He exhaled, then turned slowly to prop himself up on his elbow.
“It’s just sports. And it’s more the competing sounds of multiple games going. I’m fine watching one game or evenbeingat a game. It’s just all of them, all at once…usually, I can handle it, but sometimes, I…freeze up.” He laughed, hollow and forced. He was trying so hard to make light of it. “It’s not a part of me I want to showcase with a woman I’m trying to impress.”
“Oh, sweetie.” She let her finger trail through his hair, smiling when he leaned into it like an animal. “I think the ship sailed on that when you proposed to me on a street corner by confessing that you were deeply in debt.”
He laughed, a real one, deep and musical. The perfect sound.
“Why sports?” she asked. She didn’t want to pry, but she needed to understand.
He sighed. “It’s not a big deal, but my dad was a gambling addict. Sports betting, mostly.” His hand drifted to the bridge of his nose, bumping his glasses up as he pinched. “The more games he had playing, the worse things were going.”
She nodded, her heart aching at the sad sort of sense it all made. How he’d been so unaffected by a TV playingAntiques Roadshowat the VFW. How stiff he’d been when they’d entered the Shell Station but somehow knew exactly how to handle a bookie.
“I made you gamble,” she remembered, her body wincing in regret.
He sat up quickly, his hand now in her hair. “It was fine. I’m fine. See, this is why I didn’t want to say anything. I don’t want you to worry about this kind of stuff when it’s not even a big deal. I’m incredibly well-adjusted, considering.”
She wasn’t sure well-adjusted people announced themselves like that. She reevaluated everywhere she’d taken him with this new information, along with every “them” and “us” spot in town. Then, something truly unfortunate happened: she laughed.
It was a short shock of a laugh, but her hand hadn’t been fast enough to trap it in her mouth. His eyes stared at her, puzzled, and she wanted nothing more than to suck the sound back into her throat like a fettuccine noodle.
“I’m so sorry. I don’t find this funny at all.” She really did try her best to contain it.
“Oh yeah?” he asked, daring her.
“It’s just…” She pulled her hand from her mouth, letting it all loose. “You really moved to the worst possible place. Every bar here has at least three TVs. It’s practically in the state constitution. How have you avoided it this long?”
He shrugged. “You don’t drink.”
“So? Other people do.”
His hand trailed down her spine and snaked around her waist. He looked her square in the eye when he said, “I haven’t cared about other people since the day I met you.”
When he said things like that to her, she could hardly stand it. Who said things like that? Who meant them? That and the way he looked at her, like he wanted to belong to her, in a real way. Not some temporary transactional arrangement. Somethingreal. It made her want to be the type of person who could belong to someone, too.
“I haven’t cared about anyone else either,” she said back in a hush. “Not the way I care about you.”
He pulled her closer to him on the bed. “Yeah?” he asked. His face was so sweet and cautious, as though she was saying something too big for him to believe and not simply what he’d said to her mere seconds ago.
She nodded. “I like the way you care for people. You’re dependable and honest. Those things matter to me.”
“Those things matter to me, too,” he said, swallowing thickly. “My dad wasn’t really either of those things. He wanted to be ‘impressive.’ He would make all of these big promises to me and my brother. My brother would hang on every word. Our dad was a god to him. He believed everything that man said and was always devastated when it didn’t happen. It was better to expect the worst. Then I’d never be sad.”
So instead, you werealwayssad, she thought. But who was she to dispense life advice? “That’s why you don’t like taking risks or hoping for things. Because you think it’s easier to believe it won’t work out.”
“Disappointment is just unmet expectations,” he recited, as though reading from a picture book titledNihilism for Children. She imagined the cover would feature Eeyore or possibly the pulped stump fromThe Giving Tree.
“And what is hope if not our most unreasonable expectations?” he added, his head tilting to the side as if too heavy to hold up. “It wasn’t all bad. Sometimes he’d take us into the city to place bets, and we’d get a hot dog from a cart and do free stuff, like go to the Met or walk through a park or—my favorite—look at the architecture. Then he’d leave us in the carto meet with…” He trailed off, processing his own story. “Wait. This isn’t a happy memory, is it?”
She stared at him for a moment, unsure of what to say. “You mean, when your dad would leave you in the car to meet his bookie in the city? No, I don’t think so,” she replied, tryingveryhard not to giggle again at the dark absurdity of his sentence.
“I wrote my college admission paper on that.”
She inhaled a snort. “If it worked, I suspect it was for the wrong reasons.”
He burst out laughing, giving her permission to laugh, too. It was more the sad, cathartic kind than joyful, but sometimes those felt good.
A knock at the door broke up their morbid fit of giggles. “Room service,” a low voice announced.
