“You know what, Danika Brown?” he said.
She snuggled deeper under his arm, but only because she was cold. “What?”
“You’re all right.”
“Just all right? What a disgraceful understatement.” But all right from Zaf felt a thousand times better than self-conscious compliments from someone else. All right from Zaf made her twinkle inside as if he’d made a night sky of her. Except people weren’t allowed to make things of Dani, so she snorted and shoved him, and everything was easy again. “I hope our online stalkers aren’t lurking somewhere, filming all this.”
“Fuck ’em,” Zaf said cheerfully, but she didn’t miss the faint remains of wariness in his eyes. He caught her hand and hauled them both to their feet.
It was ridiculous to feel a little flip in her stomach every time he manhandled her, but apparently, Dani was a ridiculous human being.
“All right,” he said. “We’d better go in.” Except he didn’t move. “Am I sweating?”
She pressed a hand to his forehead. “No.”
“Feels like I’m sweating.”
“Is that usually how it feels?”
He shocked her by answering with honesty rather than a roadblock of a grunt. “Yeah. You know when you exercise in the freezing cold, and your sweat is hot but your skin is like ice, and you can almost feel the salt?”
She nodded, pressing her lips together. There was a sorry little hollow in the space between her stomach and her ribs, and in that hollow lived a very sad gnome who was greatly displeased that Zaf struggled this way, but glad he hadn’t been alone this time.
She hoped he wasn’t ever alone.
“Feels like that,” he said. “And then there’s the whole lungs-clogged-with-water sensation.”
“Oh. Delightful.”
“And my stomach dropping out of my body like it’s made of lead.”
“Sounds ideal.”
Zaf nodded solemnly. “Fan-fucking-tastic. Dan?”
“Yes?”
“Is this your version of being supportive?”
“Yes,” she said. “You can probably tell it doesn’t come naturally. I apologize.”
“Don’t,” he murmured, so quiet she barely heard him over the passing traffic. “I like it.”
Three words, and the familiar ache of not quite being enough vanished in a B-movie flash. “Oh. Really?”
Her heart pounded in time with the rhythm of his reply. “Yeah. Really.”
Zaf might’ve been embarrassed about dealing with a full-blown panic attack in front of a woman he wanted to sleep with—if he hadn’t spent the last couple of years developing a curriculum designed to teach boys that mental health struggles didn’t make them less masculine, and that there was nothing wrong with being less masculine, anyway. So, once he pulled himself together, he felt nothing but familiar exhaustion, and the glitter of laughing with Dani, and a slight annoyance that he hadn’t brought his antianxiety meds.
He’d handled things, though. He’d handled things well. So he’d focus on that. Or maybe on Dani, who was so pretty, he could stare at her all day.
Until she ruined things by asking hard questions like “Should we talk about the fact that you’re nervous?”
Zaf sighed and made himself concentrate on words instead of the fine little creases at the corners of her eyes. “I’m not nervous. It’s just, if I disgrace myself on the radio, my mother will beat me with a slipper every day for at least the next year. And I bruise like a peach.”
She swept a laughing gaze over him. “You do look rather delicate.”
“You have no idea.” Questions and concern successfully dodged, as always. Now they’d leave the conversation there, go inside, and never, ever discuss exactly what had triggered him, because Dani wasn’t his family or his forever, which meant she didn’t need to know.
But she looked at him—just looked at him, with this quiet, conscious acceptance, as if to say Maybe you’re hiding the whole story, but if you need to, I’ll let you. And something about that look leaned on every last one of Zaf’s pressure points—not in a painful way, not exactly. More like a massage that hurt really fucking good.
Maybe she wasn’t family or forever, but she was a really good friend. Beneath his memories of moments like this going pear-shaped, one undeniable fact shone like a star: Dani didn’t hurt people and she didn’t make things worse. She always—always—tried to make them better. That must be why, for the first time in a long time, he wanted to keep talking more than he wanted to shut someone down.
He could trust her. He did trust her. He would trust her.
“The thing is,” he said, “I’m nervous because, back when I used to play, something bad happened. One day my dad and brother were in a car crash, and they, uh, died.” He always stumbled over that part. Not because it hurt—although it really fucking did—but because it seemed so . . . small. So simple and flat and anticlimactic a phrase for something as monumental as death. You told people “they died,” and hell was folded up inside those two short words. Some people got it. Some people didn’t.
He knew the minute he met Dani’s eyes that she did.
“Oh,” she breathed, and caught both his hands in her own, as if she knew instinctively that once upon a time, he’d fallen apart—but if she just held him tightly enough now, the memory of it might be a little easier.
And it was easier with her hands on him and her eyes so soft and warm. Suddenly, he had no idea why he’d worried she might react the wrong way to any part of this story. Well, yes, he did: anxiety. That was why. But still. Dani was never going to treat him like a sideshow, because she was a good person. And if she had, she wouldn’t have been a good person, so what she thought wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
He’d never . . . he’d never quite looked at it like that.
“I was at practice,” he said, steeling his spine because if he didn’t, he might wobble, just a little bit. “My phone was off. But it was a big crash, locally, and there were a couple of sports outlets that
