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Dane stepped closer to me. Close enough that I could smell his soap and detergent and the faint tang of clean sweat. He tipped my chin up so I was looking right at him.
His eyes were tormented and he looked so tired.
“I fight with myself all the time,” he said. “Constantly. I don’t wanna fight with you.”
“Oh, I…”
Standing there, looking up at him, looking into his tempestuous eyes, his broad shoulders dwarfing me, I realized something about Dane that should have been obvious to me all along.
Dane Hughes was not fine.
He wasn’t fine at all.
I’d made precisely the mistake about Dane that Sofia had made about me.
Since we first met, I’d been so caught up comparing myself to him and finding myself wanting—how strong he was, how impervious, how impressive—that I hadn’t seen what was right in front of me: he was a mess too.
“You’re not okay,” I said, the revelation leaking out audibly. “I messed up the other day because I felt fucked up and I wanted to spend time with you because you always make me feel better. And I missed the part where you’re completely fucked up too. You just do it in, like, a workaholic, Atlas, push-ups way so people don’t notice. Right?”
Dane blinked at me, and for a second I thought he’d laugh at how absurd I was. Maybe he’d counter, explaining that he was an adult who owned his own business and helped countless others and had famous friends and could bench-press nine million pounds, thank you very much. But then he dropped his chin and shook his head.
“I’m not,” he said, voice sandpaper and smoke. “Not fine.”
I stepped into his space and hugged him, pressing myself as close as I could. His arms came around me and he was big and warm, and I felt like I took a deeper breath than I had in days. He ran tentative fingers through my hair. I hated that he was tentative.
“Fuck, I missed holding you,” he said.
I nodded emphatically and pressed closer, determined to hold him just as hard as he was holding me.
“Do you wanna maybe be not fine together for a bit and talk?” I asked, voice muffled against him.
His low Okay rumbled through his chest so that I felt it before I heard it. We separated reluctantly and sat on the couch. I didn’t really know where to start.
“I went to Baltimore to see Sofia,” I said. “I told her about how bad I’ve been feeling, like you suggested. And it helped, I think, even though she said some shit that hurt.”
“What did she say that hurt you?” Dane asked, instantly bristling.
Dane. Always ready to help, protect, defend. Especially when it distracted from himself. Maybe we weren’t so very different after all.
“I’ll tell you later. But it kinda made me think maybe it’d be good to tell you? How I feel?”
No one had ever watched me more intently.
“I’m scared, though.”
Dane sucked in a deep breath through his nose and when he spoke, it was like the words came from his very depths.
“Please. Please, Felix. Give me another chance.”
I blinked up at him.
“I…Yeah, I…Okay, let’s talk. I mean, I’ll tell you. God, sorry, I’m so nervous.”
My tongue felt like an unruly thing and I was sweating. He reached out and took my hand, which helped a little.
“Okay, here goes. Shit. I really care about you,” I said. “And I don’t wanna scare you away, or seem…I don’t know, too much. But I want you. Like, all the time. This—” I gestured between us. “I know we haven’t known each other that long, but it feels real to me. Like maybe it could be…a thing.”
I infused thing with as much gravitas as I could, since I couldn’t quite make myself use any of the real words for what I wanted.
“A thing,” Dane echoed.
“Um. A…” Relationship? It already was a relationship. “Partnership?” I tried. It was what I meant, but it sounded bloodless, somehow. Less romantic than what I wanted. “I don’t know. A thing, Dane! A real thing! You know what I mean!”
“I do. It is,” he said quickly. “A real thing. For me, anyway. But I’m…”
He ran a thick finger over the rip in the knee of my jeans. I could just feel it when his fingertip grazed the bit of exposed skin. When he spoke next, it was so soft, and so afraid.
“I’m scared I’ll hurt you. That it won’t work and then I’ll be…worse off than I was before.”
“How do you think you’ll hurt me?”
He shrugged, but it seemed more like reluctance than uncertainty.
“Like I did the other day.”
“By leaving? By not fighting?”
He nodded. “By being…the way I get.”
“Frozen?”
His eyes flew to mine.
“That how it seems?”
I nodded.
His eyes went distant, like he was considering that deeply.
“Not how it feels.”
“How does it feel?”
