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He loves her most, or best, but he isn’t really sure how to quantitatively measure it. He doesn’t have the appropriate tools. There isn’t a ruler, or a caliper; but he knows that the superlative form of his love exists, and sometimes that is enough for him.
He just does it in his own way, since things started creaking around the edges, everyone needing to tiptoe over the loose floorboards of their relationship.
Danny knows that his love for her is real. This is no mirage, or smoke screen, or post traumatic stress reaction to a lifetime of disappointment, regret, and being left. This is textbook l-o-v-e, but he can never quite figure out what to do with it. He doesn’t know where his love fits. It never seems to ease into the spaces he tries to squeeze it; there always seems to be too much or too little. He longs for just-enough-whelming her with his ability to express it. He can never seem to get the proportions right.
He hasn’t ever really been the leaver. (The first time, with Mindy, he doesn’t consider it leaving. He thinks of it as no longer showing up. He’s really good at no longer showing up.) Despite the fact that he pushes people away, and keeps everything in his tidy little compartments, all neatly labeled AVOIDANCE and JUDGEMENT and GUILT; he is rarely ever prepared for the act of being left. It always seems to happen so suddenly, so without warning, so without precipitating factor. What he neglects to realize, over and over, is that being left, time and time again, makes it almost impossible not to be. He is the left behind, the left over, and the bruises bloom too brightly in his psyche for him to realize what he loses and what he gains, so he just keeps making the same mistakes.
His very favorite mistakes.
“We really should know better by now.” Danny punctuates his statement by zipping up his jeans.
“Two different people are too different.” Mindy scoots down off of his desk, where his paperwork is now strewn about, a row of sonogram photos stuck to the small of her back. She’s wearing his favorite skirt of hers, one that buttons down the front, and it deeply suggests doing everything that he just did with her.
“Thanks, Confucius.” Danny kisses the top of her head, and pauses, as she leans up, getting a faceful of him in the process. “Muscle memory, sorry.”
“We have other muscles, you know.” She smiles lazily, which is a newer thing for her (the lazy part, not the smile), but he knows it means that a blow job is in the offing. She’s on her knees and his recently zipped jeans cease to be zipped. He forgets what they were talking about.
He’d let her leave him every day if she’d just take him with her when she goes.
Between her cockeyed optimism and his emotional fuckery, they are a perfect storm of electricity and combustible energy. No one knows who is the spark and who is the flint but together they implode.
“Maybe you’re just going to be the one that got away.” She says, apropos of nothing, as his head surfaces from between her thighs, pulling on his hair enough to give him devil horns in the process.
It’s easier to believe when they’re not both naked under the desk in his office. It’s easier to believe when he doesn’t get a physical pang as she leaves the room afterward, barely even acknowledging him as she rearranges her clothing and tucks her underwear into the pocket of her white coat. He wouldn't mind a chance to accidentally show her affection but he misses it as the door closes behind her.
“I wish.” He doesn’t though. He wishes he could get away, just once, instead of waiting for her to decide she wants to have another booty call (he hates calling it that, that’s a Peter thing, but considering the amplitude of her superbly shaped ass, and the vigorousness with which he enjoys it, it is an apt description), or a quickie in the on-call room, or sneaking in whatever the hell this just was. That pretty much defines the entire relationship—whatever the hell this just was. It was. It still is.
He rides the elevator with her later, but not too much later, and sees her holding the hand of a new (temporary) boyfriend. (He knows that the boyfriend is temporary because they always are. Patterns are patterns. Two different people are too different; he can turn her words against her if he needs.) He can’t flick his eyes away fast enough, but it’s burned there, in the same part of his brain that holds the memory of the softness of her skin, and that hitch she gets in her breath before he’s able to bring her to orgasm. He manages to drink the image out of his head that night, but a lot of other things go with it, including his resolve not to mention what it feels like to watch her continue to walk away.
Somehow, he ends up at her apartment. He’s knocked on her door a million times; carrying a gingerbread house, looking for his gloves, waiting for his friend to get dressed before a double date. He’s always early, or late, never quite on time. He’s not sure why he expects this night to be any different, only that this time, he actually plans on fucking everything up.
