more sports night from bygone days
the second of my sports night stories and the one i like better. far from the first to do the danny-in-college/meeting-casey story, but i did all right by it. interestingly, danny's mental breakdown was pretty much just what it's like two months into steady drug addiction. heh. tom's a real guy, by the way. him, i miss like no other.
Fall
by Candle Beck
Danny is laughing, then falling.
The stairs in the dorm are slick-painted concrete, a pasty beige color scuffed dirty by the endless galloping thuds of sneakers, beaten hard under the feet of the five hundred freshmen who live here.
Dan is laughing, then the arm he is holding onto disappears, snatched away, and the soles of his shoes are worn smooth, and he slips on the corner of the stair, and he is falling.
He catches himself, one arm thrown out, bracing the heel of his hand on the railing just before his chin slams into the stair, and he looks up, his knee on the lower step, his hair falling in his eyes, shielding him dark and unruly.
He sees half a body at the landing where the stairs cut back on themselves, a faded red Converse low-top with duct tape across the toe, jeans with a hole in the knee, a CBGB's shirt with green paint splattered on it, and then the boy who'd been leading him, the boy whose arm he'd been holding, the boy swings back into full view, and Danny sees blue eyes and a bent nose and a wreck of mahogany colored hair and a scar tracing along his jaw, and Danny tries to remember this boy's name.
"Hey, hey, no napping on the job," the boy says, tripping down the few steps that separate them and hooking his hand under Dan's elbow, hauling him up. "C'mon, next floor's me."
Danny is bleary and doesn't understand what the boy means for a second. How can this boy be a floor? He plays with the words, fiddling them over in his mind, and then forgets about it, because the boy's arm is around his waist and he is being half-carried along, and his hair is still in his eyes, and nothing is clear.
The boy tastes fiery and dark, and the hard plane of his sternum is cracked down the middle, a rift clearly visible under the skin, like two tectonic plates shifting against each other, pushing up mountains and dragging continents away from each other. Danny runs his fingers down the cliff of bone and asks what kind of seismic event caused this. He doesn't ask in those words, of course, because he is eighteen and drunk and has not yet taken Introduction to Geology.
The boy presses Dan's hand with his own, the uneven ridge tracking along the lifeline on Dan's palm, and says with his eyes hooded, "Used to fight."
Danny blows upwards to get his hair out his eyes and rests his chin on the boy's chest, peering at him, feeling far away. "Like, you boxed?" trying to picture this halfway punk in his CBGB's shirt weaving on the canvas, dancing in the square ring, thrown bloody and beaten against the ropes.
The boy slides his hand into Dan's hair and says, "No. Just fought." He pulls Dan closer and then it is fire and darkness again, and as lights go off behind his eyes, Danny has time to think that just fighting sounds pretty good.
* * *
Class and he can't hear anything.
There's this rush happening in his ears, something vast and flooding, like his blood after he's run miles at a dead sprint, after he's run until his body gives out and he falls gasping on the cement, too tired to think, only able to hear the scream of his pulse in his head.
That's what this is like, but he's not running, he's sitting still, in one of those stupid right-handed desks that he has to twist and cramp around to be able to take down notes.
But he's not taking down notes, because he can't hear anything, though the world is terrifyingly bright, stark spot-lit bright, game-show bright, a blare of colors that bleed into white, and he can't hear anything.
He gets up and the chair must scrape, screeching loudly against the scratched tile, because the professor pauses and looks up from his lecture, his eyebrows tight over his wire-framed glasses, and half the class turns to look as Danny leaves the room, and it's not until he's shaking hard in the bathroom stall that he looks down and sees the pen still clenched in his hand, held so tight it leaves a dull red dent across his palm.
* * *
Dan sees the fighter, the blue-eyed boy with the broken chest, in the cafeteria, and neither of them acknowledge each other, though Dan can see the boy watching him from across the room as Dan goes through his routine of imitating professors for his friends, the giggles and boos, the Coke can toasts and ironic applause.
Dan can hear things again, which is really good enough for him right now, all he needs.
It's October in 1987, and the world is going crazy, and Danny feels right at home.
* * *
Tom is from Chicago and doesn't believe in God.
When he met Danny, in a hallway at four in the morning, the first few weeks of dorm life, the unexpected freedom to sit in hallways at four in the morning, Tom looked down at him as Carson from Dan's Comm 1 seminar introduced them and Tom said with a tic of a smile, "You look like hell, man."
