need to do.” Dani sat on her bum—some people didn’t have the quad muscles required to crouch, thank you very much—and added, “If I can help, let me know. Otherwise, feel free to ignore me. I’ll still be here.”

  He swallowed hard. “I’m fine, though. This is fine.”

  “Zaf.”

  “You’re right,” he said with a tight little laugh. “Not fine. Not fine at all.”

  “No,” Dani agreed. “But no one can be fine all the time. So we’ll stay here while you’re busy being not-fine, and we won’t move until you’re done, and that’s okay.” It was ridiculous, it was babble, it was the best she could offer. But she saw the tremor in his hands and the worryingly pale gold of his skin, and for the first time in a long time, she wished like hell that she could offer more.

  Zaf, meanwhile, went quiet.

  At least she knew what not to do. When Zaf had mentioned his anxiety disorder, natural curiosity had led Dani to spend a few hours researching the topic. So she wouldn’t grab him, or ask silly questions, or do anything else that might make him feel worse, and that was something, wasn’t it?

  Well, it was all she had, so she supposed it would have to be.

  After a while, his breathing slowed, and his broad shoulders relaxed inch by inch. With every infinitesimal sign of release, the thick rope of concern wrapped around Dani’s throat started to ease. Then Zaf opened his eyes and gave her one of his hard, impenetrable stares, the one that meant I’m going to be a bit of an arse now, and she knew he was back to his usual self and annoyed as always. She waited for him to say something brisk and grumpy and vaguely annoying. He opened his mouth, as if preparing to do just that. But after a long moment, he scrubbed a hand over his beard and sighed.

  She bit her lip. “Are you okay?”

  He grunted.

  “Should I . . . cancel the interview? Because we can do that. If you want.”

  He stared at her, his expression unreadable. “Ten minutes before we’re due to go on?”

  “I don’t care if it’s ten seconds. Tell me,” she said firmly, “and I’ll go in there and tell them.”

  After a long moment, his lips twitched. “Are you being nice to me right now? Because that’s twice in one day. Would you also take me somewhere with coffee and cake and try your best not to bitch about the evils of caffeine? None of the cheap shit, mind. I know you’ve got money.”

  The spluttering noise she made was half amusement, half a sigh of relief. “If you can be irritating, I assume you’re much improved.”

  “Yeah, actually. I guess, with some associations, you just have to . . . get through them. And if that’s what’s going to happen tonight, I’ll do my best to handle it.” His words were cryptic, his expression pensive, and she almost wanted to ask more questions. To learn what was going on inside his head, every tiny detail.

  Luckily, before she could embarrass herself like that, he spoke again. “But you should know for future reference that I could be irritating with one foot in the grave.”

  Dani couldn’t help it: she laughed. It was a quick, guilty bubble of sound—but then he smiled in response, slow and sweet like spilled honey, so she laughed some more, and suddenly he was laughing, too. They sat in the middle of the pavement, giddy and giggling and breathless like a pair of schoolchildren, and Zaf put an arm around her shoulders and sort of . . . leaned on her. Even though he didn’t give her half his actual weight, it felt good. So good Dani forgot she was supposed to be laughing.

  And then they were simply very close, and Zaf’s eyes were very dark, and his face was very soft and very dear.

  “You know what, Danika Brown?” he said.

  She snuggled deeper under his arm, but only because she was cold. “What?”

  “You’re all right.”

  “Just all right? What a disgraceful understatement.” But all right from Zaf felt a thousand times better than self-conscious compliments from someone else. All right from Zaf made her twinkle inside as if he’d made a night sky of her. Except people weren’t allowed to make things of Dani, so she snorted and shoved him, and everything was easy again. “I hope our online stalkers aren’t lurking somewhere, filming all this.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Zaf said cheerfully, but she didn’t miss the faint remains of wariness in his eyes. He caught her hand and hauled them both to their feet.

  It was ridiculous to feel a little flip in her stomach every time he manhandled her, but apparently, Dani was a ridiculous human being.

  “All right,” he said. “We’d better go in.” Except he didn’t move. “Am I sweating?”

  She pressed a hand to his forehead. “No.”

  “Feels like I’m sweating.”

  “Is that usually how it feels?”

  He shocked her by answering with honesty rather than a roadblock of a grunt. “Yeah. You know when you exercise in the freezing cold, and your sweat is hot but your skin is like ice, and you can almost feel the salt?”

  She nodded, pressing her lips together. There was a sorry little hollow in the space between her stomach and her ribs, and in that hollow lived a very sad gnome who was greatly displeased that Zaf struggled this way, but glad he hadn’t been alone this time.

  She hoped he wasn’t ever alone.

  “Feels like that,” he said. “And then there’s the whole lungs-clogged-with-water sensation.”

  “Oh. Delightful.”

