We decided to visit Maya before I drove back to my parents’ house one Sunday evening. We spent a while walking through the fields with her, and we rode her together on the way back, as we often did.
Danny had been letting me sit behind him more and more often when we rode Maya. I’d always been careful about keeping my arms loosely wrapped around his hips, sometimes laying my hands on his thighs, and making sure not to touch him too much. Today, I wanted to go a step further.
“Get ready,” I warned him before pushing my hand underneath his T-shirt and stroking his stomach. He didn’t react badly, so I let my hand drift upward. I felt goosebumps break out on his skin, but he remained completely relaxed.
We did it! I cheered in my head. I slid my other hand up his shirt and embraced him softly enough that he wouldn’t feel restrained. I laid my cheek against his shoulder. “Danny?”
He kept the reins loosely in one hand. “Hm?”
“I like you.”
He laughed quietly. “Yeah, that’s one way to put it.”
“What, don’t you like me?”
“I love you.”
I purred contentedly. “I’m glad I have you.”
“I’m glad you have me, too,” he replied.
“I’m happy, you know? Everything is just the way it should be. We’re together and happy, Christina’s clean and getting ready to start a new job, and those guys aren’t going to bother us anymore. Everything’s good.”
“Yeah,” Danny said. I could tell he was holding something back.
“It would be the perfect happy ending to a movie,” I remarked, cuddling up against his back.
“There are no happy endings in real life.”
“Then we’ll make one ourselves,” I insisted.
“Maybe it’s not such a bad idea,” he murmured. “Maybe we should just stop here and go our separate ways.”
Shocked, I had to restrain myself from gripping him more tightly.
This wasn’t the direction I’d wanted the conversation to go in. Not at all. “Is… Is that what you want?” I asked breathlessly.
“I didn’t say I wanted it. But it would probably be the wisest thing to do.” He was silent for a while. “I’m dragging you into all this crap,” he went on. “Those idiots aren’t going to leave me alone, and for some reason I just don’t have a good feeling about Christina. But none of that is the biggest problem—the real problem is me. We can ignore it all we want, but one of these days, we’re going to run smack into it.”
“Maybe we won’t.” I tried to remain cheerful. “Where’s your optimism? You’re young, your T-cell levels are great. We just have to wait for them to find a cure.”
“Who knows how long that will take? It’s a race against time that I’ll never win.”
“They’ll find a way to keep the disease in check until they can treat it,” I insisted. But I had no idea who exactly this vague “they” were. “Soon, HIV-positive people will be able to live totally normal lives and have healthy children, and eventually they’ll eliminate it entirely.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
I couldn’t tell whether he said it because he actually believed it, because he didn’t want to dash my hopes, or because he just desperately wished it could be true.
I heard the weird rattling sound an hour later, just as I was about to drive out of the village. The car was making some very unhealthy noises, and taking it onto the highway didn’t seem like a good idea, so I drove back to Danny’s. I yanked the apartment door open and stomped into the living room.
He blinked at me in surprise. “Did something happen?”
“Yeah.” I sulked. “My car sounds like it’s about to fall apart. Here, come listen.” I threw my keys at him without warning, but he caught them in one hand at the last moment. His reflexes were amazing.
Listlessly, he shuffled out of the apartment, still barefoot, and I stepped over to the living room window.
Christina came out of her room. “Thought I heard you back.” She stepped up beside me at the window. “Why so angry?”
“There’s no way my car is just acting up all of a sudden. Not on its own. It was those guys.”
Danny drove the car around for a few minutes before parking it again and sliding underneath it. After a while, he came back inside.
“Well?” I asked testily, like I’d been expecting everything to be fixed.
He shrugged. “I’m not a mechanic, but I think there’s something going on with the exhaust system. Anyway, you can’t drive it home like that, not until we’ve had it looked at.”
“Great.” My mood sank to a new low. “How am I going to get to work tomorrow?”
“You can take my car.”
“What, and you’re just going to walk to work?”
“My first class isn’t until nine. I’ll just go running a little earlier so I have time to take the car in and drive it to work once it’s been cleared by a mechanic.” He lifted his keys from the hook on the wall and held them out to me. “Be careful,” he warned. “Mine’s a little zippier than yours. And the chassis is lower, so don’t drive over any curbs.”
I rolled my eyes and snatched the keys from his hand. “I know how to drive,” I muttered. “And my Benz has 150 horsepower. I’m sure I’ll be just fine in your sad little BMW!”
“With 190 horsepower, plus chip tuning,” Danny said. “The brake is the one in the middle.”
“I love you, too.” I gave him a kiss on the cheek and left the apartment, unlocking his car as I walked. Still furious, I dropped onto the leather seat in a huff, and then moved it forward about a foot and a half. Scowling, I wondered how Danny could stand the car’s weird blue interior lighting.
Then I took a deep breath. The car smelled like vanilla and Danny. My mood lifted a little. As soon as I drove off, I could tell his car really was a lot more powerful than mine, and it made me a little uneasy. Almost too cautiously, I maneuvered the doomsday machine back to my parents’ house.
My mom met me in the hallway. “Hey,” I said.
“Jessica! Do you want some dinner?”
She asked me that every time I came home on Sunday evening, and I always gave her the same answer: “I ate at Danny’s.”
“Alexander’s mother called,” she said cheerfully.
“What did she want?”
“She asked what you were doing this summer. You’ve been invited to go with them to Italy if you want.”
Back when Alexander and I were together, I always went with him and his family on vacation. They spent four weeks at the same campgrounds in Grado every year.
“Oh, Mom,” I sighed. “Alex and I broke up. And we’re staying broken up. Why would I want to go on vacation with his family?”
“I’m sure it would be fun,” she said, trying again.
“I don’t get four weeks of vacation from work,” I pointed out. “And I might go somewhere with Danny.” Though we hadn’t actually talked about how we were going to spend our vacation time this year.
“Well, you can always change your mind,” my mother insisted.
***
I drove Danny’s car back to him on Monday after work. He wasn’t home yet, which made me worry my car would be in the shop for a while. Hopefully the damage wasn’t too serious.
Christina and I made dinner—whole-wheat pasta with cheese sauce and a mixed salad—and then cleaned up the kitchen. I cursed like a New York cab driver during rush hour the entire time. “We have to do something about those thugs! Now they’re demolishing our cars, too? We can’t let them get away with this!”
“Wait until Danny gets home,” Christina said, trying to placate me. “Maybe something really did just break.”
“One of these days, I’m going to claw Tara’s eyes out,” I promised myself aloud. Christina and I had visited Danny’s ex at work twice now—once to call her out, and once to speak to her boss. She’d denied any involvement, of course, but she’d still been written up, because the doctor believed us and remembered that Tara had been in the room when he’d spoken to Danny.
Danny didn’t get home until late in the evening. “What was wrong with my car?” I asked in greeting.
“You’re going to laugh,” he said. “Nothing was wrong. Those jokers threw two cigarette lighters into your tailpipe. They were just sitting in there rattling around. It took the guys at the garage forever to figure out what was wrong.”
“Fantastic,” I said. “I knew they were responsible. So now what?”
Danny shrugged. “We don’t have any proof.”
After dinner, he admitted, “Your Mercedes star was broken off this morning, too. I didn’t want to tell you, and I had it replaced right away, but that probably won’t be the last time. They stole my antenna a few days ago as well.”
He hadn’t told me about that.
“Pathetic cowards,” I growled. “Now they’re too afraid to run into you, so they’re taking it out on our cars.”
Danny nodded. “Which was to be expected, I suppose. Let’s just wait and see what happens. We’ll go to the police if we have to, though I don’t think anything would come of that.”