Tom does well in hallways, in stairwells, in alleys. He is this kind of charming, in in-between places, during maybe-nights, in the complicated drafts of the mixed light, the moon and electricity. Tom doesn't stay anywhere for too long, he ducks in and out, and everybody likes him, and they look up a few minutes after he's left and wonder where he's gone.
There are three other Toms that hang out in the broad many- degreed extent of their friends, one who is Redheaded Tom, one who is Hockey Tom, one who is Tom the Flake, and this Tom is Chicago Tom. There are two other Dans, Tall Dan, Little Dan, and him, who everyone calls Danny, just because it makes it easier to figure out which one you're talking about. This is how names work in college, where everyone knows fifteen Mikes and Matts and Bens, fifteen Beccas and Jens and Sarahs, you need to make distinctions, and these names can stick for a lifetime, they're not something you can shake so easily.
Tom has a crush on Kate, who travels on the periphery of the group, friends with Donnie and Beth but not really with Tyler or Jessie, Kate has skin the color of a walnut shell and hair as black as tar, a cutting sarcastic sense of humor and skinny fingers, and she knows more about baseball than Dan does, and that's what he usually ends up talking with her about, the playoffs and the Red Sox and the designated hitter.
Tom has a crush on Kate, but he lets Dan kiss him in the bathroom of his dorm room as his roommate sleeps impatiently in the next room. Dan kisses him and presses him up against the towel rack and tries to steal away all of Tom's breath, and Tom's hand is warm on his chest through his shirt, the rising heat and the flush of sweat and the muffled sounds of their mouths against each other, and this is happening in a bathroom in a dorm at Dartmouth, this is happening at another four in the morning, because that's when these things happen, and Dan has seen too many fours in the morning since he got to college, because if you don't sleep you have trouble thinking, trouble remembering, and this is what he wants.
When they pull apart, Danny gasps and asks, "You really don't believe in God?"
Tom laughs and unbuttons the first two buttons of Dan's shirt, sliding his fingers across Dan's collarbone and the smooth hollows of his throat. "You don't want to fuck an atheist?"
Dan shakes his head, but that doesn't really make his answer clear, and he is thinking disjointedly of double negatives and sunrise and Kate's old school Cubs cap with the little bear holding a baseball bat. He is thinking that he's never even been able to figure out what he does believe in, much less what he doesn't.
He kisses Tom again, too hard, Tom's head knocking back against the wall, and one of their shirts ends up in the bathtub, where the unsteady drip falls for hours and bleeds the color onto the white enamel.
* * *
Dan fucks up and doesn't go to class for a solid week. He stops sleeping too, doesn't eat much, and begins to fade away.
His eyes bruise underneath from the lack of sleep, making it look like he's been beat up, and his hands shake, all the time. He gnaws on his lip until it bleeds, and when he smiles, the cut splits open and red blossoms again, so he stops smiling.
His friends tell him to get some sleep, they try to get him drunk enough to pass out, but it's no good, and he is up every night through dawn, the bitter cold blue light streaming in through the crack in his window, and things are slipping away from him.
The world is vague, insubstantial, too bright, too loud, like a hallucination, and the faces of the people he sees begin to smear together, a pale blur, everything fuzzy like watercolor, like Impressionism, Monet, Manet, Seurat. He had been taking art history before he stopped going to class.
Dan fucks up, and in the mess of faces, Tom appears, at his door one night after Dan's roommate had gone home for the weekend, Tom standing there knocking for ten minutes before Dan registered the sound and got up to see who it was.
Tom with his flat Midwestern accent and his troubled eyes, and Tom comes in with his jaw set and his hands in the pockets of his jeans, stealing one of Dan's beers and sitting on Dan's roommate's bed.
"You're not doing so well," Tom says without preamble, and Dan remembers the night they met, the way the first thing Tom said to him was "You look like hell, man," and he thinks about Tom's hand gripping his hip and Tom throwing his head back, his eyes shut and his face stretched, his mouth open, crying soundlessly, and Danny thinks about trying to climb inside someone else's body and never leaving.
"I'm all right," he says, sitting on his own bed.
Tom laughs his short bark of a laugh, his eyes dark and Dan never bothered to figure out what color Tom's eyes were, he thinks they might be gray or blue or green or some collision of all three, but right now Tom's eyes are dark.
