In the Middle of Somewhere (Middle of Somewhere, #1)(46)
“What happened?” I choke out.
“I was out for days,” he says, squinting at something out the window. “Busted eye socket and chin. Broken ribs. Took my appendix out.” He rests his forehead against the window. “Jamie never woke up. Head trauma.”
My swallow sounds loud in the quiet of the room.
“Fuck,” I breathe. I don’t know what else to say.
Rex taps the windowsill with the heel of his hand, and I can see him getting it together. “So, you can see why I don’t take real kindly to your brother.”
He sits down on the edge of the bed next to me and bumps my thigh lightly with his closed fist. “Listen,” he says, “I think maybe that’s not the kind of thing you talk about on a date. But I’m not real good with polite get-to-know-yous. So.”
I like this about Rex. He goes for things and explains them if he thinks they need to be explained, but he doesn’t seem to second-guess himself and he doesn’t seem to regret anything he says.
I turn my nose into his shoulder and breathe him in.
“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I know that’s not—”
“Thanks,” he says quickly, and I can tell he’s done talking about this.
I scoot backward and lie down on my bed, holding my arm out to him.
He hesitates, but then sinks down beside me, turning into my body and throwing his arm over my stomach. I hold him as close as I can.
“After that,” he says softly, leaning into my touch, “I knew I had to make it so I’d never be in that position again.”
His voice is muffled in my neck and I feel the words before I hear them.
“I had to be strong enough. For whatever happened.”
“Rex,” I say, “it wasn’t your fault.” It sounds like a useless cliché before it’s even out of my mouth.
He slides his hand under my shirt to stroke my back.
“Hey, Daniel?”
“Hmm?”
“Could I, maybe, stay here tonight?” He tenses, waiting for my answer. I’m embarrassed because my sheets are dirty, my bed’s a saggy piece of shit, and I don’t even have coffee to offer him in the morning. But his weight feels right.
“Yeah, please stay,” I say.
I mentally run through all my clothes to see if I can offer him anything to sleep in and come up with nothing that would possibly fit him. I wonder if it’s ungrateful to leave the food he made me congealing on the table. I should definitely brush my teeth.
Rex just strips and climbs under my covers. I jump up to make sure the door’s locked and turn off the lights, and I duck into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I set my phone alarm and toss it onto the windowsill. Then I drop my clothes on the floor at the foot of the bed and crawl in next to Rex, shivering. His skin is giving off enough heat that I can feel it without even touching him. I press a small kiss to his shoulder and lie on my back beside him, barely touching. I’m not sure if he wants me to hold him or to be left alone. After a while, he grabs my hand and squeezes it, like we’re a part of a string of paper dolls joined at the wrist.
We stay that way for a minute, and then he reaches over to my other hand and pulls me toward him. It’s kind of awkward the way he hauls me onto him and I’m not sure what he wants. Then I realize that he’s positioned me the way I woke up on Sunday morning, half on top of him with my leg thrown over his hip and my cheek on his chest. He’s asleep before I can decide if I like it or not.
Chapter 7
October
IT’S BEEN a week and a half since my date with Rex and I’ve only seen him once, when we met for a quick coffee at the library on Saturday. I don’t know why I thought I’d be less busy than I was in grad school once I got a job, but I was obviously wrong.
Peggy Lasher is officially my arch-nemesis. When I got to my office on Friday, I found an e-mail from her (with Bernard Ness, the chair of the department, cc’d) thanking me in advance for being willing to cover her classes in the coming week because her husband’s mother had died and she would be leaving for New York immediately. I’m not proud of the fact that my first thought wasn’t to feel sorry for her loss, or even pissed that she’d assumed I’d help her out; it was a gut-deep jealousy that she would be within two hours of Philly—unless by New York she actually meant Buffalo or something.
Of course, being pissed followed swiftly. When I mentioned it to Jay Santiago, who has become my go-to for reality checks about the department, he said that since it was such a small school the newest hire was often asked to cover classes. This was apparently school-specific, because as far as I know nothing of the sort was the culture at Penn.
Peggy’s a Romanticist—not a specialty of mine—so I had to do some major cramming to feel comfortable teaching her classes. One was an intro to eighteenth-and nineteenth-century lit, which was okay because it was mostly stuff I’d read in grad school. But her second class was a 300-level class on Romantic poetry for English majors, which took every spare moment of my time to prepare for.
In a school the size of Sleeping Bear, reputation is everything. The students all talk to each other and if you have a reputation for being a bad or boring teacher, your classes won’t fill, which is the first sign that a department won’t keep you around. So, it was very much in my best interest to make Peggy’s students think I was awesome so they’d take a chance on my classes next semester.