“Dane?”
“Hmm?”
“Why do you come here?”
He shrugged.
“Like it.”
I pulled his leg toward me with mine and he looked at me.
“Been coming here a while.” I nodded and waited. “Started at a time when I…really needed things to do. To distract me. Keep my mind occupied.”
“Part of your routine,” I said.
He nodded.
“When I was still shaky. Liked it. Kept coming.” He looked away, and I was pretty sure that was all I was gonna get. “Wish they’d get some new damned questions, though,” he grumbled.
I smiled and slid my arm through his.
“Will you tell me about it?” I asked.
He froze, so I knew he understood what I meant.
“?’Bout what?”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
He shrugged and I let it go. It probably wasn’t the right venue for a serious conversation, anyway. Of course, I’d recently wept in an alley, so…
The last question was announced, and Dane sat up straighter. When it was read out, he snorted, and instantly wrote the answer in his notebook.
But when the announcer said the answer, Dane had gotten it wrong.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “You don’t know everything.”
He smirked.
“He’s wrong,” he said.
I shot him a look.
“It’s okay not to know everything.”
“I don’t know everything. Far from it. But his answer’s wrong. Let’s get outta here.”
Dane stood and sketched a wave at the bartender on our way out. I tripped after him, trying to google the trivia question without banging into anyone.
“Oh good lord,” I said, staring at my phone. “You’re right.”
“Yeah, I know,” Dane said.
“He really does know everything,” I grumbled to no one in particular.
* * *
—
Back at Dane’s apartment, he said, “You hungry?”
“Yeah.”
The tiny voice in the back of my mind that said he cooked for me at home so he wouldn’t be seen with me in public was quiet, since we’d just been in a crowded bar together. Maybe it was just one more control thing.
“What are you making?”
“Pierogis. Passed a stand selling them today and it smelled really good. Remembered there was a recipe in this book Whit and Theo got me.”
He brandished a square, hardback cookbook studded with Post-it notes.
“Yum.”
I followed him into the kitchen and sat on the counter. Dane put water on to boil and began cubing potatoes.
Once the potatoes were in the water, Dane paused and then addressed the cutting board.
“Still have nightmares that I’ve relapsed. Wake up thinking I’m back there. Then.”
He glanced up at me as if to check that I knew what he was talking about. That I understood he hadn’t ignored me in the bar when I’d asked to hear about his experiences with addiction, he just hadn’t wanted to talk about it there.
I nodded for him to go on, and he squared his shoulders like he was preparing himself to wade into battle. When he spoke again, his voice was the monotone I was coming to realize meant that what he was saying was hard for him. Frightening.
“I’ve been sober for ten damn years, but I still have nightmares. About that feeling of…of…needing something so badly that it blots out everything else. Blots me out. I was trying to run away from myself.”
“Why?” I asked.
He turned pain-dulled eyes on me and said simply, “Because I didn’t like myself. That’s how it started, anyway.”
He turned back to his cutting board and began chopping. I wasn’t sure what to say. I wanted to know everything about him, but I didn’t want to force him to talk about something that was clearly still so painful.
“Why?” I asked gently.
“Not very interesting,” Dane said, and I couldn’t tell if he meant the story wasn’t interesting or he didn’t like himself because he wasn’t interesting.
His knife moved effortlessly through cabbage and onions, taking them apart to thin crescent moons.
When I waited silently, he started talking.
“Got my scholarship to Hofstra. It was my way out of Virginia, out of my dad’s house, and I grabbed it. That first year was…good. Real good.”
He had a faraway look on his face and I figured in Dane-speak, good meant wonderful.
“Loved my classes, learning shit. Liked practicing with the team till I was so exhausted I couldn’t think. Met some real smart people. Some good people.”
He kneaded, big hands manipulating the dough hypnotically.
“My sophomore year I got to play. It was a rush. All those people cheering, the adrenaline. Camaraderie. Junior year I got hit hard. Went down real hard. Tweaked my knee pretty bad. But I worked through it. Three games later I got piled on. No penalty, no one’s fault—I just landed wrong on another guy. Knee was fucked again. The doc gave me painkillers because I was in pretty bad shape. But I wanted to play. Wanted to keep my scholarship.”
He cut the dough into circles with the edge of a water glass and dotted filling in the center. With a practiced, gentle hand, he folded the dough over and pinched it into perfect pierogis. I imagined those hands catching a football or making a tackle. I imagined them taking a pill.