Wasted – Chapter 1 – Earned It

The bar was too loud to talk in, which was probably why we went there.

Dane liked places like that – dim enough that his face didn’t have to do anything, loud enough that silence didn’t register as silence. He stood with his back almost against the wall, drink barely touched, watching the room the way he watched everything. Like he was cataloguing exits. Like he already knew how the night would end and was just waiting for the rest of us to catch up.

I was talking to a guy from the group next to ours. Some friend of a friend, tall, a little drunk, telling a story about a flight delay that had somehow turned into a story about his ex-wife, the way stories do after eleven.

I laughed. 

Not because it was funny. Because I’d had two drinks and the bar was warm and for about ninety seconds I forgot to check where Dane was.

That’s the part I remember most clearly. Not what the guy said. The ninety seconds.

When I looked over, Dane wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at his glass, turning it slightly on the bar top, the ice sliding in a slow circle. 

That should have told me nothing. A man looking at his drink. People do it constantly.

I knew immediately it told me everything.

I don’t know how to explain that to someone who’s never learned a person the way I’d learned Dane. 

It isn’t magic. It isn’t even instinct, not really. It’s just repetition.

 You watch someone enough times, in enough rooms, and you start reading the version of them that exists underneath the version they’re showing everyone else.

Dane’s face in public never changed. That was the whole trick of him. He could be furious and you’d never know it from across a room. You’d have to already know what to look for.

I looked for it. And I found it.

I finished my drink faster than I meant to. Said my goodbyes to the flight-delay guy, who didn’t seem to notice or care that I was leaving mid-sentence. Found my coat. Found Dane, who was already holding his keys, already moving toward the door like he’d decided we were leaving several minutes before I had.

He didn’t say anything about it in the parking lot. Didn’t say anything pulling out onto the main road. 

The radio was off. It’s always off when he’s like this – I used to think that was an accident, that he’d just forgotten to turn it on, before I understood that Dane doesn’t forget things.

He removes them. 

The radio, the small talk, the easy version of the ten minutes it takes to get home. All of it, gone, so there’s nothing left in the car except the two of us and whatever he’s decided we’re going to sit inside of.

Streetlights slid across the windshield. Orange, then dark, then orange again. I watched them instead of him.

“You had fun tonight,” he said, eventually.

Not a question. Dane rarely asked questions when he already had the answer.

“I did,” I said.

“I noticed.”

That was it. Three sentences. 

If you’d transcribed them and shown them to a stranger, they’d have shrugged. Nice night out, seems like. What’s the problem?

But I heard the whole conversation underneath the conversation, the one Dane and I have been having in shorthand for two years now, the one that doesn’t require him to raise his voice or make a single accusation. 

You had fun tonight meant you laughed at another man’s story and forgot I was in the room. I noticed meant I always notice, and you know I always notice, so don’t insult us both by acting surprised.

I could have said something. Could have said, it was nothing, he was just talking about his ex-wife, I wasn’t even listening. I could have reached over and put my hand on his leg the way I sometimes do when I need him to come back from wherever this version of him goes.

I didn’t do either of those things.

I sat there and let the quiet stretch out between us, mile after mile, past the gas station on Ninth, past the church with the marquee that always has something slightly wrong spelled on it, past the turn we usually take and don’t, tonight, because Dane’s taking the long way, and I know exactly why he’s taking the long way, and I don’t say anything about that either.

Here is the part I couldn’t have explained then.

I wasn’t scared.

I was alert.

There’s a difference, although at the time I wouldn’t have known what it was.

We pulled into the driveway. He turned the engine off but didn’t move, hands still on the wheel, and for a second – just a second – I thought he might say something else. Ask something. Give me an opening.

He didn’t.

“You coming in,” he said. Not a question, that one either.

I said yes. Of course I said yes.

And that was the whole fight. If you could even call it that.

 No slammed door, no raised voice, nothing a neighbor could have heard through a wall or repeated to a friend over coffee. 

Just three sentences and forty minutes of silence and a man who could make you had fun tonight sound like the beginning of something I wouldn’t understand the shape of for a long, long time.

I got out of the car first.

He followed a few seconds later, and by the time we reached the front door, his hand had found the small of my back.

Easy. Familiar.

Like nothing had happened at all.

I unlocked the door.

Dane waited behind me, close enough that I could feel him there without turning around.

“You’re quiet,” he said.

I almost laughed.

“So you are.”

“I’m not the one who has something to say.”

There it was.

I pushed the door open.

“And if I don’t?”

His hand moved from my back as I stepped inside.

“Then you don’t.”

He walked past me, dropped his keys on the counter, and headed toward the kitchen like the conversation was finished.

It should have relieved me.

Instead, I stood there with my coat still on, watching him go.

Because I knew Dane.

And sometimes the worst thing he could do was nothing.