In the Middle of Somewhere (Middle of Somewhere, #1)(45)

“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 f*cking 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.

He wanders around my apartment like he’s hoping to distract himself, but he’s shit out of luck because there isn’t much to look at except one bookshelf and a bunch of CDs.

“I didn’t have any friends,” Rex says, looking out my window toward the woods. “In school. We moved so often I never had time to make any. And anyway, I was so shy I couldn’t talk to anyone, even if I’d wanted to.”

He wanders over to my bed, and then to the stereo. He flips through the CD book I left out and then turns the stereo off, Tori cutting out mid-”Winter.”

“But people didn’t really mess with me either. I was just invisible.”

I can’t imagine it. Rex invisible. Even now, it’s like the whole room has arranged itself in relation to him.

“When I was fifteen, we moved back to Texas because one of my mom’s boyfriends had some business there. Shitty little town called Anderson. The school was smaller, though, and after about a year, I made this friend. Well, he made me, really. Kept talking to me all the time at school even though I didn’t say anything back. Real chatterbox.” Rex smiles. “Funny-looking kid. This wiry red hair and a big old grin. Kinda scrawny. Anyway, he’d show up at my house and just take me with him wherever he went. He’d talk and I’d listen. And then one day he kissed me. I was so surprised I about fell over. He socked me on the shoulder and said, ‘Just wondering,’ and smiled at me. When I picked my jaw up off the floor, I kissed him back.”

Rex wanders over to my bookshelf and he scans the titles. He goes right for The Secret History, running a finger over the mud-spattered spine. When he speaks again his voice is strained.

“We’d have sex in the woods, near this little park. No one really went there. One day these three guys found us. I didn’t hear them. They started… you know, whaling on us. And Jamie. He was a little guy.”

Rex walks back to the window and looks out, hands in his pockets. From the way he’s talking, it’s clear that Jamie wasn’t just some f*ck in the woods. I want to ask about what he was to Rex, but I don’t want to interrupt. I can barely hear him when he starts talking again, his deep voice gone low and tight.

“One of the guys picked up a stick. Started hitting us with it. I kept trying to get up. To stop them from hurting Jamie. But I wasn’t strong enough.” When he says this, his muscles flex, arms tightening and shoulders bunching. “They ran away when some trucker wandered over to take a piss in the woods. He’s the one who radioed for an ambulance, they told me later.”

My stomach is in a knot. I stopped eating about two bites into Rex’s story, but I wish I hadn’t eaten those. I walk over to him, but his posture radiates “Stay away.” I sit down on my bed facing him.