Page 14 of Resonance
Brent rolled his eyes. “You might wanna mind your own business.”
“Two of you are doing a good goddamn job of making it a public matter.”
“Brent!” Owen interrupted. “Dan’s my boss. At Grim’s? Remember me telling you about him?”
I pressed my lips together to keep from saying something else stupid. Brent remained unconcerned. Owen, however, started to get flustered, fiddling with the ends of his hair and shuffling his feet.
I pointed to my own head. “That new, the pink coloring?”God Almighty, stop talking and just go already.
“What? Oh!” Owen ran his fingers over the streaks. “Yeah. It’s just hair chalk. Washes out. We could do some in yours sometime. It’d be fun.” He smeared one hand down the side of his face in a visible cringe. “God, this is gonna be so awkward when I’m less drunk. Could we please forget this happened?”
I grunted ayes, pleaseand figured that was as good a time as any to make my extraordinarily overdue exit. The fuck had I asked him about his hair for? I turned on my heel, keeping my strides easy as I made my way back to the front entrance, flushing for a different reason when I saw the movement of their bodies together in flickering afterimages as I walked. The expression on Owen’s face, a soft bliss to his features. It fired through me in a mixture of heat and discomfort, shaking out through my nerve endings like the spitting bite of electricity arcing across a loose wire.
Owen wasn’t young as in barely legal; he was twenty-four, but he came off as young at heart in a way someone like Ru didn’t, even though there were only four years separating them. That’d always made it easy for me to pass over how damn cute he was—if you were into cute, which I wasn’t. Cute was for plush animals and pigtails and cookies made in the shape of states or guitars or ducks, and decidedly not something for a jaded asshole like me.
But damned if I didn’t spend the rest of the evening batting aside thoughts of Owen out there with that idiot like gnats in the summertime.
And here I thought nothing could shake me.
Chapter 6
Iwas near the front of the shop on a Monday when I finally saw Dan again. For a few days after Ru’s showcase, he hadn’t come in during my shifts like usual—which I figured he only did in the first place to check up on me. Ru said it’d taken forever before he didn’t check in on him. So I wasn’t sure if that was a good sign in addition to the master key I’d been given, or if Dan was avoiding me.
The look of surprise on his face when he spotted me told me the rest of the story, and that he’d missed the note on the schedule where I was filling in for Ivy while she went to a last-minute doctor’s appointment.
On the one hand, I was instinctively mortified over being busted at Miller Hall with Brent. On the other, whatever, it wasn’t Dan’s business anyway, and I hadn’t been doing anything wrong per se. Maybe a handy next to a dumpster outside a concert hall hadn’t been the greatest or classiest idea, but I’d been a little tipsy and a lot horny, and Brent had been persuasive. Also, I’d never been particularly classy in the first place. Classy was for people who didn’t trip over their own feet or spray mountains of words everywhere like Silly String.
I tipped Dan a nod hello and focused on the price stickers I was applying to a batch of records we were about to put on sale, determined to ignore any awkwardness, along with the buzz of heat crawling over my skin. I mean, if it’d been Ru who’d seen me that night, I wouldn’t have thought twice, and we’d no doubt have gotten a hard laugh out of it. But the boss factor, and the pesky secret crush factor, gave me a bad case of the jitters. I knew if I opened my mouth, I’d start rambling. So best just to keep the trapdoor shut.
Dan scuffed down the aisles, flipping aimlessly through records, rummaging behind the front counter, and then his footfalls grew louder as he approached and the beat-to-hell toes of his boots eclipsed my peripheral vision on one side. I wondered how many stages those boots had seen, if they were even the same pair or a different one. Dan had never struck me as someone to get rid of things easily. The entire shop and the back room especially, with its bins of Milli Vanilli and Color Me Badd cassette tapes, were a testament to that.
I glanced up at him, trying for nonchalance and uncertain how well I was pulling it off. I liked all kinds of guys, and Marlboro man minus the cigarettes was usually on the lower end of the list because me and stodgy? We didn’t go well together. I was not good for people who liked the whole self-contained, strong, silent type thing because I was definitely not that. Like just then, as I stared up at Dan, with the sandpaper stubble peppering his jaw and the lines around the corners of his eyes deepening as he looked down at me, I was trying to tamp down about a million possible things I might say.
And then, like trying to hold back a burp at Thanksgiving, I failed.
“So you saw me in a compromising position the other night, and I’m just going to put that out there and acknowledge that between us because that’s what we’re both thinking, amiright? In your head, you’re probably thinking what a holy mess and also, next to a dumpster? That’s kind of gross.” Dan’s lips formed a thoughtful O. “Maybe more than kind of, although—” I lifted a finger. “—I will say that clearly it had been recently emptied because it really wasn’t that smelly at all, if I remember correctly. I was a little distracted and a little drunk. It was mostly just a faint whiff of stale beer—which is not so different than inside any bar.” His brows went up, and the corners of his mouth quirked as I motored on. “Meanwhile, I’m thinking…” I lost steam. Finally. “Actually, I don’t remember what I was thinking. All the thoughts flew out of my head when I realized it was you standing there instead of some bouncer or something. I’m not sure which was better or worse.”
“Both are better than a police officer,” he deduced simply. See laconic. Definition: Daniel Grim.
Dan picked up the roll of stickers and corralled a stack of records by his boot, then crouched next to me and started marking them in silence.
I guess that was that, then? All right, cool. I got through the next five price markdowns before he spoke again. “I got arrested for public indecency and ‘lewd’ acts once.” He lifted two fingers in lazy air quotes. “Was in a church parking lot, though, because you’re right about the dumpster part: that’s nasty and I’m not gonna lie and say that very thought didn’t cross my mind while I was standing there.”
I caught his smile in profile, the faint dimple that dished in against the dark stubble and became a grin with a curve like the devil’s pitchfork. Damn the man was handsome. Handsome was the perfect word. Not hot. Just handsome, like the old west and broken-in saddles, the smell of oil and leather in a sunlit barn, and all kinds of other lofty images that’d kept me glued to old spaghetti westerns when I was a kid.
Fortunately he continued, completely oblivious to the crush leaking out of me like soda fizz. “Luckily, that time it was with a girl, because otherwise…” He hitched one shoulder, and I could fill in the rest well enough.
I crumpled some of the sticker backing paper in my fist and tossed it in the pile at my feet, then reached for another string of stickers as I nodded in sympathy.
“Who was that guy anyway? Boyfriend?” Dan tilted his head slightly toward me, one brow carving up in inquiry.
“Nah. Just a guy I hook up with sometimes. Friend with benefits or whatever. I’ve known him for a while. It’s easy, no fuss. It won’t last.” I wrinkled my nose as I said that last part.Totally unnecessary.
“Why’s that?”
“Well, I don’t have a great track record for people sticking around for one. Or a great track record for sticking around myself.” Better be the leaver, I figured, than the one left behind. I’d had that plenty in my life. “And he’s bi, but he’s already told me he wants to marry a woman. Wants a family and whatnot.”
Dan’s grin erased itself, a dark line shading in the fringe of his brows. “You can have a family without a woman.”