Chapter 8
Ava
“I don’t know,” I said, sipping my margarita. “I wasn’t paying much attention. But I thought Rey should have had hot sex with that Kylo Ren guy.”
Dane put his head in his hands, cradling his forehead. “Ava.”
“What? I like tall, skinny men.”
“Do you even know the plot of any of the Star Wars movies? Name one.”
I frowned at him. We were sitting in a bar downtown, a two-level place full of pool tables and TV screens. It was early, barely dinnertime, and the place wasn’t packed yet. Dane and I sat at the corner of the near-empty bar, him with a pint of dark, bitter beer, me with my fancy drink.
“I don’t need to know the plot,” I said. “I know a hot guy when I see one.”
This was my favorite game with Dane—or it used to be. You could call it Bait the Nerd. The rules were that I would say something absurd about a nerdy thing Dane cared about, and Dane would get mad. Over the years, I’d become a master at it.
Who’s the guy with the dark glasses and the lasers coming out of his eyes? What’s his deal, anyway?
How does Batman pee in that suit?
Why doesn’t Black Widow have superpowers like the rest of them? Is it because she’s a girl?
Do you think Captain America is a virgin?
Why is Wolverine so hung up on that Jean Grey chick? She isn’t even hot.
Made. Him. Crazy. Hence, Bait the Nerd.
I actually didn’t mind most of Dane’s nerdy stuff, and I paid more attention than I let on. But it was too much fun to drive him nuts, so I never admitted the truth.
“The whole movie should have been about Carrie Fisher,” I said, taking another sip and watching Dane’s face. “Actually, all of the movies should have been about her. I mean, what the fuck.”
“You’re making me day drink,” Dane said, lifting his head and sipping deeply on his beer.
“Good,” I said. “I like drunk Dane.”
“He doesn’t come out very often.” Dane drank again.
“Tell me what you’ve been reading.”
He did, and I knew some of it. I told him some of my favorite books—I didn’t read as much as Dane did, and a lot of what I read was romance, but reading was one of my favorite pastimes, especially on my phone during a boring day on set. Dane didn’t judge, and he asked me questions. We talked about TV, though neither of us watched much of it. We drank, and he made me laugh.
After the gut-wrenching way we’d had it out earlier, it was a relief. I felt the muscles between my shoulder blades loosen, my turning stomach ease. And at the same time, I couldn’t deny the other thing I was feeling: butterflies. Deep in my stomach, down between my legs, even while we talked about Game of Thrones.
It wasn’t a date, because Dane and I had too much history to be on a date. And we weren’t friends. If Dane was my friend, I wouldn’t be picturing him in his boxer briefs as we talked. I wouldn’t be wondering if he was different in bed now, slower maybe, more experienced, less frantic. I wouldn’t be asking myself if all that new muscle made him heavier, if it made his weight different, the way he moved different. My mouth was dry just thinking about it, so I took another drink.
“What?” Dane said when I was too quiet. “What is it?”
I swallowed. The margarita was going to my head, making me feel pleasantly fuzzy. And turned on. “All these changes,” I said, motioning to him, up and down. “They’re hot.”
Dane’s dark eyes looked briefly surprised, and then he looked away. The bar was dark and he had a beard on his cheeks, but I thought he might be blushing. “That wasn’t what I was going for,” he said.
“Really?” I said in disbelief. “Paying for laser surgery? Doing, I assume, months of workouts? You weren’t trying to get hot?”
“Not specifically.” He frowned. “I just wanted to change. Be less me. Or maybe more me. I didn’t really analyze it.” He looked at me, his gaze frank. “You’ve always been hot, even before you were blonde. Though you didn’t need to lose the weight.”
My spine straightened. “Are you passing judgment on my weight, Dane Scotland?”
“No, ma’am,” he said instantly. “It’s just an observation. You’re hot either way.”
That gave me tingles, which was bad, so I said, “I work in the fashion industry in New York. I assure you I definitely needed to lose the weight. And I need to lose more.” I took a deep sip of my margarita.
“Why? You’re behind the camera, not in front of it.”
“You sweet, innocent baby,” I said. “Everyone in the business needs to look good, no exceptions. In exchange for the body image issues, I get clothes.” I motioned to my leopard-print dress.
“It’s very nice,” Dane said.
“Nice? It’s eight hundred dollars nice, though I didn’t pay anything close to that. And these.” I flexed my leg out, showing him my black high heel—and, incidentally, my bare calf, which I thought looked pretty sexy now that I’d had a margarita. “You have no idea who designed these shoes, do you?”
