sports night fic: Landlocked Blues.
Oh my god, y'all, writing this story was like pulling teeth but I am so very pleased with the way it turned out. Before you read this read torchthisnow's Time Grabs You By the Wrist, as the two are meant to exist as a single unit. (Just like Casey and Danny.)
With thanks to my crack team of insecurity-soothing mavens, including but not limited to helpwess, puppetoflove, jascott and the rest of the R.C's and cabal.
For torchthisnow, with adoration. All of my best ideas come from your brain.
Landlocked Blues
by missdeviant
I've grown tired of holding this pose
I feel more like a stranger each time I come home
So I'm making a deal with the devils of fate
Saying let me walk away. Please.
-- Landlocked Blues, Bright Eyes
1989. New Hampshire.
The median age of the staff at the Valley News was a paltry 27 years when Casey McCall had started working there. It was one of the things that had stuck with him after his first interview. The paper had seemed like the kind of place where he could develop seniority quickly, where he wouldn't be passed up for a promotion just because he was young and fresh-faced and Midwestern.
He hadn't been wrong about how quickly he'd advance through the ranks. The former sports editor, a thirty year veteran of the business whose wardrobe appeared to be stolen from the closets of Nixon-era Woodward and Bernstein, had retired after Casey had been on the job for less than three months. There hadn't been enough money in the budget to fill Casey's old position, but he didn't have time to worry about the workload. Without a major sports team in a hundred mile radius, the only beat was the high school beat more than half the time.
What he hadn't expected was the difficulty that he had trying to break into the tightly knit ranks of the twenty-somethings who ran the newsroom. They were congenial, to be sure. Casey never doubted that he was liked, or that his coworkers appreciated the work that he did. Still, there was something vaguely incestuous about their interactions, and they all seemed to be in tacit agreement that Casey wasn't a part of the family.
"Go home," someone would inevitably say when midnight rolled around and Casey was still hunched over a microfilm reader trying to determine whether the Southport High football team's losing streak was the worst in its history. (It was.) "You haven't been married long enough to put in this much voluntary overtime."
So he would.
Casey would sometimes remember this time as golden. He was young, idealistic, and able to function on a salary of under twenty grand. More often, he remembered it as being too quiet, the colorless empty calm before a welcome storm.
*
When Casey heard the new intern was eighteen, fresh off his first semester at Dartmouth, he'd expected to meet someone wide-eyed, innocent; someone who'd be a little cowed, even by their less than impressive paper. Someone Casey would have to coax from his shell of "yes sirs" and "no sirs." In short, he expected a version of himself at eighteen.
Dan Rydell was none of those things.
"Newlywed?"
It was one of the first things that Casey remembered Dan asking him. It had come after formal introductions and the editor in chief's facility tour, which featured such highlights as the cabinet where they kept the coffee filters. (It was a slow news day. Casey spied.) It came just after they'd exchanged a hearty welcome-to-the-office handshake across the peeling laminate of the break room table.
"Close enough." The gold of his ring still sometimes caught him off guard, especially when it reflected the light.
"Thought so. You've still got that new car smell."
Casey paused. "I smell like a car?"
"Actually, you smell like gyros. I was just using metaphor. I've heard writers do that." Danny flipped a pencil that he had been holding and caught it, eraser end, before sliding it over his left ear.
"Is that so? Teach you that at Dartmouth, did they?"
"I'm self-taught." He smiled widely.
The guy was brash, too brash for his first day. It should have been jarring given that they had known each other for all of four hours, but it's the first really real conversation Casey'd had with anyone in the office since he started, and he made up his mind to like Dan at that moment.
Casey chuckled. "Maybe you can self-teach yourself to bring me some coffee later, intern?"
"Aye aye, boss." Dan gave a little salute. Not quite a yes sir, but good enough.
Casey showed Dan the ropes for the rest of the day. Dan learned about the microfilm reader that has a tendency to jam and which must be avoided at all costs, and the toilet that clogged and how to change the ribbon on the Smith-Corona.
"I can see this is a cutting edge operation," Dan said as Casey's fingers came away black.
"I'm angling for one with a built in word processor screen."
They talked about the U.S. Open even though there was a foot and a half of snow on the ground and even when it became clear that he and Dan were going to be the only two left in the office at the end of the day, no one reminded Casey that he should be going home to his wife.
"Am I keeping you?" he asked Dan, an embarrassed afterthought, as he hauled the station's old black and white television out of storage. It was a clear night, and he had already boasted that he could pick up the NBC affiliate out of Albany for the Knicks-Sixers game.
"Hell no."
The game was a good one, and the night didn't seem to be willing to end just because they had to lock up the office. Casey called Lisa and told her he'd be late, he was taking the new guy out for drinks. She was already well-versed in his difficulty integrating himself into the crowd, so she didn't even protest, just laughed and reminded him that workaholism wasn't in the vows alongside sickness and health.
They were already in the parking lot of the bar when Casey's hand came off the steering wheel of his graduation-gift Corolla. He used it to smack himself in the head.
"Shit. You're not twenty one."
"That won't be a problem. Allow me to introduce you to your new friend" - Dan shifted in his seat and dug a wallet out of his right pocket, flipping it open so the clear plastic ID sleeve showed - "Nick Carraway, twenty four, citizen of the good state of South Carolina."
Dan drawled out the last words.
"You're going to get me fired. You're going to get yourself fired."
"Neither of us is going to get fired."
"Nick Carraway might. And. Can I just say, if you were going to pick a pseudonym, you might have wanted one a bit less conspicuous than the name of the main character in one of the greatest American novels written this century?"
"Case, my friend, I think you're overestimating the intelligence of your average New Hampshire bouncer and underestimating the importance of one Jay Gatsby."
"Nick is the narrator. Ergo, he falls under the umbrella of main character." Casey turned off the ignition and unbuckled his seat belt. Blinked. "Doesn't he?"
"I can't believe they awarded you a diploma at whatever corn-state school you attended."
"Indiana."
"Congratulations."
"It's a good school. I'll have you know I graduated Phi Beta Kappa."
