by Frankie Rose
“That was your brother?”
Daniel’s eyes were on fire. The sun, a burnished golden ruin in the sky, was just beginning to dip below the crooked rooftops that were dotted with smashed chimney pots, casting a cold, unfriendly light across the street. It had a dying quality to it, and framed Daniel with a silvery halo that made him look like some kind of destroying angel. He glared at me as though I’d just asked him if he was a serial killer, and then clenched down on his jaw. “Yeah. That was my little brother.”
I gawped at him, entirely lost for words. When he refused to meet my eye, I cleared my throat and looked up at the heavens, praying for some kind of divine intervention to help deal with the situation. Daniel, with all his complexities and horrific past, should have come with a handbook. I was nowhere near prepared to handle comforting him, especially when he didn’t seem to want comforting. He scowled down at his shoes, which were polished to within an inch of their lives. He looked just about as pale as I had ever seen him. In fact, he looked like he might throw up.
“Do you want to follow him?” I nervously twisted the handkerchief that I’d found in a tiny pocket of my dress. My initials were stitched into the corner.
He looked at me as if I were mad. “No, of course I don’t want to follow him.”
“I just thought, since we were here…”
“He’s gone now, anyway.”
I craned my neck to peer over the milling people in the street, gentlemen and ladies walking arm in arm down the long boulevard, heads down against the light rain. “I can still see him.”
“Just leave it, okay?”
I turned back to catch the look on Daniel’s face; his eyes were pained, shining slightly, and his brow was creased. The devastated look on his face said a lot, like he couldn’t bear me studying him the way I was.
“I don’t understand.”
“You don’t have to.” There was a finality in his tone that made me look down at my hands, gathered over my full skirts. They were still throbbing. I wanted more than anything to put them in my pockets, but I’d already searched the dress and found it decidedly lacking in hand-sized pockets.
What made him bring me here with him? What could he possibly have thought was going to happen? He came here to see Jamie, knowing what it would do to him, knowing that it would tear him down to the bone, and he had brought me along for the ride anyway. Surely he knew I wasn’t heartless, that I would want to make him feel better somehow, and yet he seemed determined to be as cold and distant as possible. Something tired and brittle snapped inside me.
“Okay. So you don’t want to go after your dead brother.”
Daniel looked up as though I’d slapped him. He narrowed his eyes. “No.”
“Okay. So what do you want to do?”
He took a deep breath, looking up and down the street. He seemed to be attempting to pull himself together. “I want to do something I haven’t done in a long, long time.”
“Laugh? Take a bath? Tell the truth?”
He gave me a sour look. They were lame remarks, I knew. Daniel laughed occasionally, though admittedly it was usually at my expense. And he always smelled amazing, some combination of limes and smoke, a scent entirely unique to him. Maybe there was something in the truth thing, though. Who knew when he was telling the truth.
I was curious what he wanted to do, regardless. I quirked an eyebrow at him. “Come on, then,” I demanded. “What is it?”
He hesitated, fiddling with his cane, then locked me in a look so inescapable it made me break out in a nervous sweat. His whole demeanor changed in a heartbeat. The suggestion of a wicked smile pulled at the corner of his mouth. “Can you dance?”
