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“I had the same thought.” A relieved smile pulled at Kenna’s lips. “I’m going to use software to disguise your voice, and if Savas gives me trouble for it, I’ll just explain to him in private that I interviewed a faculty member.” She started a new recording but she didn’t recreate the introductory commentary. Her eyes flicked to him and then back to the desk, where her notebook lay open. Waiting. “Whenever you’re ready.”
His thoughts raced a hundred miles a minute to weave a mostly fictitious narrative with a few truthful bits thrown in to compensate for his unimaginative right brain.
“It was the end of my final year of undergrad. Same boat as you. Exam week might be rough around here, but exam week at UCLA? It’s something else entirely. I had a hysterical breakdown, to put it mildly, which led to a more severe incident than what you witnessed on the run.”
She winced.
The run. Perhaps he shouldn’t have mentioned it. He was already giving Savas and countless others information to piece together and figure out what was going on between Kenna and himself.
Nothing, yet.
Dayton had faith that would change. He’d peel back enough counterfeit layers to snag her heart.
“And following your incident?”
“I went home for the summer. That’s when I got my …” he trailed off. He would grant her one critical truth amid this fabricated tale, something not even Nathan knew about. His clothes seemed to disintegrate and he felt naked in that chair. Sweating, exposed. “It’s congenital. A block. My heart beats slower than it’s supposed to.”
Her grip tightened, ever so slightly, on the pen she held and she blinked one too many times.
He watched as Kenna tried to feign some sort of activity that indicated she went unaffected by his words but she was all shaking hands and false starts.
She was a bundle of nerves and he knew she couldn’t speak freely due to the recording that was in progress, the one that others would be privy to. Dayton supposed it was better this way, almost; telling her within the confines of a circumstance that prevented her from having a theatrical reaction to the news. And still he pictured Kenna’s reaction, unrestrained. The shouting, the weeping, the inevitable interrogating. It was the antithesis of her current form, polished and professional behind his desk, holding herself together. She would do just fine in therapy.
“You said you went home for the summer, but after that I think you cut yourself off.”
“I had surgery.” His fingers twitched as he unfastened the second and third buttons on his shirt, giving the material enough leeway for him to pull it aside and show her the two-inch scar. “For a pacemaker.”
With this revelation, her mask of neutrality slipped. It was there though it was askew. Parts of her face were hammered in cold, therapeutic apathy and the rest were awash in hurt.
Dayton wanted to grab her hand and guide it to that spot below the left side of his collarbone, to feel her fingers trace that scar like she had traced the others.
But she was across the room and they were collaborating for a finals project on campus.
He refastened the buttons and spoke before he did something worthy of getting them both thrown out of the university. “My parents, and my doctor, threatened me into surgery. They said I was being irresponsible, that I should’ve gotten one years ago.”
He had, in fact, not gone home for the surgery.
He stayed in California and his twin sister, Carmen, had overseen his brief recovery. Dayton found it repulsive how easy it was to look Kenna in the eye and distort reality and bury the lifetime of truths he’d been dying to share with someone.
“When I went back to California for grad school, it all went to hell. I use an app to monitor my PM now, but that technology wasn’t around then, so I kept a monitor in my bedroom. I lived with two other guys. It was college. I thought people would be more accepting. So I told them. Everyone on campus seemed to know within a week. People I’d never met were coming up to me, asking ignorant questions.”
It wasn’t his story but it was one he’d heard a hundred times from the lips of his patients. Victims of Ponderosa’s rumor mill. They were a special breed who came around with the sole intent of burdening another with their plight, and they’d leave, never to be seen again, as if his office were a confessional. People who didn’t truly want help but didn’t mind flirting with the idea of it.
What he was doing with Kenna was hardly any different. He knew there was no future in store for them and yet he continued in his attempts to win her over, spinning a sob story with the hope of evoking enough empathy to spend one night with her in his arms.
One night, and Dayton could let her go.He could.
“It seems childish, discussing it so many years later. You have to understand, I thought I’d gained a newfound freedom when I moved to California. No one knew who I was. No one knew what was wrong with me. On the outside, I was just like anyone else. Then suddenly, overnight, I’m reliving my adolescence.”
Kenna maintained a death grip on her pen but it never met the blank pages of her notebook. Dayton became hyperconscious of that pen and her lack of notes. Was there not a faraway look on his face?
Nostalgia was difficult to conjure on the spot.
The bullying narrative wasn’t enough. He needed something grander, and above all else believable, something that would appeal to Kenna’s sensibilities.
“Something strange happened during that swell of attention. This girl, Audrey Dresden, started talking to me. I’ll admit, I had my eye on her for years. But it didn’t end there. A ton of her sorority sisters were flirting with me, constantly. I didn’t date much in college, so the whole ordeal made me uncomfortable.”
“And did you and Audrey date?”
