by Roan Parrish
Dane’s eyes burned into mine, and I let mine burn back at him, hoping he could feel how much I loved him as well as hear it.
“Oh.” His voice came out shaky.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and hugged him tight.
“I love you,” I said.
“Love you. Love you,” Dane said against my hair. “Sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight.”
“Nothing’s wrong with you. I like when you’re in jealous love mode.”
“Uh. Jealous love mode?”
“Yeah, like, when you get kinda irritated if I’m too far away on the couch so you, like, drag me onto your lap. Or when we’re walking and I go to hold your hand and you put your arm around my shoulders instead, ’cuz it’s not close enough.”
Dane gaped at me, and I realized with a shock that he wasn’t aware he did any of that.
“Sometimes,” I went on, “you reach over and pull the elastic out of my hair so you can touch it, or you tug on my ponytail so I’ll take it down.”
“I…I do?” He slid his fingers into my hair. I loved when he touched it.
“My favorite, though,” I said, pressing closer to him, “is when you’re inside me, and you try to pull me down farther onto your cock. Like you can’t stand not being able to crawl all the way inside me. You make this little frustrated sound and I can feel you so deep.”
Dane shuddered.
“Jesus Christ, Felix.”
I pressed my lips to his neck.
“Maybe you can show me later.”
He nodded.
“Whatever you want, sweetheart.”
A soft little body squeezed its way between us and started working its paws on Dane’s muscular thigh. I slid off his lap and put the remaining tuna in the fridge. Then I put a little bowl of water on the floor.
“Maybe she’ll curl up with us if we sit on the couch?” I suggested.
The cat had begun a slow, inquisitive exploration of the apartment, though, sniffing delicately in every corner and jumping effortlessly to the tops of all the furniture. I trailed after her and Dane trailed after me.
“Maybe not the bed—” Dane began to say. But she jumped on the bed and burrowed under the covers. I moaned from the cuteness and poked at the lump of her to make her grab my fingers through the blankets. Dane sighed but didn’t stop me.
Eventually, when she’d explored every nook and cranny she could find, we sat down on the couch and I called to her and made kissy noises to lure her into my lap. I couldn’t think of anything better than Dane holding me and me holding the kitten. But just as that fantasy seemed like it might come true, she stalked right past me and jumped onto Dane’s lap instead.
“Damn, that’s harsh, Skellie,” I said. She let me stroke her head with two fingers for about ten seconds, then curled into a tiny ball on Dane’s thigh and buried her head under her tail. “Awww, she loves you,” I said, half jealous and half elated. “She doesn’t even care that I exist.”
“But…why?”
“Why does she love you?” I grinned and shrugged. “No mystery to me.”
It was cheesy and ridiculous, and Dane smiled at me so big it made my heart flutter.
All evening, I tried to woo Skeleton, and all evening she allowed me to pet her but always ran back to Dane. Finally, I gave up.
“Well, she’s made her allegiance clear. She doesn’t wanna live with me. She obviously wants to live with you.”
“What? No.”
“Why not? You like animals and you never told me why you don’t have one.”
“I…I can’t adopt her. I’m trying to stop needing to take care of people. My sponsees and…and…”
Affection and exasperation warred.
“Dane, you don’t take care of a cat. It lets you live with it. Besides, it’s not the same thing at all. You get something from having a pet. You get to love them, and you get affection from them. It’s nourishing, not draining.”
He stroked my hair with one hand and Skeleton with the other.
“You don’t have to adopt her if you don’t want her, of course. But…do you?”
Because even though Dane had been skittish with Skellie all night, I thought maybe he’d enjoy being able to transfer some of his attention to her. Getting to pay attention to when she got fed instead of his own routines. Maybe petting her would relax him the way touching me seemed to. Maybe he’d sleep better after chasing a kitten around his apartment for a few hours.
Maybe he’d smile more.
“Maybe…maybe she could stay…for a little while. Just to see.”
“Okay,” I said gently, not wanting to pressure him. “We’ll just see.”
I wound my arms around Dane’s neck and kissed him. I poured every bit of love into the kiss that I could. Dane ran a hand up and down my back and I let arousal creep in at the press of his hips against mine.
“Should Halloween sex be in costume?” I asked, breathless and winking as kissing turned to touching.
“What would you wanna be?”
I looked up at him and let him see everything I wanted.
“I want to be…yours. Your partner.”
My heart beat for him, and I pressed a hand to Dane’s chest so I could feel his beating too. He cupped my face in his hand.
“Then we’re already in costume,” he said.
I kissed him deep and sweet, and we sank into each other with abandon.
Epilogue
SIX MONTHS LATER
Felix
I woke up to a wall of rippling muscles blotting out my vision. When I blinked, it resolved itself into Dane’s glorious torso as he leaned over to kiss me good morning.
“What’s on…?”
I started giggling. Dane had written Happy Birthday on his stomach, where once he’d written his affirmations. But he was so used to writing them so that he could see them in the mirror that he’d written it backward.