"Yeah, you're all right," Tom replies sarcastically. "If not sleeping or going to class means all right. Which it doesn't. So you're not. Doing all right."
Tom has a strange way of talking, chopping up his sentences, getting to the end and then deciding to say one more thing, fractured, fragmented, and he draws out certain vowels and makes fun of Dan when Dan says `ayuh', like Dan's granddad used to say, an old New England expression, bringing to mind salt-eyed fishermen and hard men working stony ground, nor'easters and the explosion of colors in the fall.
Dan rubs his palm across his face, the rasp of the stubble he's let roughen across his cheeks and jaw, and says, "Whatever. I'm just, you know, I'm getting used to things. College and stuff. Not like I need to go to class every day."
Tom hikes an eyebrow, a trick Dan wishes he knew how to do. "Yeah, okay. Except, sleeping? Something you have to do every day. Else you die." Tom's mouth crooks and Dan remembers feeling that against his skin.
"I've just . . . not been very tired lately," Dan lies, but Dan has never been able to lie very well.
Tom's eyes flicker with something old and sad, and he says softly, "You sure, man? Because you look pretty tired to me. You look like you're about to fall over, Danny."
Danny tries to laugh that off, but the laugh breaks hard in his throat and turns into a sob, and he covers up his face with his hands, something shattering in his chest, and he presses the heels of his hands against his eyes until it throbs, until he is blind.
He feels the shift of the bed as Tom comes to sit beside him, Tom's hand soothing on his back, and Dan tilts towards him unwillingly, like Tom is a force of gravity, and his face is buried in Tom's chest, his arms clenched around Tom's body, and he cries hard, gasping, wanting to scour himself clean.
Tom's hand is in his hair when Danny tapers off into fits and starts of choking, hiccupping breaths, his eyes burning, his face wet. He raises his head and Tom is looking at him with solemn eyes, and Tom's eyes are green with sparks of gold.
Dan says brokenly, "I don't think I can take feeling like this much longer."
Tom strokes his hand through Dan's hair and says with a sigh, "Ah, Danny. Don't you know that nothing that happens when you're eighteen matters?"
Dan shakes his head, his eyes shut again. "You're wrong. You're so wrong."
Tom tugs him closer, sliding his arm around Dan's shoulders, and asks, "What is it?"
And Dan has told no one, because people think he's a pretty good guy right now, and why should he explain to them that that couldn't be further from the truth?
But Tom's eyes are dark green and wise, and Tom is steady beside him, and Dan has not slept in a week, so he stutters through the story, his voice breaking on random words, `sixteen', `smart', `license', `red light', `brother'.
Tom listens quietly, and at the end, Dan says, "I just want to see him one more time, you know? I want to yell at him for messing with my stuff and tease him about a girl he's going out with and argue with him about what to watch on TV. I want to pay him five bucks to do my calculus homework and be astonished by the fact that he can do it better than I could ever hope to. I want to tell him not to try and be like me, because I'm no good, I've never been any good, not to anybody. I want to call `Sam' when I come into the house and hear his feet pounding down the stairs. I want to see him, just one more time, that's all, I want to see my little brother, Tom, I just want to see him, I want to see Sam, I want-"
Tom cuts off Danny's heartbroken ramble by leaning in and covering Danny's mouth with his own, breathing into him, and Danny kisses him back frantically, tasting tears and the corrupt past on his tongue, and it's not enough to make him forget, but it's a start.
Tom doesn't let him get too far, fastening a hand to Dan's shoulder and pushing him a few inches away. Dan stares at him, his eyes feeling huge, gaping, and Tom smiles sadly and runs his hand down Dan's face, and tells him, "Nothing I say is gonna matter. I'm just a guy you barely know. Who maybe you'll regret someday. But right now. Right now nothing's for sure. I know. You're fucked up and I'm fucked up and everything's fucked up. And I don't know how we get through it. I just know that we do. And someday you're not gonna be eighteen any more. And you're not gonna be scared, and you're not gonna be alone. Maybe you're lost right now, but you'll find your way. You got the North Star and you got a map in your heart, and sometimes this is how far away you need to go before you can get back home."