"Yet your professors still didn't teach you what determines a main character in a novel. The novel. But why quibble when there is drinking to be done?"
"Tonight, I'm drinking with Nick Carraway." Casey grinned at the new intern sitting in the passenger seat.
"You're drinking with Nick Carraway."
"Do you usually attempt to win over your direct superiors by being a total asshole?"
Dan laughed. "It's always worked before."
The air outside the car was so cold that when it hit Casey's lungs it was almost caustic, and that sharp just-slapped feeling, combined with the bracing wind, was the only reason he didn't tell Dan it was working now.
*
Casey learned more about Dan - Danny - in their first three weeks of working together than he knew about some of the guys that he had to that point considered his closest friends. Dan hated soccer, had a total hard-on for The Great Gatsby, and wrote better copy than anyone who was only eighteen had a right to.
They rotated through Casey's favorite watering holes, testing Danny's fake at each one. Casey learned how to stop holding his breath as the bouncer tilted the laminated card in the light. Okay, sometimes he still held his breath, but he eventually stopped feeling guilty about contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
On Christmas Eve, Casey learned about Sam and the accident. He listened to the words spill out of Danny's lips. As the thin sounds of Christmas carols floated over the porch, he wished that he could wrap his hands around Danny's heart, to mend what was broken.
Collecting and applying knowledge was Casey's raison d'etre. At the age of eleven he could recite the Pacers' win-loss records for every season, including the ones that were played before he was born. By the time he graduated college he could speak four languages. Assembly manuals weren't generally a problem unless they were printed in Japanese.
That night Casey made a promise to himself. Even if it took the rest of his life, he would find the answers for Danny. He would find the way to fix him. If that failed, at the very least he would see to it that Danny would never be hurt in that way again.
It was a promise that he meant to keep.
1993. Dallas.
Lisa wanted to try for another baby. That's how she phrased it, try for another baby, which should have clued him in in the first place.
"What, things aren't working out so well with Charlie?"
It was meant as a joke. Their son was in the midst of his terrible twos and refused to walk anywhere when he could run instead. Lisa had been to the emergency room twice in less than three months; Charlie's latest set of stitches still hadn't been removed.
"No," she said quietly. Her hands were busy chopping a tomato. "Things aren't working out so well with you." The knife thunked methodically against the wooden board and a thick, sticky breeze blew in through the open window above the sink. "We haven't had sex in a month, Casey."
The awful thing was, three seconds after it was out of her mouth he had done the math and she was right. Even worse, he hadn't noticed. He was twenty six years old, he had been married for less than five years and he hadn't noticed he and Lisa weren't having sex.
"So, what, Lisa? You think a baby is an insurance policy against us having problems? God knows I've been working - trying to - "
She put down the knife and faced him head on. "I'm tired of the goddamn television show. I'm tired of the endless ESPN and the two, three hour telephone calls every night. You know what I think? I think you're putting all your eggs in one basket and that basket is Danny Rydell. Casey, I'm your wife. We're your family. We're supposed to be your basket."
There was no way of responding to her statement. It took him a moment to process, and when it had run through all the cogs and wheels he didn't have an answer, either, because he knew that she was telling the truth.
"The things you expect to hear from me. I can't say those things, Lisa. What do you want me to say?"
"I don't know." Her mouth turned down on the left side, the way it did when she was really upset. She shifted her attention to the colander filled with green beans, snapping their stems viciously.
Dinner that night was a cold affair of please-pass-the-salts and clanking ice cubes. Later his wife tucked Charlie in alone, reading him four stories rather than the usual two. Eventually she curled up on their queen size mattress without touching Casey. She didn't put her cold feet on Casey's calves or try to steal the blankets or anything.
All night he felt her lying beside him, polite and demure.
It would have been easy, at any point during the night, to roll over, rest his chin against the back of her neck, wrap an arm around her waist. Apologize.
He didn't
Over breakfast the next morning he said, "I'm going to go to New Hampshire to see Danny graduate." To his surprise, she didn't fight him.
Even without a battle he felt as though something had been lost.
*
The drive was straightforward, following the curving path he marked meticulously with yellow highlighter on maps obtained from Triple-A. Miles of flat interstate through scrub cattle pastures were followed by the nauseating twists of the Ozark mountains.
At a third-rate motel off of I-40, Casey carefully folded the entirely questionable comforter to the foot of the bed and placed a towel from his duffle bag over the pillowcase before he laid down, still in his clothes. He vowed to only sleep long enough to get refreshed. Instead, he awakened to bright sun through the slats of the blinds, four hours behind schedule if he was going to arrive in time for the ceremony.
Danny’s graduation announcement was jammed behind the sun visor. Every hundred miles or so Casey flipped the visor down and checked that it was still there, re-reading the words to himself and feeling a swell of pride run through his whole body.
At a rest stop in Virginia he loaded the slot of a payphone with quarters and dimes before hanging up the receiver. The coins clanked down in the return.
There was nothing that he could say to Lisa. His genteel upbringing insisted that it was only proper to call his wife and tell her he hadn’t died in a fiery pileup. He owed her that. But he also knew that if he called he would have to say he was sorry; he knew the only apology she would accept involved him going home, and he wasn't willing to give this up.
He pressed the accelerator to the floor and drove.
*
Parking at Dartmouth was a total bitch. A bit of creative driving meant that Casey arrived on campus on time, but if parking hadn't been such a bitch, he would have found Danny beforehand and then they would have spent the ceremony exchanging bored looks across the stands, which is how Casey remembered his own college graduation. He didn't need a ticket to get in, thank god, but by the time he took a crowded shuttle bus from a remote lot the procession was over and the commencement address had already begun.
He wound up in a seat on the wrong side of the stadium in almost the highest bleacher, looking down on the beginning of the alphabet. Locating Danny among row upon row of identical dark robes was next to impossible; he finally spotted him just before the speaker got to the “P”’s.
As Danny crossed the stage Casey made a megaphone out of his hands and shouted “Way to go!” His voice swam and got lost in the other catcalls and whistles, but he felt good to be there, adding to the cacophony.
