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Later is Right Now, Start Explaining

painting of a woman by Serge Marshennikov

It’s an overstuffed hotel chair she’s sitting in with her damp hair dripping down into a nice plushy terry robe. She has her arms folded, staring at the rather large flat-screen TV that she has not turned on. The remote for it is sitting on an end-table next to her, right where Drin left it, along with a glass of water. He brought it over to her before he went to get a bath. He took Dance along in the bath with him, too. No showers for Dance until the cuts heal in the purpling mess on his back.

Squinting ruefully at himself in the mirrors, Dance told her it’s probably just as well she opened the skin, allowing the swelling to drain, just like the battered face of an overworked boxer.

Dance is making a lot more sense since they finally let him get some sleep. But he woke up wanting all kinds of impractical things, like eating tuna sashimi and cinnamon toast in bed and getting fucked to a fare-thee-well and taking a rental car to the ocean. He had to settle for room service cinnamon buns and the gentlest handjob Drin has ever given him. The hematoma looks horrible.

She’s wishing she was sinking into their own ratty cat-clawed couch at home, which makes her back complain. She wishes she was eating popcorn with the boys in the glow of the elderly CRT tube that she’s had since before she invited Dance to be her roommate, and eventually, lover.

Dance is not happy. She can hear his voice in the bathtub, softly pleading. He sounds like a frightened little kid. It makes her crazy, that sound.

She sits still, arms folded, feet propped up on a glass-topped table. She’s ignoring the impulse to kick the bloody fancy bit of chrome nonsense across the room and out the sliding glass door. She’s been ignoring a lot of these impulses in the last ten hours.

The slider on the door is open, hot breeze riffling the sheers. So is the window in the other wall, as they have a corner room. Dance insisted on having those open. He wanted to be able to smell the wind coming in along both sides of the building. Smelling air recirculating from other people’s rooms made him claustrophobic. That’s new. He never used to be bothered by letting things at home go musty and closed off for days, obsessing over his music and forgetting to take the trash out.

When Dance first sat up in bed, wincing, Emma asked if they could just buy airline tickets and go off to the Bahamas for awhile, and let Dance bask in the sand on a beach until he felt better.

Drin simply shook his head and said, “No, he can’t get past airport security.”

Dance had lowered his head and shuffled off into the bathroom to hide, the way he did when he was really upset, when he can’t pull out words.

“And why bloody not?” Emma had said, angry suddenly.

“He won’t pass x-ray. Oh, and he’ll probably set off the nitrogen sniffers if they have those. For sniffing explosives. Plastique and things like that.”

Emma had one clear thought in the curdling rage. If I go in there and Dance is curled up in a corner humming old gospel hymns to calm down, I am going to lose it.

Emma just stood there staring at Drin. She wasn’t sure why the image of anybody, of whatever style of security, hassling Dance about the results of scanning him in their bloody primitive x-ray machines just made her furious so instantly. She was a little worried about that, too. “Are you going to explain any of this?” she had demanded.

Drin had sighed. “I’m going to try. Do you mind if I get him washed down? I’m not certain how much of that perfume is still spilled on him. That may be why he’s upset.”

Emma barked, “He’s frightened and upset because he doesn’t know what is going on, he has no target or goal to focus on, you’re being cryptic as hell and he’s halfway remembering a lot of really nasty crap. He’s a case of PTSD waiting to blow, now, and he wasn’t like that two weeks ago. He was fine a month ago.”

“I know,” Drin told her sadly.

“I’m not going to hit you, I’m not,” Emma said, “but don’t you push your luck, love, I’ll just lose it and haul back and slap you silly, and I don’t want to do that. I want to sit down, with Dance, and get a good explanation of what we have going on and what we need to do about it, to the best of your knowledge, and I want Dance to be very clear that we both want to help him.”

“Excellent idea,” Drin said. “After I get him out of the bath, all right?”

“All right,” Emma said.

She doesn’t know what she’s going to do if Dance starts crying. When little kids get that weird note in their voices, they’re about five seconds from going to pieces. But he’s an adult, and pretty tough. It’s been going on for a good twenty minutes, and he’s still hanging onto it, still talking, still responding when Drin’s voice murmurs questions at him.

Every time Dance’s voice start to rise, she feels her leg muscles twitch to push her up off the chair and drive her into that bloody bathroom to go get him. But she doesn’t let the twitch take over. She sits, hugging herself, trusting that Drin knows what he’s doing. God knows she doesn’t seem to have a lot of other choices.

But she’s not going to be able to keep any distance when Dance comes out of that bathroom. She knows what will happen. She’s going to talk him into laying down with both of them very close to him, and talking into his ear, saying nonsense if she has to, until he goes to sleep, and if she’s very lucky, it will be the kind of sodden tired sleep that means he won’t wake up if she starts to cry.

Or if Drin does.

===

Challenge: Cornered
Writer’s Notes: A followup on events in my first “cornered” piece of fic, “You Get to Explain Later, Right?” edited to add: Since I didn’t track the time-frame here, I’m not sure it’s fair to post it as a challenge fic. I think maybe a link to it would be more correct.
The thing is barreling along like a plotbunny on
speed and I have no idea where it’s heading, because it’s like that snowball just glomping onto ideas I’ve been idly considering for years!

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