“Rex, what’s going on?” I say.
He finally looks at me and his eyes look more uncertain than I’ve ever seen them. His jaw is clenched. Whatever he sees in my face makes his expression soften. He puts his hands on my knees.
“Sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “You didn’t even get to finish your food.”
“I don’t care about that,” I tell him.
“No, really,” he says, “I apologize.” He falls into this stilted, overly formal way of speaking sometimes. When he’s nervous? Or uncomfortable. I’m not sure. “I hate that your brother did that. I can’t stand violence.”
I almost laugh. The idea that Rex, who’s six foot four, built like a bodybuilder, held me up against a tree as he fingerfucked me, and could probably take apart any guy I’ve ever seen hates violence seems, well, laughable. But then I remember how he fixed Marilyn’s leg the night we met. How he looked at my bruises and binder-clipped my pants. How he warned me about the weather and got upset with me because sometimes people die in the snow. How he made sure I was wearing my seat belt and cooked for me and stretched me so carefully in bed when I said it had been a while. How he held me in sleep, his arms heavy, but never crushed me. How he washed my hair in the shower and put a hand over my brow so shampoo didn’t get in my eyes. How, at the diner the next morning, he winced when I burned the roof of my mouth on my coffee and silently pushed my water toward me even though I barely noticed because I do it all the time.
Rex stands abruptly and opens my refrigerator. He shakes his head and I know he’s seeing my collection of takeout condiments and a stain from last week’s leftovers that leaked.
“You don’t have any food,” he says resignedly, and waves me off before I can make any excuses. He opens the freezer and takes out… something. He rummages through my cabinets and pulls out a can of beans and box of instant rice and starts fiddling with my stove.
“You have to light it,” I say. He picks up the fireplace matches that I’ve jammed into the oven door handle and gives me the same look Ginger gives me when she thinks I’ve said something particularly childish.
“Daniel,” he says, bending down to look at the stove. “You really need to talk to Carl—this stove doesn’t have a sensor on the pilot light.”
I walk over, but it just looks like any other old stove to me.
“Uh. Is that bad?”
“It’s not safe. If the pilot light goes out and the gas is still on… it’s not safe.”
“Okay,” I say, trying not to snap at him for patronizing me, since it’s obvious he’s freaked out about something else.
He puts a hand on my shoulder.
“I’m serious. Are you going to call Carl?”
“Um, I don’t really think he’ll get me a new stove, Rex. Besides, I hardly ever use it.”
His hand tightens on my shoulder like he wants to fight me on it, but he just turns back to the counter.
I don’t know where he found it, but he’s chopping a small onion and stirring it into the beans before I even see him find a knife that must have been here when I moved in. As happened before, after he’s been cooking for a bit, his shoulders relax and he starts to talk.
“I don’t want to get all heavy on you,” Rex says.
“Hey, come on. I started it by talking about my brother. Just tell me why it flipped you out so much. Here, I’ll put on some music,” I say when he doesn’t answer right away. I flip through my CD books for a few minutes trying to find the right thing. But what’s good background music for an unexpected confessional from the guy you just started dating and whom you barely know? I figure you can’t get more confessional than Tori Amos, and put on Little Earthquakes.
“You like Tori Amos?” Rex says, his back to me.
“Tori Amos is fucking amazing,” I say, ready to go to the mat for Tori.
“I know,” he says, “I guess I just thought you liked… I don’t know, harder rock stuff?” He says this like he wouldn’t know this “harder rock stuff” if he tripped over it. “Just, you’re all edgy and stuff.”
I’m about to prickle at this assessment when he sets a plate in front of me that looks like I’m in a Mexican restaurant. There’s fluffy yellow rice and beans with onion that smell like spices I know I’ve never bought, and a miniburrito, which must have been what he found in my freezer.
“What the hell?” I laugh. “Wow, thanks. Have some,” I say, but he waves it away.