“Told you I wouldn’t forget, sweetheart,” he said, and kissed me again, gathering me in his strong arms and giving me a very happy birthday greeting indeed.
After I’d come, still shivering from the intensity of pleasure that he brought me every time we were together, I tucked my head in the crook of his neck and let myself drift, relaxed and satisfied.
The last few months had been the most difficult and the most wonderful of my life.
In the weeks after Dane apologized to Rachel, he had begun to let go of some of the guilt he’d been carrying all these years.
At first he’d been nearly euphoric with the freedom of stripping it away. But then, the grief hit. The guilt had been a bandage keeping it in place and when he ripped it off, sadness for all the time he lost began to weep out.
One morning I woke in the predawn moonlight to a sound in the living room. I found Dane sitting on the floor with his notebooks all around him, filled to every margin with his cramped scrawl, years and years of midnight scrivening.
“This is what I did,” he choked out when I sat beside him. “This is what I did instead of…of having a fucking life. I copied a dead man’s words like some kind of p-pathetic machine.”
He tore one of the notebooks in half with his bare hands, cover and all, the scribbled pages drifting down like grim confetti. I let him rage through those pages, but I took the other notebooks away before he could destroy them. There were twenty-four. The next day I found a box frame and I arranged the notebooks in it, in six rows of four notebooks each, and I hung it on the wall next to the bookshelves as a reminder of how quickly something that took up so much space in the past could become just another piece of decor for the future.
Sometimes I caught Dane staring at it, like he was trying to reconcile the man who had written in the notebooks with the man he w
as now. But when I asked if he wanted to take it down, he said he didn’t.
Little by little, the grief was passing. Dane smiled more—spontaneous smiles of happiness, not just smiles that answered mine. He talked more, too. Over our first few months together, his monosyllabic answers to questions had turned into halting confessions. Now, though—now that he truly believed I wanted to hear whatever he was thinking, wanted to hear his fears and desires as well as the facts he learned from podcasts, he loved to talk to me. He described the process of making fabric dyes from roots and the history of wicker. He told me things he saw during his day that reminded him of me. He mused.
He loved to listen, too, and sometimes he’d hold me on the couch and stroke my hair, wanting me to just talk. He had the same amazing capacity to take in information about me as he did information from what he read and listened to, and sometimes he shocked me by remembering random tidbits I didn’t even remember saying in the course of the rambling narrations he encouraged.
We spent a lot of time together. Usually at Dane’s, but occasionally at my apartment. Although it had been our home for years, with Sof gone, it mostly just felt unfamiliar. Lonely.
I’d been glad when she got back last month. The tour had gone incredibly well and Riven invited her to join the band officially. It was only a matter of time until she and Coco went public. They were ridiculously in love. It wasn’t anything like the life I thought she’d have or the one I wanted, but she was happy and I was happy for her.
Dane had let Johi take the wheel with the bar and she proved to be just as awesome as I’d known she would be. In addition to karaoke night she added theme nights, drink specials, and online advertising. She also refined Dane’s vague ideas into a vibe that felt welcoming enough for people who weren’t drinking to hang out there. She added a board game night and—much to Dane’s delight, though he wouldn’t admit it—a Quizzo night.
One night a few weeks before, Dane had put up a trivia question on the drinks board, which said that anyone who got the answer right got a free drink. After Johi explained to him that he was an idiot and people were just looking up the answer on their phones, she proclaimed they’d just do a whole trivia night instead. Yeah, okay, I might’ve tipped her off about that one.
I had a bet with Caleb and Theo and Johi going about how long it would take before Dane insisted on writing all the questions and running Quizzo night himself.
At Dane’s behest, they began opening later and making the space available for groups earlier in the day—AA and NA meetings, but also meet-up groups, like knitting and craft groups, book clubs, and other activities. They were the kind of thing, he said, that he’d wished he’d found his way to when he was recovering.
Dane had also made the difficult shift away from attending as many meetings and working with as many sponsees as he had before.
I knew he still felt guilty at times that he couldn’t carry that mantle forever. But Caleb gave him a very stern lecture last month about embracing the things that nurtured him and distancing himself from those that were harmful that I had a sneaking suspicion might’ve been one right out of Dane’s own playbook.
This had happened when we were all staying at Matt and Rhys’s house in Sleepy Hollow for the weekend, and Matt had listened carefully to the whole conversation. Finally, when Dane was glowering in stony silence that I knew meant he thought Caleb was right but couldn’t quite admit it yet, Matt spoke up. He told Dane that the best way to help people was to educate them. That if he was only one person helping, all his expertise stayed with him, but if he passed his knowledge on to others, then all those people could go out and help.
Dane wasn’t used to making choices based on what would make him feel happy and safe. But when Matt phrased it as doing more good than he could on his own, it finally got through to him. So he began working with two of his former sponsees who were interested in doing the kind of work he had done. One wanted to be a rehab counselor and the other wanted to be a social worker, and I tried to impress on Dane that he’d essentially been unofficially doing the work of entire professions in his spare time. But he waved it off. He couldn’t ever quite acknowledge all that he’d done.