Her face doesn’t betray any disappointment when she sees that it is him. In fact, she looks almost grateful (and truthfully, he will accept “not deeply dissatisfied” as a desirable reaction). He doesn’t know what he is saying, or why he can’t seem to propel himself inside. She helps him by pulling on his arm, as if she’s been expecting him to show up half in the bag at two a.m., because that it is his way. (It isn’t.)
“Take off your pants.” She orders, tugging at his belt.
“So that’s how it’s going to be now?” He is slurring, he knows, because of course, he can’t possibly be in control of his faculties when he’s about to divest six months (maybe six years?) of pent up emotions. Them’s drinking words.
“I’d tell you to put on your pants, but that’s not going to solve anything.” Mindy’s already shedding her own clothing, and leading him toward her bedroom, and he follows. The words he's spent a half a bottle of Jack Daniels preparing seem more important when she's still wearing her lacy black bra.
“You know what I have always appreciated about you, Castellano?” He is still panting slightly, and her hair billows out across the duvet cover where she is strewn, like confetti, “Your O face is on point. It’s like you’re discovering sex for the first time every time. Or you just invented fire. It’s very caveman, but very sensual, all at once. Are you sure you haven’t made a sex tape?”
“Mindy.”
“It’s your eyebrows, I think? And your mouth. Your lips are very…expressive. And they say that the eyes are the windows—“
“Do you ever stop talking?”
“I’m sure no one has ever waxed poetic about your Oh Fuck face before, so quit your grumping.” She is pretending to be annoyed now, but he’s not.
“I don’t think we should do this anymore.”
“What? Do you want me on top now?”
“No, not this.” He sits back on his heels, rolling off of her. They’re both glossy with sweat and he has lipstick marks up and down his chest, and he briefly wonders if she put it on before or after she answered the door. He can’t remember. He can’t remember how he’s been pretending that casual sex is all he wants or where the hell he put his pants. He can't remember not wanting her. “This.”
“I need to buy a vowel here, Danny.” Her breasts are exquisite, and they mock him while he tries to recall the last time he had a handle on grammar and vocabulary and basic human interactions.
"Do you still love me?" These aren't the words he was trying to find. And yet, they appear. They appear, and they hang, and they sink into the folds of the comforter, and curves of her hips.
He can see what dances across her face, and her naked body, and he wants to cover her with the chenille blanket she keeps at the foot of the bed, because it's unfair to spring those words on a person who is already so vulnerable. He has second hand embarrassment for her, and first hand for himself. No one is getting out of the room unscathed, he knows that now, no matter what the results.
"How do you want me to answer that question, Danny?" He hears something in her voice that he cannot recognize, something that tangles around his already pounding heart. He wishes he believed in closure, in absolution. He needs to absolved of this need to keep her close, if she's going to insist on staying just out of his reach. Always. Or maybe it's him that is always just to the left of center. He wishes he could tell.
"With your mouth?" Out loud? Sky writing? "Honestly?"
"Do you?"
"Do I?"
"Do you still love me?" Out of her mouth, it is less an accusation than a realization. She closes her hand over his kneecap, and leans in.
"You don’t know what it’s like to hold you." He reminds himself to breathe. The alcohol has burned off, in sweat, and sex, and he still tastes her; only a little of it is bitter. He'll never be able to do this correctly; to stretch his love for her into the right words at the right times.
Both of her hands are on his chest now, and her face briefly goes out of focus. "Danny." His name is a plea.
"Mindy."
"This isn't funny." He recalibrates his bearings, and sees that they are still naked, and both afraid. "You still love me?"
The breath he took leaves him, all in one great exhalation, "I still love you." He shakes his head. "Not still. I love you." He doesn't need to qualify it; he loves her.
He's watching her from the outside now, no longer in his own body. "It's not just muscle memory?"
It is, but not just. "No, and it's not just sex, and it's not just anything. I needed you to know. So we don't keep doing this."
"Why do you think I kept letting you do this?" She owns him; he knows that he loves her best, or most, because no one else has ever possessed him so singularly, and with such minimal effort. She's so close, and he doesn't have to go far to find her lips with his, and locate his answer.
He'll go where ever she takes him, he knows that now.