  “And my stomach dropping out of my body like it’s made of lead.”

  “Sounds ideal.”

  Zaf nodded solemnly. “Fan-fucking-tastic. Dan?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is this your version of being supportive?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You can probably tell it doesn’t come naturally. I apologize.”

  “Don’t,” he murmured, so quiet she barely heard him over the passing traffic. “I like it.”

  Three words, and the familiar ache of not quite being enough vanished in a B-movie flash. “Oh. Really?”

  Her heart pounded in time with the rhythm of his reply. “Yeah. Really.”

  * * *

  Zaf might’ve been embarrassed about dealing with a full-blown panic attack in front of a woman he wanted to sl
eep with—if he hadn’t spent the last couple of years developing a curriculum designed to teach boys that mental health struggles didn’t make them less masculine, and that there was nothing wrong with being less masculine, anyway. So, once he pulled himself together, he felt nothing but familiar exhaustion, and the glitter of laughing with Dani, and a slight annoyance that he hadn’t brought his antianxiety meds.

  He’d handled things, though. He’d handled things well. So he’d focus on that. Or maybe on Dani, who was so pretty, he could stare at her all day.

  Until she ruined things by asking hard questions like “Should we talk about the fact that you’re nervous?”

  Zaf sighed and made himself concentrate on words instead of the fine little creases at the corners of her eyes. “I’m not nervous. It’s just, if I disgrace myself on the radio, my mother will beat me with a slipper every day for at least the next year. And I bruise like a peach.”

  She swept a laughing gaze over him. “You do look rather delicate.”

  “You have no idea.” Questions and concern successfully dodged, as always. Now they’d leave the conversation there, go inside, and never, ever discuss exactly what had triggered him, because Dani wasn’t his family or his forever, which meant she didn’t need to know.

  But she looked at him—just looked at him, with this quiet, conscious acceptance, as if to say Maybe you’re hiding the whole story, but if you need to, I’ll let you. And something about that look leaned on every last one of Zaf’s pressure points—not in a painful way, not exactly. More like a massage that hurt really fucking good.

  Maybe she wasn’t family or forever, but she was a really good friend. Beneath his memories of moments like this going pear-shaped, one undeniable fact shone like a star: Dani didn’t hurt people and she didn’t make things worse. She always—always—tried to make them better. That must be why, for the first time in a long time, he wanted to keep talking more than he wanted to shut someone down.

  He could trust her. He did trust her. He would trust her.

  “The thing is,” he said, “I’m nervous because, back when I used to play, something bad happened. One day my dad and brother were in a car crash, and they, uh, died.” He always stumbled over that part. Not because it hurt—although it really fucking did—but because it seemed so . . . small. So simple and flat and anticlimactic a phrase for something as monumental as death. You told people “they died,” and hell was folded up inside those two short words. Some people got it. Some people didn’t.

  He knew the minute he met Dani’s eyes that she did.

  “Oh,” she breathed, and caught both his hands in her own, as if she knew instinctively that once upon a time, he’d fallen apart—but if she just held him tightly enough now, the memory of it might be a little easier.

  And it was easier with her hands on him and her eyes so soft and warm. Suddenly, he had no idea why he’d worried she might react the wrong way to any part of this story. Well, yes, he did: anxiety. That was why. But still. Dani was never going to treat him like a sideshow, because she was a good person. And if she had, she wouldn’t have been a good person, so what she thought wouldn’t have mattered anyway.

  He’d never . . . he’d never quite looked at it like that.

  “I was at practice,” he said, steeling his spine because if he didn’t, he might wobble, just a little bit. “My phone was off. But it was a big crash, locally, and there were a couple of sports outlets that paid extra attention to me—I don’t know if you know, but there aren’t many Muslim rugby players. It was a, er, point of interest.” He rolled his eyes as he said the words. “Most of them were just waiting for me to fuck up. But anyway. I got more press than I technically should’ve, and when I left practice, there was a reporter waiting for me.”

  Dani’s eyes widened. “Zaf . . .”

  “He told me. He said, ‘Zafir, how do you feel about the tragic death of your father and brother?’”

  She pressed a shaking hand to her lips. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”

  “I broke his nose.” Zaf paused. “That’s what I heard, anyway. I don’t really remember.” He flashed her a smile, because telling this story shouldn’t be sad; it was already too much to bear inside his head. “I was always surprised he didn’t press charges, but—”

  “But you would’ve been well within your rights to murder him, and he probably knew it,” Dani snapped, rage flickering around her like flames, so intense he could feel the heat. He wasn’t angry anymore, had worked hard not to be, but for some reason he liked seeing that anger in her. Maybe because it was for him. She was feeling for him, and it made him hungry for more.

