Page 56 of Resonance
“Yeah?” He arched a brow, leaning against the doorframe again and looking amused. I dropped to the end of the bed and kicked my shoes off, then shrugged. “Yeah, I have no game.”
“No subtlety at all?”
I could tell he was teasing, but I gave him my personal self-assessment anyway. “In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not great at being subtle. I came factory-installed with three speeds: dead, which I can’t give a review on yet; tumble dry, which I consider my everyday operation; and fast-forward mode.”
“So you’re both a dryer and a remote control.”
“See, that’s a perfect example of tumble dry: everything all mixed up and spinning around.”
“And fast-forward?”
“That time Les came into the shop in Gatlinburg and I slapped myself. And possibly about thirty seconds ago,” I tacked on in a mumble.
Dan hmm’d thoughtfully. “Got it. Guess I just figured you might try for subtlety sometimes, for cool quotient and all.”
“Nope.” I popped my lips. “I know my strengths and weaknesses. I once asked a guy if he wanted to bone. I was pretty drunk, though.”
He chuckled. “If someone ever asked me if I wanted to bone, I’d turn their ass around and march them on out the door.”
“No one’s ever gonna ask you if you want to bone, because you look like you’d kick the ass of someone who asked you that.” He grunted, but I couldn’t resist leaning in as I stood from the bed and passed alongside him, dropping my voice low. “Wanna bone?”
Holy mother of darkness was it fun to watch Dan’s reaction: how his jaw went slack at first and then his mouth snapped closed as he shook his head at me when he realized I was teasing him. I burst into laughter, and he shoved my shoulder good-naturedly.
“Go on.”
“I am. Gonna Netflix and chill with myself in your den. Except I would never actually do that because god that’d be rude and probably creepy, depending. That doorway off the kitchen, yeah?” I asked, kind of half babbling to myself as I walked down the hall, expecting to hear his bedroom door slam shut at any second in an attempt to save himself.
But a few minutes later, after I’d plopped onto a large, plaid-covered couch that definitely qualified as rustic but mostly just as plain old, I heard him moving around in the kitchen. The scent of popcorn popping infiltrated the air as I flipped through the channels on his TV.
By the time he settled next to me, the opening credits ofDate to Screamwere playing. Dan kicked his feet up on the coffee table, which I took as permission to follow suit, then rested the bowl of popcorn in the foot of space between us.
“I’ve seen this, actually,” he said. “It’s…”
“God-awful,” I cheerfully supplied. “Good reminder of why I hate blind dates.”
“What’s wrong with a blind date?”
“Aside from the potential of psychos, the same thing happens to me on a blind date that happens when I get onstage. Well, any date really. Even if I’m not even that into the date, suddenly I get that hyperconscious spotlight feeling.” I shuddered dramatically.
“Weren’t you supposed to go out with Marco recently?”
I was surprised he even remembered. “I bailed on that. Well, not bailed as in I didn’t even show up. I just… um… didn’t follow through on the whole setting-up part.”
Dan gazed appraisingly at me for a beat, then muttered, “Uh-huh,” and focused on the TV screen where the doomed girl was obliviously munching on a salad across from her neatly coiffed grim reaper.
“Your uh-huhs have a way of sounding like they can mean many things depending on the context.”
“That might be true.”
“So what’d that one mean?”
“That was the baseline uh-huh which meant—Jesus, your questions sometimes—I think it meant I didn’t know what else I was supposed to say there, but was acknowledging that you’d spoken.”
“Uh-huh.”
He cut a savage glance my way as I chuckled.
And after that, I almost managed to enjoy the stupidity of the movie for a third awful time except that the side of Dan’s foot just barely rested against mine, and the heat of his body wafting toward me every time he dug his hand in the bowl of popcorn kept distracting me.