After the ceremony it took him longer than he expected to make his way through the crowd while he prayed that Dan stayed in the last place he saw him. But then he found him and he smiled and they smiled and it was like fucking divine intervention in a field.
He tackled Danny so hard that they almost fell over onto someone's grandmother. It was a perfect moment and Casey was convinced that he would risk Lisa's unending wrath, would make the same stupid, cramping eighteen hundred mile drive twice a month if it meant that at the end of it, he got to see Danny's face looking like it did right then.
*
When they finally made it back to his car, Casey had to shove all the trip-crap from the passenger seat onto the floor just so Danny could sit down.
“You drove up here from Dallas?” Dan demanded. “You realize we have to make this same drive again in two weeks?”
“It’s your graduation. I wanted to be here,” he said. “Lisa’s home with Charlie.”
He had a laundry list of things he could tell Dan - it was Danny, after all, who might have pretended to mind but in reality wouldn't - but he wasn't going to start. It was Danny's day, and he wasn't going to ruin it with some bullshit about the problems he and Lisa were having or a hypothetical marriage-saving baby. On that day, there were windows to be rolled down and beers to be drank; on that day he was with his best friend.
Once on the road, Dan shuffled day-old Wendy's boxes with his feet. He discovered one of Charlie's old pacifiers and pretended to put it into his mouth before Casey batted it away. He rifled through the glove box, analyzing Casey's selection of cassette tapes.
"Seriously, man. What is this shit?" Danny asked, holding one up.
"Mmm? Oh, that's Lisa's."
"Wilson Phillips. You two are lucky that taste in music isn't genetic or we'd have to discuss sterilization."
The words made Casey flinch, but it wasn't Danny's fault. Salt didn't sting unless there was an open wound.
Casey tried giving Dan a dirty look and failed miserably. "Give me that."
The tape was unceremoniously yanked out of Danny's hand.
Less than two minutes later they were belting out in unison "someday somebody's gonna make you want to turn around and say goodbye!" Danny was drumming out the beat on the dashboard with the heels of his palms and Casey was laughing so hard his chest physically hurt.
You've got no one to blame for your unhappiness. You got yourself into your own mess. Lettin' your worries pass you by. Don't you think it's worth your time. To change your mind?
He really should not sing, ever, but it felt so goddamn good, to be finally, finally sitting with Danny, attempting three part harmony at the top of his lungs.
No, he wasn't sorry he had come. Not one bit.
*
"Yeah, I'm at a bar," he yelled. "Jesus Christ, can we just drop - hey, do I hear Charlie? Put him on - hey, Charlie Barley, it's Daddy!" Casey pressed back against the wall as one of the bathroom doors swung open.
"Uh-huh? You did?" He switched the phone to his left ear and chuckled. "How big? That's pretty big, buddy. You'll have to tell me all about it - hello? Are you there? Hey, hey, if you can hear me, can you give your mama the phone for me? Bye bye, I lov -
"Hi. Yeah, I'm still here, where the fuck did you think -"
The sound system played a song with a pounding bass line. Casey cupped his hand over his right ear.
"What? Oh. Wednesday, probably," he said flatly. "Okay. Okay. Lisa? Hello?"
The goddamn music blasted through his sinus cavity.
"Hello?"
He slammed the phone back into its cradle and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Before trying to shoulder back through the narrow hallway he took a deep breath, plastered on an anchorman smile.
And we're live in three, two…
At their booth, Danny waited with two new bottles of beer, spinning his graduation cap on one finger.
"Welcome back. I became concerned that you were climbing Everest instead of taking a piss."
"Mmm," he shrugged and tipped his Bud to his lips. "Next time I'll have my Sherpa radio you with updates from base camp."
Danny stopped spinning the cap and moved to put it down next to their empty bottles. He paused, then reached across the table and plunked it on Casey's head instead. Forming a square with his long fingers, he used them to frame Casey's face and clicked his tongue.
"Welcome to the summit."
Casey grinned.
*
Even mostly-packed, Dan's apartment still looked like college. Warped cardboard coasters advertising various beers littered the coffee table. The couch was an off-print and it sagged in the middle where Casey had mended the wooden frame with duct tape. The stain on the arm where someone had dropped a slice of pizza during the '92 NBA Finals was still there, mottled into a curious brown.
"Oof," said Casey as he fell onto the sofa. He was starting to get too old for drinking until the wee hours and sleeping without the necessary support. Through the haze of beer, he still couldn't help thinking that back was going to hurt like hell tomorrow in the car. He was an old, old, old man.
Old, reliable, responsible Casey, fixer of couches. Marrier of wives and father of babies and wearer of sensible shoes with arch support.
"Whoops, hi." Danny was drunk and un-sensible, and as he had tried to arrange himself on the sofa his head had come to a rest on Casey. Casey laughed, feeling the weight of Danny's head and shoulders redistribute across his chest.
"Hi."
Danny Danny Danny. Young and frivolous and warm Danny.
"Hey, Case," Danny's eyes were closed and his cheeks were flushed. His Danny.
"Hey Dan."
"Was Lisa pissed? Pissed that you came out here, I mean."
Are you with Danny?
It had been loud in the bar, even with his fingers pressed over his ear, a vain attempt at blocking out the noise, but through the shoddy receiver Lisa's voice had been clear enough for him to catch the inflection.
"Are you with Danny?"
He had heard the rest in his mind, the accusation implied by those four little words. He spends two hours on the phone each night with Danny. They don't talk anymore because he talks to Danny. They don't fuck anymore because he talks to Danny. He might as well just be fucking Danny. Is he fucking Danny?
So. Fine. Maybe he'd always been emotionally in love with Danny, just a little bit. But he was straight. He was a heterosexual married man with a heterosexual married cock.
Except for sometimes when his best friend laughed really hard, or drank a beer, or said something brilliant, or played racquetball with him.
Danny was still sprawled across Casey's lap, waiting for a response.
Casey slid his fingers into Danny's hair. It was crunchy and a little sticky from gel and sweat, and he played at breaking the clumps apart with his fingertips.