Tom with his mournful eyes like the bottom of the ocean, Tom with his fingers hooked in the collar of Danny's shirt, Tom with his charcoal hair and his ears that stick out, Tom who doesn't believe in God, Tom from Chicago, and it's all Danny can do to pull Tom in and bury his face in Tom's shoulder, hiding his eyes and breathing in, tasting the fabric of Tom's shirt in his mouth, cotton and laundry detergent, soap and sweat, and Danny can breathe, as he falls apart, as things crash around him, and it's the stark shuddering midst of autumn, and Danny doesn't know if he believes what Tom has said, but he thinks maybe he might, someday.
* * *
That summer Dan gets an internship at a struggling cable network in New York City and meets Casey.
It's baseball season and all the good teams are playing out west, three thousand miles away, it is the Oakland A's and the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dennis Eckersley breaking records, and that's what Dan and Casey talk about the first day they meet, Eckersley, and more specifically, Eckersley's hair.
Casey is tall and whippet-thin, with a crash of hair that Danny keeps thinking is the color of straw, but really is darker than that, and his voice is surprisingly deep for someone so gawky- looking. Casey's got long fingers, and subway tokens in his pocket that he is ever jingling, and he goes into great and obscure depth about the 1977 A's bullpen, and Dan thinks probably he's the only person in the city who could follow along with Casey to this minute detail, the only person who could correct Casey when he messes up the names of left-handed relievers.
Dan loves his internship but he's not very good at it, though everyone tells him he's doing great. It's the middle of May and the city is smothered, and Danny is too close to his parents, though he rarely sees them.
The first night Casey invites him out for a drink, Danny has one too many (five too many) and tells Casey he's got a girl's name, his voice cutting near cruel. Dan waits for Casey to realize Dan's an asshole and not talk to him anymore, but Casey just grins and says, "Yeah, and you've got a five year old's."
Dan's dad comes by the station one day and his eyes narrow when Casey puts his hand on Danny's shoulder to show him something. He asks Dan why Dan doesn't have a desk, and he's there when Laura, one of the show's producers, yells at him for losing a reel of footage that wasn't Dan's responsibility to begin with, wasn't something Dan had ever had in his possession. Laura finds the reel, eventually, realizes it wasn't Dan's fault after all, apologizes sweetly and lets him have the last cinnamon Danish, but his dad has left by that time.
Casey asks him if his dad is always like that. "Like what?" Dan shoots back, his voice flat and professional, dull heat behind his eyes.
"Well, you know . . . he's not exactly the most affectionate guy I've ever met."
They are sitting in the newsroom, watching a game, and Dan's hand is moving unthinkingly, scribbling things down, though he has no idea what they might be. He shrugs. "He's just tough. I guess your dad was all lovey-dovey, huh?"
He darts a look at Casey, Casey's polished hair and the twisted collar of his shirt. Casey isn't looking at him, and his profile looks carved out of stone. "Not so much, no," Casey replies, and Dan knows a fucked up childhood when he hears one.
He hands Casey his Coke without Casey having to ask, and Casey shifts him a smile, and Dan wants to tell him about how he and Sam used to race each other to the ocean, the second their family got to the beach, they'd be running, barefoot, skinny tanned brown arms pinwheeling, skidding down the dunes, sand sticking to their legs, hair plastered back by the wind and the spray, flinging their bodies into the water like they were trying to beat something out of either the ocean or themselves. But Casey doesn't know about Sam, so Danny doesn't say anything.
He gets better at his job, but he still feels uselessly young, a kid playing dress-up, and it becomes a better and better thing that he gets to see Casey every day, because Casey is taller than him and steady, and they are both boys whose fathers don't like them very much, and if Danny can come through it half as well as Casey has, he'll consider himself blessed.
* * *
Sometime before the All-Star break, Dan stops sleeping again, and things start to run in reverse.
The tender discolored skin under his eyes, the way he starts to lose weight in the bad way that sick people get skinny, the fragile pale drift of his face, the jackrabbit shudders in his hands, this is all something he has lived through before, it is a choking stupid dj vu, and he wonders if this is how it will always be, cycles of insanity cluttered with periods of normalcy, he wonders if he'll ever be able to shake it any better than he has been able to shake the name Danny, which is the only thing Casey calls him.
Casey asks him if he's okay on a Tuesday, and Dan brushes him off, doesn't sleep until Friday, when the black slams down around him and he collapses on his kitchen floor while making a cheese sandwich, and he wakes up four hours later with his cheekbone bruised by the tile, after dreaming about the boy with the fractured sternum, and the lights of New York City in the middle of the night through his window are manic, flickering and screaming, and he thinks that it's not so bad to be going crazy in a city that's already beat him to it.
