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A second ring.
No “Hello,” just a voice coming up out of the phone the way it might come up out of the floorboards.
“Mark?”
“Hey, uh, Dante. Yeah, hey. Sorry to—it’s late, I know. I’m drinking. I mean drink. Damn it, drunk. No, wait, I’m not drunk. Shit. I just can’t drive. I’ve had drink. Maybe more. Okay, more. Any chance you’re up?”
A pause. Not long. Just long enough that I heard, faintly, a page turn.
“Where are you?”
“Place called Fuse, over on—”
“I know it.” I heard the creak of a man rising out of a chair, then the jingle of keys off a hook. “Ten minutes. Stay on the sidewalk where it’s lit. Do not go back in the bar.”
He hung up, because Dante never spent a word he didn’t have to.
I stood there on the curb with my dead-end night and my phone going dark, and one of those beautiful boys came out of the door, spotted me still standing there, and called over, “You waiting for somebody?”
“Yeah,” I said, and was mildly surprised to find it was true. “I am.”
He shrugged and went back inside to climb someone else. I peered down the dark street toward wherever Dante was coming from and felt, for the first time all night, something in my chest begin to unclench.
Chapter 9
Dante
Dostoyevsky lifted his head when I reached for my keys, which is as close as my retired racing greyhound came to an opinion.
“Not this time,” I told him. “Go back to sleep.”
He regarded me with the ancient sorrow his breed wore whether or not sorrow was present, decided the couch outranked whatever I was doing, and folded himself back into the shape of a question mark.
I’d been eighty pages into Turgenev with a cup of tea gone cold at my elbow. It was a good night, a quiet one, the kind I’d built my whole life to have, and then the phone had lit up with Mark’s name. I was on my feet before the call could connect.
I noted that, the speed of it.
A man calls at midnight and you’re standing before you’ve decided to stand?
There wasn’t time to sit with that, and honestly, I didn’t want to, so I poured myself into my car and drove.
The thing about Fuse was that I’d stood outside a hundred bars like it, mostly on the working side of the rope. I knew exactly what happened to a man like Mark in a room like that. I knew it the second he’d said the joint’s name on the phone. He spoke it small, the way one might report a mistake he was already paying for. I’d known when Finn told him to go out. I’d narrowed my eyes at the whole idea and said nothing, because it wasn’t mine to say. A grown man gets to walk into his own bad night.
Still, I’d known.
You send a muscular, kind, gray-bearded man into a room full of horny young gays who’ve come to hunt his precise silhouette, and you get what he got. I didn’t need to watch the replay to have seen it.
I found Mark slumped on the sidewalk where I’d told him to wait, under a flickering streetlamp that clearly didn’t care about his troubles. Something in my chest did a thing when I saw he’d actually listened, the big man, sitting where I put him, waiting.
I rolled up, and he got in. My car rocked with the weight of him. He’d clearly brought the whole night in with him, full of bourbon and the defeat of a man who went looking for something and got manhandled instead.
“Hey,” he said. “Thanks for this. I mean it. You didn’t have to.”
“Seat belt.”
For a few blocks, neither of us said anything, which was fine. I drove, and he looked out the window at Ybor drifting by. I kept my eyes on the road the way you’re supposed to.
Then a streetlight came through the windshield and moved across him.