"Doesn't matter," he finally replied. The fingers he was running through Danny's hair just then, they weren't gay fingers. When Charlie snugged into Casey's lap, curling into a puppyish little ball, Casey would do the same thing. What he was doing with Danny was habitual, Casey rationalized. But.
Habitual wasn't supposed to make your heart race, to make it difficult to keep your breathing steady.
“It matters a little.”
With those four words Lisa had destroyed years of denial and self censoring and the fact that when it came to certain verboten topics, Casey could be as dense as a fucking lead wall. No. No. It was - it was something that had existed since that first Christmas on the porch; an unnamed something he always knew but had just begun to recognize for what it actually was.
“No. It doesn’t,” Casey said firmly. “Doesn’t matter to me, shouldn’t matter to you.”
“Okay.”
Dan rolled, burying his face in the front of Casey's oversized shirt. God. He fought the urge to trail a finger around Danny's ear, tug down his lip and watch to see if Danny would suck it into his mouth. Closing his eyes, he instead concentrated on the feel of Danny's hair and scalp, rubbing in tiny practiced circles.
"So fucking proud of you, Danny," Casey murmured a minute later. Across his legs he felt Danny breathing, slow and even.
*
He didn't remember sleeping but he must have at some point because it seemed to happen so suddenly; Danny curled around him, covering his body at a different angle.
Dan's erection, pressing into Casey's hip.
Adrenaline surged through his body, every inch of his skin jolted fully awake. He bit the inside of his cheek, tried not to imagine Danny's hips moving, riding him, and failed miserably.
At least Danny wasn't awake to witness Casey's desperate thoughts.
This, like all things, would subside. He was a good husband and a good father and maybe he was in love with his best friend, cock and all, but he wasn't an adulterer. Danny would stay asleep and he would go home to Lisa. He would return to his usual repressed self, chalk the temporary lapse in straightness up to one weird, drunk night, just like the time he and Lisa had been so desperate to touch that they come home from a party and done it in a garbage can filled closet in her dorm, against the utility sink.
He wrapped his arm around Danny's waist, not trying to wake him. Just trying to keep him there. Locking in the feeling of their bodies, together, not quite doing but simply being. This would have to be enough, he thought.
It had to be enough.
*
Danny stirred, tried to move away before Casey was done committing the moment to memory.
“No. No, it’s okay." He heard himself mutter. I don't know what's okay and what's not, he thought. His voice snagged in his throat. "Danny."
Danny opened his eyes, wrapped his knuckles in Casey's shirt. The fabric shifted and strained against Casey's lower back.
They only had this moment; they only had the here and now. It was all anybody ever had and most people didn't even have it as good as this. Danny was his basket. Lisa already thought -
He had nothing to lose so he bent his neck, put his mouth on Danny's hair. Danny could say no. Just because he had a - perfectly natural physiological reaction - it didn't mean it was because of Casey - just because Casey wanted didn't mean that Danny wanted -
Danny made a noise that could have been a moan and Casey stopped rationalizing. He watched the rest of his life arc away from his body like a perfect ten foot jump shot. Lifting his mouth from Danny's hair, he moved lower, to Danny's temple, his cheek, following a route that wasn't highlighted on any map.
*
The next morning, they didn't talk about it.
The night played on an endless excruciating loop in Casey's head. The desperate thrust and grab of their bodies, the feel of Danny's tongue in his mouth. The awful wrenching almost-sick feeling as Danny had extricated himself. The closed-mouth kiss, like an apology.
Every silence felt too long. Each one was another opportunity for Dan to stop whatever it was they were doing and say, "about coming to Texas, I don't think it's smart…," so Casey filled the time with aimless banter. The Orioles, Dana Whitaker's plans for the show, Charlie's rapidly expanding vocabulary - "He's gonna win a Pulitzer, Danny, I know it" - "Will that be before or after he delivers the Heisman you promised a month ago?"
He took every step, every precaution to make sure that their interaction was the same as it always had been, the Danny-and-Casey, the quick patter and outlandish one-upsmanship. No mention of his hands, underneath Dan's clothes; the insanely amazing feel of hot skin and hotter lips.
At the car, he hugged Danny tight, inhaling his scent as if he could carry Danny all the way to Texas in his lungs.
“See you in two weeks." He tried to keep it from sounding like a question. Dan nodded.
Casey slipped the keys into the ignition and listened to the warning ding for a long moment before pulling the door shut behind him.
“Eleven days." The words floated to him over the roar of the engine.
Casey rested his left forearm on the window frame and twisted in his seat to look at Danny. “Eleven days?”
“By the time you get home to Dallas,” Dan said. “It’ll be eleven days, then.”
The last time Casey had cried, not counting groin-related injuries, had been the day Charlie was born. Lisa went into labor three weeks early. He'd been out in the field doing coverage on U.N.H.'s women's lacrosse team when the word had come in from his producer. Casey had gotten the shakes when he tried to get behind the wheel, and Danny made the two hour drive to the hospital in a flat hour and fifteen. For the first twenty miles Danny kept Casey's trembling hand gripped in his, and joked that if Casey kept holding on so tight, by the time they reached the hospital he was going to be the one who needed Darvocet.
Casey blinked repeatedly, converted the emotion to a grin. Danny smiled back, broad and real, and god, if he wasn't going to be okay, if they weren't going to be okay then Casey would bet everything he had.
He felt like he already had, and had won.
“Eleven days,” he choked out.
Casey punched the air with his fist as he put the car into gear, and pure joy made him bring his palm down the horn, beeping ecstatically, as if he could announce what he was feeling to the world.
He had a breeze drifting through his open windows and eighteen hundred miles ahead of him. Lisa would be waiting at home, and Charlie, and Dana and Lone Star Sports, and maybe none of those things would work out the way he had planned for them to. But through those and everything else there would always be Danny. Danny, holding his hand, walking him through. The two of them. Partners. Side by side, just like they were meant to be.
Just like they had always been meant to be.