The next time Casey asks him if he's okay, Danny tells him no.
He wants to call Tom, Tom who never worked up the courage to ask Kate out or end things with Dan, Tom who went home for Christmas break freshman year and never came back. He wants to call Tom, but that spring, the last spring of Dan's eighteenth year, Tom had killed himself.
After saving Danny's life, Tom had gone home for Christmas break and never came back, and one day in April, just before Passover, Tom had decided that he didn't want to get through it anymore, he didn't want to be scared and alone anymore, he didn't want to be eighteen anymore. Tom had shown Danny how to get home and then lost his own way, and it wasn't hard, a pretty red artist's knife, a motel bathroom because he didn't want his parents to have to find him, another temporary place where Tom could be charming and then be gone, and it wasn't hard, and when Danny heard the news, he was cold and silent for two weeks, and all he could hear was Tom telling him, "You're fucked up and I'm fucked up and everything's fucked up," and Danny wished he had held onto Tom, just a little bit longer, seen something other than salvation in Tom's eyes, seen the desperation that Tom could talk Danny out of but couldn't do the same for himself.
Dan is scared and alone and Tom lied to him, back in the chill dry start of October, Tom had saved him once and then taken the easy way out, and now Tom's gone and Dan's lost again.
* * *
There's a moment in a bar somewhere in Greenwich Village when Casey asks Dan what he wants to drink, and Dan says, "I want . . . I, I, I want, I can't, I'm, fuck, I don't think, I want . . . I can't, Casey, I can't," his eyes getting big and panicked, all the words he has ever known fleeing from him, and he is shaking hard and he is sweating and this is not supposed to happen here, not where people can see, his hands jittering on the table like they're about to break free and run, and he hasn't slept in five days and the colors are blurring and the moon is full, and Casey grabs his elbow and hauls him out of there, out into an alley where there is cracked concrete and white paper and silence.
Danny breathes in, cold and low, stirring in his chest, and he looks up so that he won't have to look at Casey.
"Danny . . . listen, Danny," Casey says in his uncharacteristically deep voice, but then he doesn't say anything, and Danny thinks that maybe Casey wants him to listen to the silence, which doesn't sound so bad.
Casey's hand is on his arm, and Danny drops his eyes to meet Casey's gaze. Casey has worry etched into the lines of his face, his smoothly handsome face, and Dan swallows.
Dan lets out a weak, cackling laugh and says, "So, in case you haven't figured out, I'm not exactly a picture of mental health right now."
It's an alley in New York City, it's somewhere Tom would have felt right at home, the moon bracketed by the buildings, the tarred strip of the sky, and Casey keeps his hand on Dan's arm and says, "It's okay."
But it's so far away from okay that Dan can only make a sound like a moan and press his fist against his eye, knuckling away any tears that might be trying to escape. Because he doesn't want to cry in front of Casey, Casey who is his friend when Dan deserves no friends, Casey who has not-straw-colored hair and strong hands, Casey who has become such a good thing for Dan to see every day.
Dan wraps his hand around a dirty gray pipe that runs down the length of the wall and tugs, wondering how hard he would have to pull before it tears free. Red dust from the bricks smears across his hands, like fingerprints of blood. Dan tells Casey, his voice trembling and his skin cold, "I sometimes . . . sometimes I have trouble. Being around people. Being around myself. I sometimes can't . . . deal with a lot of stuff. I sometimes go crazy."
He lifts his eyes, an iron taste in his mouth like adrenaline or shame. Casey is half in shadow, a diagonal line of dark slashing across his body like a sheet of ash, and Casey asks, only half his mouth visible, "Can I help?"
Dan's eyes burn with sudden tears, because Casey is such a good guy, Casey is stupid and blind and never ran away from Dan, as he should have, never realized all that has been destroyed by this terrified dark-haired kid from Dartmouth and all the broken things that wreak havoc in his too-young heart.
"Casey, I can't ask you . . . you don't know what you're getting into. I don't want to bring you down with me, I don't want you to go crazy too," Dan manages, the words tight and choked.
