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More stupid thoughts because it doesn’t matter if Dane is dating anyone. He won’t be datingmebecause he’s probably not interested, potentially a murderer, most definitely coercive, and if that weren’t enough, we have nothing in common. The books on the shelves and the art on the walls tell me Dane is a hell of a lot more highbrow than me. I like to pour vodka into a slurpee and get plastered watchingRick and Mortywith Jude.
Now that I’ve decided we will never date and he probably won’t kill me, I feel a lot more relaxed. Enough to set my empty plate down and start poking around.
“Have you read all these?” I trail my finger down the spines of his books.
Touching his stuff makes Dane uncomfortable. He watches me everywhere I move.
I like his eyes on me, even while I can barely stand it.
“Every one,” he says stiffly.
When I was his patient, he was in complete control. He’s not quite so certain how to deal with me as an unwanted guest in his living room.
This is the first time I’ve had anything like an upper hand, and I can’t help dragging this out a little just like Dane did outside the iron gate. It might have something to do with the shot in the arm he gave me, which makes this all the more his fault—I’m floating on a wave of wicked glee with zero sense of consequences. I can’t even feel my injured leg beneath me.
He’s got a lot of odd books on his shelf—stuff that looks mystical and occult right alongside the nonfiction.
“Are these your old textbooks?” I pull a tattered, leather-bound copy ofGray’s Anatomyoff the shelf.
“No.” Dane narrowly resists snatching it out of my hands. “That’s a first edition from 1858, and it’s worth about sixteen grand, so unless you want to be scrubbing my toilets until the end of time—“
“Thank god.” I laugh. “I was afraid that’s what they were handing out back when you were in college.”
“I’m not that old.” His mouth quirks up, though his expression has saddened. “Though, fuck, sometimes I feel like it.”
“Me too,” I say with too much honesty.
We stare at each other a long moment.
Dane seems like he’s looking at me for the first time, really looking at me, as a person, not an obstacle. And I do the same back to him—I stop ogling his body through his clothes and fucking with his stuff and really look into his face, feeling that moment of connection where an emotion is the same, even if all the circumstances are different.
“What’s the deal with your brother?” he asks abruptly. “Why are you his keeper?”
The moment is broken. I look away, flustered. “Because our parents died.”
Dane doesn’t ask the next obvious question,How did they die?,and for that I’m grateful because I loathe the way acquaintances will casually ask me to relive the worst night of my life.
Most people can’t resist their curiosity.
If Dane really had a wife who died, I’d guess he isn’t asking ‘cause that’s the exact question he hates pointed at himself.
Instead, he says, “How old was your brother?”
“Ten. But he looked about six.” I smile, remembering how small and slight Jude was, how huge his dark eyes were in his tiny, pointed face. “He was such a sweetheart as a kid. He used to lie at the foot of my bed for hours while I was studying. He’d draw or read or write in his journal, but never do his own schoolwork.”
Dane snorts. “Sounds like my brother. Just the last part—not any of the nice stuff.”
“You have a brother?”
It’s good to know Dane has family members still breathing.
“He owns the Monarch in Grimstone. He took that in the inheritance, and I took the house.”
“Who got the better deal?”
“We both got what we wanted. Or so we thought at the time.”
The Monarch is the beautiful old hotel on Main Street, the only one actually inside the town itself. Its competitor is the hideously opulent Onyx resort built on the opposite end of the beach, loathed by the original residents but possible salvation for me in the way it should skyrocket my property value. Dane’s, too, though it sounds like he doesn’t need it.