He kept his eyes on the rearview mirror until Danny blurred away.
a thousand miles seems pretty far
but they've got planes and trains and cars
I'd walk to you if I had no other way
our friends would all make fun of us
and we'll just laugh along because we know
that none of them have felt this way
-- hey there delilah, plain white t's
mirror, courtesy puppetoflove: hey there, delilah
With thanks to my crack team of insecurity-soothing mavens, including but not limited to helpwess, puppetoflove, jascott and the rest of the R.C's and cabal.
For torchthisnow, with adoration. All of my best ideas come from your brain.
Landlocked Blues
by missdeviant
I've grown tired of holding this pose
I feel more like a stranger each time I come home
So I'm making a deal with the devils of fate
Saying let me walk away. Please.
-- Landlocked Blues, Bright Eyes
1989. New Hampshire.
The median age of the staff at the Valley News was a paltry 27 years when Casey McCall had started working there. It was one of the things that had stuck with him after his first interview. The paper had seemed like the kind of place where he could develop seniority quickly, where he wouldn't be passed up for a promotion just because he was young and fresh-faced and Midwestern.
He hadn't been wrong about how quickly he'd advance through the ranks. The former sports editor, a thirty year veteran of the business whose wardrobe appeared to be stolen from the closets of Nixon-era Woodward and Bernstein, had retired after Casey had been on the job for less than three months. There hadn't been enough money in the budget to fill Casey's old position, but he didn't have time to worry about the workload. Without a major sports team in a hundred mile radius, the only beat was the high school beat more than half the time.
What he hadn't expected was the difficulty that he had trying to break into the tightly knit ranks of the twenty-somethings who ran the newsroom. They were congenial, to be sure. Casey never doubted that he was liked, or that his coworkers appreciated the work that he did. Still, there was something vaguely incestuous about their interactions, and they all seemed to be in tacit agreement that Casey wasn't a part of the family.
"Go home," someone would inevitably say when midnight rolled around and Casey was still hunched over a microfilm reader trying to determine whether the Southport High football team's losing streak was the worst in its history. (It was.) "You haven't been married long enough to put in this much voluntary overtime."
So he would.
Casey would sometimes remember this time as golden. He was young, idealistic, and able to function on a salary of under twenty grand. More often, he remembered it as being too quiet, the colorless empty calm before a welcome storm.
*
When Casey heard the new intern was eighteen, fresh off his first semester at Dartmouth, he'd expected to meet someone wide-eyed, innocent; someone who'd be a little cowed, even by their less than impressive paper. Someone Casey would have to coax from his shell of "yes sirs" and "no sirs." In short, he expected a version of himself at eighteen.
Dan Rydell was none of those things.
"Newlywed?"
It was one of the first things that Casey remembered Dan asking him. It had come after formal introductions and the editor in chief's facility tour, which featured such highlights as the cabinet where they kept the coffee filters. (It was a slow news day. Casey spied.) It came just after they'd exchanged a hearty welcome-to-the-office handshake across the peeling laminate of the break room table.
"Close enough." The gold of his ring still sometimes caught him off guard, especially when it reflected the light.
"Thought so. You've still got that new car smell."
Casey paused. "I smell like a car?"
"Actually, you smell like gyros. I was just using metaphor. I've heard writers do that." Danny flipped a pencil that he had been holding and caught it, eraser end, before sliding it over his left ear.
"Is that so? Teach you that at Dartmouth, did they?"
"I'm self-taught." He smiled widely.
The guy was brash, too brash for his first day. It should have been jarring given that they had known each other for all of four hours, but it's the first really real conversation Casey'd had with anyone in the office since he started, and he made up his mind to like Dan at that moment.
Casey chuckled. "Maybe you can self-teach yourself to bring me some coffee later, intern?"
"Aye aye, boss." Dan gave a little salute. Not quite a yes sir, but good enough.
Casey showed Dan the ropes for the rest of the day. Dan learned about the microfilm reader that has a tendency to jam and which must be avoided at all costs, and the toilet that clogged and how to change the ribbon on the Smith-Corona.
"I can see this is a cutting edge operation," Dan said as Casey's fingers came away black.
"I'm angling for one with a built in word processor screen."
They talked about the U.S. Open even though there was a foot and a half of snow on the ground and even when it became clear that he and Dan were going to be the only two left in the office at the end of the day, no one reminded Casey that he should be going home to his wife.
"Am I keeping you?" he asked Dan, an embarrassed afterthought, as he hauled the station's old black and white television out of storage. It was a clear night, and he had already boasted that he could pick up the NBC affiliate out of Albany for the Knicks-Sixers game.
"Hell no."
The game was a good one, and the night didn't seem to be willing to end just because they had to lock up the office. Casey called Lisa and told her he'd be late, he was taking the new guy out for drinks. She was already well-versed in his difficulty integrating himself into the crowd, so she didn't even protest, just laughed and reminded him that workaholism wasn't in the vows alongside sickness and health.
They were already in the parking lot of the bar when Casey's hand came off the steering wheel of his graduation-gift Corolla. He used it to smack himself in the head.
"Shit. You're not twenty one."
"That won't be a problem. Allow me to introduce you to your new friend" - Dan shifted in his seat and dug a wallet out of his right pocket, flipping it open so the clear plastic ID sleeve showed - "Nick Carraway, twenty four, citizen of the good state of South Carolina."
Dan drawled out the last words.
"You're going to get me fired. You're going to get yourself fired."
"Neither of us is going to get fired."
"Nick Carraway might. And. Can I just say, if you were going to pick a pseudonym, you might have wanted one a bit less conspicuous than the name of the main character in one of the greatest American novels written this century?"
"Case, my friend, I think you're overestimating the intelligence of your average New Hampshire bouncer and underestimating the importance of one Jay Gatsby."
"Nick is the narrator. Ergo, he falls under the umbrella of main character." Casey turned off the ignition and unbuckled his seat belt. Blinked. "Doesn't he?"
"I can't believe they awarded you a diploma at whatever corn-state school you attended."
"Indiana."
"Congratulations."
"It's a good school. I'll have you know I graduated Phi Beta Kappa."
"Yet your professors still didn't teach you what determines a main character in a novel. The novel. But why quibble when there is drinking to be done?"