Casey steps forward, into the light, and the yellow of the light over the bar's door catches up on his eyelashes and the ends of his hair, making him glow, and Danny is astonished by how quickly Casey can go from shrouded to utterly revealed, because Casey's eyes are tragic and aching, and his hands are reaching out and settling on Dan's shoulders, pulling him closer, and Casey says quietly, "I think you're worth going crazy for."
There is a full moon and siren going by on the street, and the light over the door gutters and flags and goes out, crash-landing the alley into thick darkness, and somehow Dan ends up in Casey's arms, his nose pressed hard to Casey's shoulder, his arms wrapped around the other man so tightly he has a hipbone cupped in each of his palms, and it is dark the way the end of the world will be dark, and Casey's mouth is hot the way hell will be hot, first on Danny's cheek, then his jaw, then doubling back to Danny's ear, Casey's teeth tugging on his earlobe, Casey's lips searing down his neck, and Danny gasps, biting down on Casey's shirt and a little bit of Casey's shoulder, because Casey hisses, and Danny can feel Casey's warm breath as a shiver over his whole body, and Danny fiercely, unimaginably, desperately wants to kiss Casey, but Casey's mouth is on his neck, the brief curious brush of Casey's tongue against his pulse, trying to find out what Danny tastes like, and Dan's hand is slipping up under Casey's shirt, smooth skin, slat-thin and hard, and Casey rests his forehead on Danny's shoulder and breathes out, long and low, and Danny can feel him dragging himself under control beneath Dan's hands, and then Casey is pulling away, stepping back, and Danny can't see him in the darkness, but he hears Casey's voice disembodied and strained, saying, "You're worth it, Danny," and then there is a sudden wedge of gold light as Casey wrenches open the door and heads inside, moving jerkily and not looking back at Danny, not that he would have been able to see him anyway, because Dan lifts his hands up in front of his face, and they are invisible.
* * *
Four days later, Casey brings Lisa to the station to meet his friends, and won't look Dan in the eye when he introduces them.
Casey has never mentioned a girlfriend, much less a fiance, but Dan grins and tries to be charming, although this woman seems markedly uncharmable, all hard smiles and glittering eyes and long nails.
Dan has been sleeping, if it can be called that, snatches of vague unconsciousness, barely getting into a serious doze before something snaps him out of it, and something always snaps him out of it. He dreams of broken noses and red brick and murky eyes and smoke and California, where he has never been. He dreams of baseball and the Brooklyn Bridge and the taste of sweat and his father laughing so hard at something Sam said he's crying. He doesn't dream about Casey, maybe because he spends so much of his waking life thinking about Casey, he doesn't need to do it while asleep, too.
Casey doesn't talk to Dan much anymore. This is nothing more than what Dan expected. He's only surprised Casey talked to him for as long as he did. Since the alley, Casey is nervous and awkward around him, and Dan knows that Casey has finally figured out the kind of person Dan really is. This Lisa, who Casey never stops touching for a single moment while she's in the station, she might be the reason Casey pulled away from him, but Danny himself will be the reason Casey stays away.
Sometimes things fuzz at the edges, out of focus, and Danny gets good at centering himself, keeping his eyes solid in front of him, not paying attention to the corners of his vision and the way it looks like something's about to attack him from the side, lunge out of the blur and tear him apart.
After Casey walks Lisa out to her car, he comes back and finds Danny in editing, where Dan is learning how to cut film from Carlos, whose last name is Schwartz and who is a genuine Puerto Rican Jew, something Danny had once assumed to be a New York myth, like the alligators in the sewers.
Casey says, "Hey, Carlos, let me take over, go get a hot dog."
Carlos grins his pure white grin and says, "Vegetarian, McCall, for the last time."
Danny thinks about making a crack about how New York City hot dogs probably *are* vegetarian, but his eyes are fixed on the monitor, he is trying to figure out the turning point in this game, which the Atlanta Braves had once led by eight runs, but ended up losing by five, he is trying to figure out how it went so wrong.
Casey waits until the door clicks shut behind Carlos and then waits a little longer, finally clearing his throat to break the silence.
Dan doesn't turn to look at him, so Casey sighs and says, "Danny."
"Yeah?" Eyes forward. How did it go so wrong?
"Danny, would you . . ." Casey trails off and comes to sit in the chair next to Dan, and Dan can feel Casey's gaze on the side of his face, making Dan want to put his hand up to block him, but he knows that will do no good.
