17. Calliope #3
“It explains several injuries.” Dash tears a small piece from the corner of his burger bun and sets it aside. “I broke my arm when I was nine because he told me I wouldn’t jump from the shed roof.”
I stop with my spoon halfway to my mouth. “You jumped from a roof.”
“It was a low roof.”
“You broke your arm.”
“The landing was poorly planned.”
I set the spoon down and try to picture it: Dash smaller, younger, reckless enough to climb onto a shed because an older brother dared him.
It doesn’t match the man across from me until it does, until I think of the quiet stubbornness in him, the way he walks me to my car every night without announcing what it costs.
“What happened after?” I ask.
“My father yelled. My mother cried. My brother tried to convince everyone I slipped.” Dash looks down at his plate, moving one fry aside with his thumb. “He stayed in my room that night because he thought I’d wake up scared from the pain.”
The image comes easily, two boys in a dark room, one in a cast and the other pretending not to be worried. Dash’s voice doesn’t change much, but something in it softens enough that I hear the distance around the memory.
“Are you close now?” I ask.
Dash’s hand stills beside the plate.
“Not the way we used to be.” He reaches for his coffee after a moment, and when he looks back at me, the old softness has folded into something quieter. “Life got complicated, and then we let it stay that way.”
I nod and take another bite of soup. I want to ask his brother’s name, where he is, whether they call each other on birthdays or only when something breaks badly enough to require family, but Dash has given me a door and stopped with his hand on the frame.
I don’t push it open for him.
My phone lights beside my elbow before the silence can change shape. Mara’s name appears across the screen, and I tilt it enough to read the message without picking it up.
Alive?
I take a picture of my bowl, the sandwich, and the fries, catching the edge of Dash’s plate because his hand is still near it. Then I send it before I can overthink the proof of company.
Her response comes almost immediately. That is food. I’m choosing to be moved.
A second message follows. Tell whoever owns the other plate that I approve of the fries.
I press my lips together and turn the screen toward Dash.
He reads it, then looks at the plate between us. “Mara has standards.”
“She has opinions.”
“They appear compatible.”
I answer Mara with one word. Noted.
Then I turn the phone facedown and slide it closer to the wall.
Dash sees the movement. He doesn’t comment on it, and after a few seconds, he asks whether I had any siblings, letting the conversation continue from a safer direction because he seems to understand that safer doesn’t always mean less honest.
I tell him I didn’t. I tell him my mother used to say I was enough work for three children, which was probably true during the year I decided every library book needed to be catalogued by emotional severity.
Dash asks what category had the most entries, and I tell him betrayal, obviously, because I was twelve and dramatic.
His smile returns slowly.
We stay until the soup cools and the waitress drops the check near the edge of the table. I reach for it first, and Dash lets me have it.
That matters more than it should.
He doesn’t argue when I pay. He only leaves the tip in cash after I sign the receipt, adding it quietly beneath the edge of his empty coffee cup. Outside, the cold has sharpened enough that my breath clouds in front of me, and the diner windows glow behind us as we cross the lot.
Dash walks me to my car again.
This time, I know exactly how far he will have to walk afterward.
He stands beside the driver’s door while I unlock it, the wind moving through the open space between us. His hair has come loose near his forehead, and there is a faint coffee stain at the edge of his sleeve that I don’t remember seeing before dinner.
“Thank you,” I say, my hand resting on the door handle.
“For dinner?”
“For walking me out every night.” I look toward the road that leads back to campus, then back at him. “And for telling me why.”
Dash’s gaze stays on me. “You’re welcome.”
I reach for his sleeve before I can fold the impulse away. My fingers close lightly around the wool near his wrist, just long enough to feel the warmth of his arm beneath the fabric.
He doesn’t move.
The touch lasts only a few seconds, but my body pays attention to every one of them. When I let go, Dash opens my door and steps back so I can get in.
“Text me when you’re back at the house,” he says.
“I will.”
He closes the door after I’m settled, then waits beside the car while I start the engine and buckle my seat belt. The headlights wash over him when I pull out of the space, his hands tucked into his coat pockets and his shoulders slightly hunched against the cold.
At the edge of the lot, I glance in the rearview mirror.
Dash is still there.
When my car turns toward the house, he starts walking back in the direction we came from, toward campus, the west lot, and the path he has been taking for weeks without telling me.