The other thing that had changed was how Dane felt about Skeleton. It had only taken about a week—okay, maybe a month—for me to get over the fact that the tiny kitten we found on Halloween adored Dane with a kind of pack mentality love that did not extend to me. Because watching him fall in love with her was the sweetest thing I’d ever seen.
After I’d taken her to the vet and confirmed that she wasn’t crawling with disease—Dane’s words—I brought her home and the second we crossed the threshold, she leapt out of the box and climbed Dane like a tree, bumping her little head against his neck as he stood there, frozen and wide-eyed.
“She’s not rabid, she doesn’t have any bugs on or in her, and she got all her shots,” I said. Dane tilted his head to touch hers, very gently, and reached his fingers to her fur, and I saw him melt before my eyes when she stuck out her tongue and licked his thumb.
Ever since then, there was no further discussion about whether Skeleton’s home was temporary. She followed Dane around the apartment like she was his guardian, and when he petted her she purred in ecstasy. He tried to be stern about not letting her on the kitchen counters or the table, but she’d look at him with such resentment that he couldn’t stand it, giving her the run of the place approximately forty-eight hours after she moved in.
He tried to grumble and complain when she did things like curl up directly on top of him or use the side of the couch to sharpen her claws, but it was so clear he didn’t actually care that I hardly knew why he bothered. He was totally smitten with her, and I’d even caught him talking to her when he thought I couldn’t hear.
Watching him fall in love with her made me fall in love with him all over again.
* * *
—
Maybe it was seeing Dane shift all that purpose and energy from distracting himself to making something that inspired me. Or maybe it was seeing the way he ruthlessly dug through his life to figure out which things were nurturing him and which were harming him. Maybe it was seeing him take such care of Skeleton. Maybe all of the above. Either way, over the past few months I hadn’t been able to stop working on dioramas. I could hardly even call them dioramas at this point, because they broke the bounds of their boxes and trailed around the house.
Dane called them art. I called them messing around. But mostly because I wasn’t sure what they were or what I was doing.
Because slowly what had begun as exhibits about Countess Báthory and the biology of carnivorous plants became more personal. History turned to story and I thought about all the different ways to narrate a life.
I made one for Sofia that showed her journey to Riven through different songs that had been important to her through the years. I made one for my mom about our street in New Brunswick via the stray dogs and cats that had appeared at different times in my childhood.
I wasn’t sure what I was making, no. But I loved the way it felt. The drive to slice open a life or a topic at different nodes and spread them out for others to see.
It was the satisfaction it gave me to break things apart and see how to think about them differently that had finally driven me back to the museum three months ago, just before closing, looking for Sue.
“Felix!” she said when she saw me. “Hey, kiddo. How’s everything?”
“Take me on your rounds and I’ll tell you?” I offered.
We walked through the dim, hushed museum and I filled her in on my life. She told me about her wife and how much she appreciated that Dane had given her niece a job at the bar.
“So, question,” I said, nervous that if the answer was no, I didn’t know what the next step would be. “I, uh. It’s basically my dream to make exhibits for a museum,
like these. Well,” I revised. We were in the Birds of New York exhibit that always upset me a little bit. “Not exactly like these. But yeah. So I know they’re like impossible jobs to get.”
I’d spent the time since my Halloween pledge to quit Buggy’s looking online for any jobs in the museum business and found nothing. First I’d gotten discouraged, then resigned, then I’d decided to come here and talk with Sue when I caught Dane running reverent fingers over my dioramas.
I went on, “And probably no one wants some random person who doesn’t even have a college degree in…whatever you’d get a degree in to make museum exhibits. But you’re the only lead I have, and I would start out doing anything, really. So I guess I was wondering if you have any…influence? Knowledge? Information? Ugh, I don’t know.”
I slumped against the glass case, birds of New York silently judging me through cotton-stuffed eyes. Sue swatted me away from the glass irritably. She stared at me too, eyes narrowed a little.
“You figured it out, then, huh?”
I nodded.
“Yeah. Probably can’t happen, but at least I know what I want. That’s good. Right?”
“Absolutely. I don’t have any influence over who gets hired, but I know a lot of people here. Been here a while. Let me see if I can poke around. Gather any intel. Okay?”
I threw my arms around her and she patted my back awkwardly.
Two weeks later, she texted and told me to come to the museum. She wouldn’t say anything except where to meet her. I bit my lip and didn’t tell Dane where I was going. I didn’t want to get either of our hopes up.
I was nearly bouncing up and down when I met Sue, and she gave me a firm pat on the back and told me not to embarrass her. We walked through a door to a private corridor of the museum that held offices. She knocked on a door, pushed it open, and introduced me to a woman named Ann. Then she winked at me and went outside.
Ann was in charge of coordinating programming with schools that brought students on field trips, much like the one I’d taken all those years ago in New Brunswick.