Casey lets out a half-moaning rush of air, and leans forward, taking his head into his hands. Danny, not expecting this, turns to look at him, his eyes widening slightly as he takes in Casey's penitent pose, and his hand moves to rest comfortingly on Casey's bent head instinctively before he pulls back.
"Danny, I'm sorry," Casey says, his voice cracking, staring down at the floor.
Without thinking, Danny immediately protests the apology, "Hey, for what? Come on, you haven't done anything wrong," because Casey isn't the fuck up here, but then Dan remembers Casey's mouth on his neck and the cold sharp bite of Lisa's engagement ring catching the light, and Dan wishes he didn't have to have this conversation now, wishes he didn't have to have it ever.
Casey lifts his head with visible effort, and his eyes are fever-bright and anguished, an expression Danny knows all too well from his own bathroom mirror, where he has taken to shaving with his eyes closed so that he will not have to look at himself.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you about Lisa," Casey says slowly, each word leaving him like it has to be ripped out. "I didn't . . . at the bar that night, I didn't mean to . . . I just, I wanted to help, I . . . I wanted to touch you, and I don't know . . . I don't know what I was thinking, it just happened." Casey wrenches his hands through his hair, leaving a ruff of it sticking up in back, and Danny wants to smooth it down, test the texture and pull of it between his fingers.
Casey's face is twisted, his voice warped, and he says, "I know I've ruined things between us. Which isn't something I wanted to do. Which is actually the last thing I wanted to do. But I know I have, and I just wanted to say that I'm sorry, and to tell you that . . . you're so good, Danny, and it doesn't seem like you've ever really been made aware of that, so I just wanted to tell you, because it's the truth, it's the truest thing I know. You're good, Danny, you're so good, and I can't believe I fucked this up, I can't believe I did this."
Casey's voice has broken down completely by the end of it, and he is staring down at his hands, so Dan reaches out and takes one of them, loops his fingers around Casey's wrist, tugging until Casey raises his eyes and looks at him and Dan has always known that Casey's eyes are brown, he has always known this, but for some reason it stuns him now, the depth and the sadness, and Danny can't really breathe.
"No, Casey," he says, and Casey's face falls, so Dan continues quickly, the world blurring and not-all-there, "You're wrong, you know that, you're a very wrong man who's just wrong." Dan half-smiles, this true faltering smile, and he says, "You haven't ruined anything. I think maybe this is going to be one of those things that can't be ruined."
Danny counts out Casey's pulse and thinks of Sam asking him what being in love feels like, something Dan could never answer. "You're going to be with Lisa and you're going to be so happy," he tells Casey. "And I'm going to be your friend and watch games with you and work with you and make fun of you at every available opportunity, of which I'm sure there will be many. You met me at a kind of terrible time in my life, but it's okay, because you met me, and you made it better."
There's light rising in Casey's eyes, and Dan's chest clutches and he ducks his gaze down, because Casey is too much right now, Casey and Casey's eyes and Casey's pulse under his fingertips are too too much, and Danny says in a jagged whisper, "I'm pretty much a mess, but I think maybe I'm gonna be okay. This is the first time in a long time that I've believed that, and that's got a lot to do with you. All to do with you, actually. I don't know anything, Casey, but I know I've fallen apart, and I know that you're the only good thing I have right now. And you're enough. I know that too."
Dan brings his eyes up and Casey is smiling, and Casey is beautiful, and Danny lifts Casey's hand and kisses the inside of his wrist, sweet and cool, and Casey's smile turns into a grin, and Danny's going to be okay, and Casey's going to be okay too, and Danny hears Tom in his head, saying, "You got the North Star and you got a map in your heart, and sometimes this is how far away you need to go before you can get back home."
* * *
On the Fourth of July, Casey takes Danny to a barbecue with a bunch of Casey's friends from college, a patio somewhere in Queens, flag-draped, sparklers, plastic cups in primary colors, a blue cooler full of beer and soda, little kids running around with superhero capes safety-pinned to their T-shirts.
It's a full bright day, and they can almost hear the roar from Shea Stadium as the Mets play a double-header and the planes out of LaGuardia pound the sky overhead, and every time Casey introduces him to someone new, Casey says, "This is Danny, he's my best friend," and Danny is warm and well-rested and Casey's hand is on the back of his neck, and he can smell the ocean as night falls and they wait for the fireworks to explode in the dark, and Danny is safe.
Danny is home.
THE END