"Tonight, I'm drinking with Nick Carraway." Casey grinned at the new intern sitting in the passenger seat.
"You're drinking with Nick Carraway."
"Do you usually attempt to win over your direct superiors by being a total asshole?"
Dan laughed. "It's always worked before."
The air outside the car was so cold that when it hit Casey's lungs it was almost caustic, and that sharp just-slapped feeling, combined with the bracing wind, was the only reason he didn't tell Dan it was working now.
*
Casey learned more about Dan - Danny - in their first three weeks of working together than he knew about some of the guys that he had to that point considered his closest friends. Dan hated soccer, had a total hard-on for The Great Gatsby, and wrote better copy than anyone who was only eighteen had a right to.
They rotated through Casey's favorite watering holes, testing Danny's fake at each one. Casey learned how to stop holding his breath as the bouncer tilted the laminated card in the light. Okay, sometimes he still held his breath, but he eventually stopped feeling guilty about contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
On Christmas Eve, Casey learned about Sam and the accident. He listened to the words spill out of Danny's lips. As the thin sounds of Christmas carols floated over the porch, he wished that he could wrap his hands around Danny's heart, to mend what was broken.
Collecting and applying knowledge was Casey's raison d'etre. At the age of eleven he could recite the Pacers' win-loss records for every season, including the ones that were played before he was born. By the time he graduated college he could speak four languages. Assembly manuals weren't generally a problem unless they were printed in Japanese.
That night Casey made a promise to himself. Even if it took the rest of his life, he would find the answers for Danny. He would find the way to fix him. If that failed, at the very least he would see to it that Danny would never be hurt in that way again.
It was a promise that he meant to keep.
1993. Dallas.
Lisa wanted to try for another baby. That's how she phrased it, try for another baby, which should have clued him in in the first place.
"What, things aren't working out so well with Charlie?"
It was meant as a joke. Their son was in the midst of his terrible twos and refused to walk anywhere when he could run instead. Lisa had been to the emergency room twice in less than three months; Charlie's latest set of stitches still hadn't been removed.
"No," she said quietly. Her hands were busy chopping a tomato. "Things aren't working out so well with you." The knife thunked methodically against the wooden board and a thick, sticky breeze blew in through the open window above the sink. "We haven't had sex in a month, Casey."
The awful thing was, three seconds after it was out of her mouth he had done the math and she was right. Even worse, he hadn't noticed. He was twenty six years old, he had been married for less than five years and he hadn't noticed he and Lisa weren't having sex.
"So, what, Lisa? You think a baby is an insurance policy against us having problems? God knows I've been working - trying to - "
She put down the knife and faced him head on. "I'm tired of the goddamn television show. I'm tired of the endless ESPN and the two, three hour telephone calls every night. You know what I think? I think you're putting all your eggs in one basket and that basket is Danny Rydell. Casey, I'm your wife. We're your family. We're supposed to be your basket."
There was no way of responding to her statement. It took him a moment to process, and when it had run through all the cogs and wheels he didn't have an answer, either, because he knew that she was telling the truth.
"The things you expect to hear from me. I can't say those things, Lisa. What do you want me to say?"
"I don't know." Her mouth turned down on the left side, the way it did when she was really upset. She shifted her attention to the colander filled with green beans, snapping their stems viciously.
Dinner that night was a cold affair of please-pass-the-salts and clanking ice cubes. Later his wife tucked Charlie in alone, reading him four stories rather than the usual two. Eventually she curled up on their queen size mattress without touching Casey. She didn't put her cold feet on Casey's calves or try to steal the blankets or anything.
All night he felt her lying beside him, polite and demure.
It would have been easy, at any point during the night, to roll over, rest his chin against the back of her neck, wrap an arm around her waist. Apologize.
He didn't
Over breakfast the next morning he said, "I'm going to go to New Hampshire to see Danny graduate." To his surprise, she didn't fight him.
Even without a battle he felt as though something had been lost.
*
The drive was straightforward, following the curving path he marked meticulously with yellow highlighter on maps obtained from Triple-A. Miles of flat interstate through scrub cattle pastures were followed by the nauseating twists of the Ozark mountains.
At a third-rate motel off of I-40, Casey carefully folded the entirely questionable comforter to the foot of the bed and placed a towel from his duffle bag over the pillowcase before he laid down, still in his clothes. He vowed to only sleep long enough to get refreshed. Instead, he awakened to bright sun through the slats of the blinds, four hours behind schedule if he was going to arrive in time for the ceremony.
Danny’s graduation announcement was jammed behind the sun visor. Every hundred miles or so Casey flipped the visor down and checked that it was still there, re-reading the words to himself and feeling a swell of pride run through his whole body.
At a rest stop in Virginia he loaded the slot of a payphone with quarters and dimes before hanging up the receiver. The coins clanked down in the return.
There was nothing that he could say to Lisa. His genteel upbringing insisted that it was only proper to call his wife and tell her he hadn’t died in a fiery pileup. He owed her that. But he also knew that if he called he would have to say he was sorry; he knew the only apology she would accept involved him going home, and he wasn't willing to give this up.
He pressed the accelerator to the floor and drove.
*
Parking at Dartmouth was a total bitch. A bit of creative driving meant that Casey arrived on campus on time, but if parking hadn't been such a bitch, he would have found Danny beforehand and then they would have spent the ceremony exchanging bored looks across the stands, which is how Casey remembered his own college graduation. He didn't need a ticket to get in, thank god, but by the time he took a crowded shuttle bus from a remote lot the procession was over and the commencement address had already begun.
He wound up in a seat on the wrong side of the stadium in almost the highest bleacher, looking down on the beginning of the alphabet. Locating Danny among row upon row of identical dark robes was next to impossible; he finally spotted him just before the speaker got to the “P”’s.
As Danny crossed the stage Casey made a megaphone out of his hands and shouted “Way to go!” His voice swam and got lost in the other catcalls and whistles, but he felt good to be there, adding to the cacophony.
After the ceremony it took him longer than he expected to make his way through the crowd while he prayed that Dan stayed in the last place he saw him. But then he found him and he smiled and they smiled and it was like fucking divine intervention in a field.
