He knew this.
He also knew he should be attempting to do something about it.
He didn’t know what.
There’s always Zoloft, he thought as he took another drink of the bourbon.
It was five till.
There were no messages.
Matteo was laughing at something the young couple at the end were telling him, the man’s hands waving animatedly, like he was a few martinis in. The woman—his wife? girlfriend?—watched him fondly, rolling her eyes as if the man was full of shit. He probably was. Most men were.
He’d told this to her once.
She’d rolled her eyes at him. “I’m pretty sure I know that,” she’d said, scrunching her nose at him. She liked to tease him sometimes. “You don’t have to tell me that.”
Oh, but he did.
Matteo glanced back over his shoulder at David. He smiled that wicked smile and winked at him again, and David thought he’d probably need to leave a big tip. Matteo certainly seemed to be working for it.
Or maybe he has a daddy kink, David thought, surprising even himself. Maybe he thinks that I could be his daddy.
He snorted, rolling his eyes at his own ridiculousness. Daddy kink. God. If only his younger self could hear him now. Here he was, receding hair, his clothes hanging off his thin frame while he still managed to have a bit of a paunch. The bags under his eyes had become less pronounced (thanks, Ambien!), but he knew he still looked slightly hollow, like his insides had been scooped out and misplaced. There was something inside him, even after all that he’d been through, but it was a meager thing.
It was nine.
Phillip wasn’t here.
Which… wasn’t surprising. He was habitually late. It was one of those things, one of those funny little quirks that came with Phillip, like biting his fingernails or kissing his hand and touching it to the ceiling of the car he was in every time he rolled through a yellow light. He could
n’t exactly say why he did it, just that he always did. He was perplexing, aggravating, and oh so wonderful.
That hurt too.
So he was late. Again.
David wasn’t worried.
He checked his phone.
Two minutes after nine. There were no new messages.
He pulled up the message tree again, just to make sure he hadn’t missed anything.
It said the same thing:
I want to see you
I’d like that
Would nine work? On Friday? The hotel?
ok
The good thing about text messages is that he could type in a word like ok and that’s all Phillip would see.
What Phillip wouldn’t see was how David’s hand had been shaking, how he had been breathing shallowly, reading over the words again and again and again, trying to parse out their hidden meaning. (Nine? What’s so special about nine? Do I have plans on Friday? Of course I don’t. I never have plans. The hotel? It’s just a staycation, after all. That’s it. That’s all it is. Right? Right? Right?) That one word, those two letters, ok, wouldn’t show how David had closed his eyes and leaned his forehead down onto the kitchen counter where he’d been waiting for his Lean Cuisine to finish nuking in the microwave (apple cranberry chicken—it’d tasted like shit), phone clutched in his hand, knowing he’d have one chance, one chance to get this right, to try and salvage something out of everything he’d become.