Dane frowned. “If you think I do, then you haven’t been paying attention.”
I sighed theatrically. “No wonder you need me, Dane. You may be hot, but you don’t know how to dress.”
“What’s complicated about it?” He sipped his beer. “You find clothes that fit, you put them on. Clothes keep you warm and keep you from being naked. That’s it.”
I was about to argue, and then I felt my jaw drop. I realized what he was doing: playing Bait the Fashionista, his response to Bait the Nerd. I could tell by the tiny quirk of a smile at the corner of his mouth, the bastard. “For that, you owe me another margarita,” I said, sliding my empty glass over the bar. “I’d like to get tipsy.”
“Why?” he asked, motioning to the bartender. Drinking hadn’t been my thing when I was a teenager—I’d been more of a square, but I’d changed. I didn’t know a single person in New York who didn’t drink like a fish.
“Because my bank account is empty and my life is held together by glue and Scotch tape,” I said, realizing as the words came out that the first margarita had hit me hard. “And I’m dressing my ex in the same city as my shitty childhood, the place where my mother still lives.”
Dane got a cautious look on his face as he slid my drink toward me. He knew everything about my background, my life, the childhood that Aidan and I had. “Are we going to talk about your mother?” he asked.
“No, we’re not.” I took a deep sip, letting the icy alcohol hit my veins. Aidan and I had grown up fatherless with a single mother. She said she left our father because he hit her, but I always wondered if that was a lie. God knew my mother lied about enough things, big and small.
Some people should never be a parent, and my mother was one of them. We were in her way; we were a headache who took up her time and cost her money. She had no time for us, no patience. Aidan had let it roll off him somehow, but I never could. I spent my childhood trying to please my mother, hoping to win the affection and love she couldn’t give. I tried, and I tried, and I tried. It never worked.
When Aidan moved out and I spent more time with the boys, my mother never asked where I was. She never asked if I was safe or happy. When I finally moved out too, she was so relieved she didn’t bother to hide it. You’ll be fine, she said, her only words of wisdom. The underlying message was clear: If you’re not fine, I don’t want to hear about it.
A few years ago, our mother started losing her memory and becoming confused. The degeneration was rapid, so fast that she now lived under 24-hour care in an excellent home, with Aidan paying the bills. Instead of getting the chance to come to terms with my mother, or even reconcile with her, I now had a mother who was quickly forgetting about me altogether.
Dane knew all of this. He’d been with me for every minute of it since I was eleven. It was both comforting and disconcerting, sitting with someone who knew so much about me. I’d gone to New York to reinvent myself, become a new person. A person who never talked about her increasingly ill mother. I didn’t talk about her now, but it was because I didn’t need to.
“I guess you know everything,” I said to him, looking at the line of his jaw beneath his beard.
“I do.” He sipped his beer, which was still his first drink. “I thought we weren’t talking about it.”
“We aren’t. Where are your parents now?”
“Divorced,” Dane said. “My mother remarried and moved to Washington state. My father is still in Chicago, working. Neither of them wants my money.”
I felt my eyebrows go up. I remembered Dane’s parents as always working, leaving him home alone for much of his life. You’d think people like that would be happy to have a rich son. “What do you mean, they don’t want your money?”
“My father says he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he wasn’t working. My mother says her new husband does just fine.” Dane rubbed a drop of beer from his bottom lip. “I think both of them think my money is immoral. Like there’s no way you can get as rich as I did without robbing someone or taking what isn’t yours. They used to ignore me, but now they pretty much don’t trust me.”
“Jesus, Dane.” I cupped my chin in my hand. “We’re both the products of such fucked-up parenting. No wonder we freaked out when I was nineteen. Do you think we would have made good parents?”
“Is that a serious question?” He frowned at me.
I nodded, my heart suddenly in my throat because I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer. “Yes, it is.”
He paused for a second, watching my face, and then he said, “If you asked me back then, I would have said no. No way would we have been good parents. But I’ve had a lot of time to think about it, about who we were. And yeah, it was a surprise, and it would have been hard. But I honestly think we would have been good parents. In fact, I think we would have kicked ass.”
I swallowed. I was sitting down, but my knees still went weak as my stomach fluttered. I remembered why I’d chosen Dane all those years ago, picked him from all the guys I could have had.
I’d pretended it was convenient. But it wasn’t. It was because he was Dane.
And in a week I’d go home, and we’d be finished all over again.