He tackled Danny so hard that they almost fell over onto someone's grandmother. It was a perfect moment and Casey was convinced that he would risk Lisa's unending wrath, would make the same stupid, cramping eighteen hundred mile drive twice a month if it meant that at the end of it, he got to see Danny's face looking like it did right then.
*
When they finally made it back to his car, Casey had to shove all the trip-crap from the passenger seat onto the floor just so Danny could sit down.
“You drove up here from Dallas?” Dan demanded. “You realize we have to make this same drive again in two weeks?”
“It’s your graduation. I wanted to be here,” he said. “Lisa’s home with Charlie.”
He had a laundry list of things he could tell Dan - it was Danny, after all, who might have pretended to mind but in reality wouldn't - but he wasn't going to start. It was Danny's day, and he wasn't going to ruin it with some bullshit about the problems he and Lisa were having or a hypothetical marriage-saving baby. On that day, there were windows to be rolled down and beers to be drank; on that day he was with his best friend.
Once on the road, Dan shuffled day-old Wendy's boxes with his feet. He discovered one of Charlie's old pacifiers and pretended to put it into his mouth before Casey batted it away. He rifled through the glove box, analyzing Casey's selection of cassette tapes.
"Seriously, man. What is this shit?" Danny asked, holding one up.
"Mmm? Oh, that's Lisa's."
"Wilson Phillips. You two are lucky that taste in music isn't genetic or we'd have to discuss sterilization."
The words made Casey flinch, but it wasn't Danny's fault. Salt didn't sting unless there was an open wound.
Casey tried giving Dan a dirty look and failed miserably. "Give me that."
The tape was unceremoniously yanked out of Danny's hand.
Less than two minutes later they were belting out in unison "someday somebody's gonna make you want to turn around and say goodbye!" Danny was drumming out the beat on the dashboard with the heels of his palms and Casey was laughing so hard his chest physically hurt.
You've got no one to blame for your unhappiness. You got yourself into your own mess. Lettin' your worries pass you by. Don't you think it's worth your time. To change your mind?
He really should not sing, ever, but it felt so goddamn good, to be finally, finally sitting with Danny, attempting three part harmony at the top of his lungs.
No, he wasn't sorry he had come. Not one bit.
*
"Yeah, I'm at a bar," he yelled. "Jesus Christ, can we just drop - hey, do I hear Charlie? Put him on - hey, Charlie Barley, it's Daddy!" Casey pressed back against the wall as one of the bathroom doors swung open.
"Uh-huh? You did?" He switched the phone to his left ear and chuckled. "How big? That's pretty big, buddy. You'll have to tell me all about it - hello? Are you there? Hey, hey, if you can hear me, can you give your mama the phone for me? Bye bye, I lov -
"Hi. Yeah, I'm still here, where the fuck did you think -"
The sound system played a song with a pounding bass line. Casey cupped his hand over his right ear.
"What? Oh. Wednesday, probably," he said flatly. "Okay. Okay. Lisa? Hello?"
The goddamn music blasted through his sinus cavity.
"Hello?"
He slammed the phone back into its cradle and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. Before trying to shoulder back through the narrow hallway he took a deep breath, plastered on an anchorman smile.
And we're live in three, two…
At their booth, Danny waited with two new bottles of beer, spinning his graduation cap on one finger.
"Welcome back. I became concerned that you were climbing Everest instead of taking a piss."
"Mmm," he shrugged and tipped his Bud to his lips. "Next time I'll have my Sherpa radio you with updates from base camp."
Danny stopped spinning the cap and moved to put it down next to their empty bottles. He paused, then reached across the table and plunked it on Casey's head instead. Forming a square with his long fingers, he used them to frame Casey's face and clicked his tongue.
"Welcome to the summit."
Casey grinned.
*
Even mostly-packed, Dan's apartment still looked like college. Warped cardboard coasters advertising various beers littered the coffee table. The couch was an off-print and it sagged in the middle where Casey had mended the wooden frame with duct tape. The stain on the arm where someone had dropped a slice of pizza during the '92 NBA Finals was still there, mottled into a curious brown.
"Oof," said Casey as he fell onto the sofa. He was starting to get too old for drinking until the wee hours and sleeping without the necessary support. Through the haze of beer, he still couldn't help thinking that back was going to hurt like hell tomorrow in the car. He was an old, old, old man.
Old, reliable, responsible Casey, fixer of couches. Marrier of wives and father of babies and wearer of sensible shoes with arch support.
"Whoops, hi." Danny was drunk and un-sensible, and as he had tried to arrange himself on the sofa his head had come to a rest on Casey. Casey laughed, feeling the weight of Danny's head and shoulders redistribute across his chest.
"Hi."
Danny Danny Danny. Young and frivolous and warm Danny.
"Hey, Case," Danny's eyes were closed and his cheeks were flushed. His Danny.
"Hey Dan."
"Was Lisa pissed? Pissed that you came out here, I mean."
Are you with Danny?
It had been loud in the bar, even with his fingers pressed over his ear, a vain attempt at blocking out the noise, but through the shoddy receiver Lisa's voice had been clear enough for him to catch the inflection.
"Are you with Danny?"
He had heard the rest in his mind, the accusation implied by those four little words. He spends two hours on the phone each night with Danny. They don't talk anymore because he talks to Danny. They don't fuck anymore because he talks to Danny. He might as well just be fucking Danny. Is he fucking Danny?
So. Fine. Maybe he'd always been emotionally in love with Danny, just a little bit. But he was straight. He was a heterosexual married man with a heterosexual married cock.
Except for sometimes when his best friend laughed really hard, or drank a beer, or said something brilliant, or played racquetball with him.
Danny was still sprawled across Casey's lap, waiting for a response.
Casey slid his fingers into Danny's hair. It was crunchy and a little sticky from gel and sweat, and he played at breaking the clumps apart with his fingertips.
"Doesn't matter," he finally replied. The fingers he was running through Danny's hair just then, they weren't gay fingers. When Charlie snugged into Casey's lap, curling into a puppyish little ball, Casey would do the same thing. What he was doing with Danny was habitual, Casey rationalized. But.