  Get a grip. He cleared his throat and continued. “Life went downhill from there. Everything fell apart, or maybe I ripped it apart with my bare hands. I don’t know. I was kind of going through some shit.” She laughed softly then, just like he’d wanted her to, and even more pressure slipped away. “I made some bad choices, wanted to fight the world. And for about a week, a few of those right-wing rags decided following me around was their new favorite thing. It didn’t last long—I wasn’t famous enough. But it felt like forever to me. So now, I guess, I’m a bit . . . private.” That wasn’t the full story, just a fraction of it. Because the press had left Zaf alone eventually, but grief hadn’t. Not for a long, long time. He wasn’t going to tell her about the heights his anxiety had reached, or how it turned out depression could fuel rage like nothing else, or how bleak it felt when the fire ran out and the demons were all you had left. Not right now, anyway.

  But the unexpected lightness in his chest made him think that he could. Some other time, he could.

  Which was . . . novel, to say the least.

  “I see,” Danika murmured, and he felt oddly certain that she did, at least a little bit. Her gaze was steady on his, and beneath the sadness, nothing had changed. There was no pity, no judgment ready and waiting to crush him. He was still himself, but the biggest relief was the fact that she was still Danika.

  She would always be Danika. She would always be just fucking right.

  Then she continued. “And I see what you meant, now, about your past, and not wanting to bring it into the present.”

  He shrugged, clearing his throat. “Yeah. Well, what you and me are doing, it’s, er, changing associations, according to Fatima. Which helps.”

  “Changing associations,” she repeated gently. “Interesting.”

  He arched an eyebrow, because he could practically hear her mind whirring. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  “Just . . . I understand wanting to shift the narrative. But changing it completely—is that possible, in this case? I mean, your loss, and your anxiety, they’re at the root of why you started Tackle It. Aren’t they?”

  He stared at her, unnerved by the ruthless way she drilled down into something he wasn’t always comfortable thinking about. “Well—I don’t know. Maybe. But it’s not—I’m not going to parade my family’s death like it’s part of the organizational ethos.” He realized he was sounding a little defensive, mostly because right now she reminded him of Jamal. And Kiran. And his own doubtful midnight thoughts, wondering if he was making the right decision by keeping things separate, or just the easiest one.

  “Of course not,” she replied firmly, but her eyes burned into him as if she saw things he’d rather hide. She put a hand over his chest for a moment, just the lightest touch, as if she’d needed to reach out and check his heart was still okay in there. “I was just thinking, Zaf, that . . . you’re brave. Most people, when something scars us, we hide it. When you started Tackle It, you framed a scar in gold. Don’t you think?” She waited, as if she actually thought he’d be able to respond to that.

  Sorry, no. He was too busy trying to figure out why those words unraveled the knots in his chest so easily.

  After a moment of silence, Dani shook her head and gave an embarrassed little laugh. “Sorry, that was . . . weird. Very weird.”

  “No. No, that was—” Truer tha
n I know what to do with, and I think I need a moment.

  “Inappropriate,” she supplied wryly, “and dangerously close to maudlin.” He could hear the discomfort in her voice, knew she hadn’t meant to get emotional with him. Danika didn’t get emotional with anyone, and usually, he’d lecture her about that—but right now, it didn’t seem right.

  Because Zaf was beginning to wonder if he had some shit of his own to sort through. When he’d started therapy, he’d been determined—really determined—to heal. To move on from a grief so huge that it might crush him if he couldn’t find a way to fold it up and make it safe. He would never be over Dad’s and Zain’s deaths, but fighting the darkness in his head had been like . . . like his battle cry.

  Was it possible to move on too hard? So hard you became afraid of even glancing back? He didn’t know, and standing outside a radio station while his fake girlfriend tried to pretend she was the friendly neighborhood robot didn’t seem like a good time to figure it out.

  “Anyway,” Dani was saying, “if anyone brings up your family during this interview, don’t worry. I’ll eat them.”

  That startled a smile out of him. “Good to know. Jamal pretended to be my publicist and outlined what they could and couldn’t ask. So it should be fine, but . . .”

  “But some people struggle with basic listening skills,” she finished, facing his fears head on. “Well, I can promise you this: I’ll be right beside you to misdirect whenever necessary. All right?”

  She was too fierce and too smart to doubt. The only thing he could say was “All right.” The only thing he could feel was relief.

  “And,” she went on, “I have something that might help your nerves. I mean, it always helps me when I’m nervous, so . . .” Dani’s voice trailed off as she began fiddling with the mess of leather cords she always wore around her neck. Zaf had spent way more hours than was healthy wondering what hung off those cords. His current favorite theory was that she kept every engagement ring she’d ever been given, kind of like how Russian princesses used to sew jewels into their clothes before they fled the country. He’d read about that in an older romance novel he’d found at the local library.