Raze (Riven 3)

When I got off work, I felt completely at loose ends. Usually I went home to have dinner with Sof, but she wouldn’t be there. She’d texted back to say that everyone she’d ever spoken to had been in touch with her too and that she was staying at Coco’s again that night. I guessed they had a lot of work to do to get ready for tour.

I shuffled slowly toward the subway to go home but stopped on the corner. I had nothing to do there, and nowhere else to be. As the city pulsed around me, I was overwhelmed by the terrifying sensation that I could do anything and no one would even notice. I’d felt it alone in our apartment, the strange and vaguely frightening feeling of total privacy in a teeming city. But this was that times a hundred. This was the feeling of being wholly, annihilatingly invisible as thousands of people walked by me.

The idea of spending another evening alone in our apartment filled me with dread, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do. As I wavered at the corner, I closed my eyes and imagined what would make me feel better, and I knew it instantly.

What I wanted was Dane.

I wanted him to gather me up in his arms and hold me and tell me everything was going to be okay. When I was with him, I sank into the parts of myself that I couldn’t with other people, and it felt like freedom. I wanted that part of myself to live.

I wasn’t playing it cool with him at all, and probably I should’ve been, especially since I really didn’t know how he felt about me.

Sometimes when he looked at me, I knew I had his complete attention. When I’d gotten all emotional at Secaucus Psychic, he held me close and didn’t laugh. He cooked for me. He seemed to like spending time with me, and things were definitely hot between us.

But then there were the other times. The times when I could see him fall out of the moment and pull away, like being with me was a distraction from something else. The times when I knew he wasn’t telling me things. He wasn’t a very verbal guy in general, and that was fine. But I could practically feel the wall he threw up sometimes. When he froze like he couldn’t even move for fear of giving away something personal.

He’d broken our date two days ago when one of his sponsees called with an emergency. He’d been apologetic about it, but very clear about his obligation. And while I was glad that his sponsee had someone to help him, a small, petty part of me had wished that I was important enough that he wouldn’t break our plans. Then I felt guilty and pathetically needy for wanting that. When I’d texted him that night to say I hoped he had a good day, he hadn’t responded.

He clearly wasn’t a phone person—he didn’t call to chat, and he wasn’t a casual texter—so I was left wondering: if I stopped reaching out to him, would I simply never hear from him again? It seemed horrifyingly possible that if I didn’t call him, he’d just disappear from my life.

Late at night, alone in my bed, it was easy to list all the reasons he might disappear: I worked a crappy customer service job in a poly-blend polo shirt that was about the least flattering color for my skin tone possible. I lived with my sister in a shitty walk-up. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing with my life. I didn’t really have many friends, and the person I talked to the most besides my sister was my mom.

I even wondered if maybe he kept offering to cook for me because he didn’t want to go anywhere with me in public.

Hell, he owned his own business and his apartment, spent all his free time helping people, was casually friends with rock stars, and could bench press like fifty times my weight one minute and cook a gourmet meal the next. He knew tons of stuff because he read and listened to podcasts and watched documentaries constantly, and—oh, yeah, he’d done one of the hardest things ever and broken free from addiction.

So, yeah, it was pretty easy to imagine why I wouldn’t hold much appeal.

But…I still wanted him.

At the thought of getting on the train and just going home, my heart started to race. I fumbled my phone out of my pocket and called him.

“?’Lo?” Dane said, as if he didn’t know it was me. It threw me.

“Hi,” I said. “It’s, um, Felix,” I added, suddenly afraid he wouldn’t recognize my voice.

“Hey,” he said, voice warming a little. “Hey, sorry. Had to get a new phone.”