Habitual wasn't supposed to make your heart race, to make it difficult to keep your breathing steady.
“It matters a little.”
With those four words Lisa had destroyed years of denial and self censoring and the fact that when it came to certain verboten topics, Casey could be as dense as a fucking lead wall. No. No. It was - it was something that had existed since that first Christmas on the porch; an unnamed something he always knew but had just begun to recognize for what it actually was.
“No. It doesn’t,” Casey said firmly. “Doesn’t matter to me, shouldn’t matter to you.”
“Okay.”
Dan rolled, burying his face in the front of Casey's oversized shirt. God. He fought the urge to trail a finger around Danny's ear, tug down his lip and watch to see if Danny would suck it into his mouth. Closing his eyes, he instead concentrated on the feel of Danny's hair and scalp, rubbing in tiny practiced circles.
"So fucking proud of you, Danny," Casey murmured a minute later. Across his legs he felt Danny breathing, slow and even.
*
He didn't remember sleeping but he must have at some point because it seemed to happen so suddenly; Danny curled around him, covering his body at a different angle.
Dan's erection, pressing into Casey's hip.
Adrenaline surged through his body, every inch of his skin jolted fully awake. He bit the inside of his cheek, tried not to imagine Danny's hips moving, riding him, and failed miserably.
At least Danny wasn't awake to witness Casey's desperate thoughts.
This, like all things, would subside. He was a good husband and a good father and maybe he was in love with his best friend, cock and all, but he wasn't an adulterer. Danny would stay asleep and he would go home to Lisa. He would return to his usual repressed self, chalk the temporary lapse in straightness up to one weird, drunk night, just like the time he and Lisa had been so desperate to touch that they come home from a party and done it in a garbage can filled closet in her dorm, against the utility sink.
He wrapped his arm around Danny's waist, not trying to wake him. Just trying to keep him there. Locking in the feeling of their bodies, together, not quite doing but simply being. This would have to be enough, he thought.
It had to be enough.
*
Danny stirred, tried to move away before Casey was done committing the moment to memory.
“No. No, it’s okay." He heard himself mutter. I don't know what's okay and what's not, he thought. His voice snagged in his throat. "Danny."
Danny opened his eyes, wrapped his knuckles in Casey's shirt. The fabric shifted and strained against Casey's lower back.
They only had this moment; they only had the here and now. It was all anybody ever had and most people didn't even have it as good as this. Danny was his basket. Lisa already thought -
He had nothing to lose so he bent his neck, put his mouth on Danny's hair. Danny could say no. Just because he had a - perfectly natural physiological reaction - it didn't mean it was because of Casey - just because Casey wanted didn't mean that Danny wanted -
Danny made a noise that could have been a moan and Casey stopped rationalizing. He watched the rest of his life arc away from his body like a perfect ten foot jump shot. Lifting his mouth from Danny's hair, he moved lower, to Danny's temple, his cheek, following a route that wasn't highlighted on any map.
*
The next morning, they didn't talk about it.
The night played on an endless excruciating loop in Casey's head. The desperate thrust and grab of their bodies, the feel of Danny's tongue in his mouth. The awful wrenching almost-sick feeling as Danny had extricated himself. The closed-mouth kiss, like an apology.
Every silence felt too long. Each one was another opportunity for Dan to stop whatever it was they were doing and say, "about coming to Texas, I don't think it's smart…," so Casey filled the time with aimless banter. The Orioles, Dana Whitaker's plans for the show, Charlie's rapidly expanding vocabulary - "He's gonna win a Pulitzer, Danny, I know it" - "Will that be before or after he delivers the Heisman you promised a month ago?"
He took every step, every precaution to make sure that their interaction was the same as it always had been, the Danny-and-Casey, the quick patter and outlandish one-upsmanship. No mention of his hands, underneath Dan's clothes; the insanely amazing feel of hot skin and hotter lips.
At the car, he hugged Danny tight, inhaling his scent as if he could carry Danny all the way to Texas in his lungs.
“See you in two weeks." He tried to keep it from sounding like a question. Dan nodded.
Casey slipped the keys into the ignition and listened to the warning ding for a long moment before pulling the door shut behind him.
“Eleven days." The words floated to him over the roar of the engine.
Casey rested his left forearm on the window frame and twisted in his seat to look at Danny. “Eleven days?”
“By the time you get home to Dallas,” Dan said. “It’ll be eleven days, then.”
The last time Casey had cried, not counting groin-related injuries, had been the day Charlie was born. Lisa went into labor three weeks early. He'd been out in the field doing coverage on U.N.H.'s women's lacrosse team when the word had come in from his producer. Casey had gotten the shakes when he tried to get behind the wheel, and Danny made the two hour drive to the hospital in a flat hour and fifteen. For the first twenty miles Danny kept Casey's trembling hand gripped in his, and joked that if Casey kept holding on so tight, by the time they reached the hospital he was going to be the one who needed Darvocet.
Casey blinked repeatedly, converted the emotion to a grin. Danny smiled back, broad and real, and god, if he wasn't going to be okay, if they weren't going to be okay then Casey would bet everything he had.
He felt like he already had, and had won.
“Eleven days,” he choked out.
Casey punched the air with his fist as he put the car into gear, and pure joy made him bring his palm down the horn, beeping ecstatically, as if he could announce what he was feeling to the world.
He had a breeze drifting through his open windows and eighteen hundred miles ahead of him. Lisa would be waiting at home, and Charlie, and Dana and Lone Star Sports, and maybe none of those things would work out the way he had planned for them to. But through those and everything else there would always be Danny. Danny, holding his hand, walking him through. The two of them. Partners. Side by side, just like they were meant to be.
Just like they had always been meant to be.
He kept his eyes on the rearview mirror until Danny blurred away.
a thousand miles seems pretty far
but they've got planes and trains and cars
I'd walk to you if I had no other way
our friends would all make fun of us
and we'll just laugh along because we know
that none of them have felt this way
-- hey there delilah, plain white t's
mirror, courtesy puppetoflove: hey there, delilah