Flings Read Free

didn’t make a ton of sense either but so what? Road signs flashed in and out of his vision. He didn’t imagine himself at all.
    Danny wanted Ellen to come to them, call a cab, but she was barely listening to what he said. There was no way she could wait patiently, give directions, sit back and watch streetlights roll by. She was in meltdown mode and someone had to get to her. Kat fired up the computer while Danny kept repeating, “It’ll all be okay.” Ellen hung up on him midsentence and he was suddenly worried that she might do something. The bus schedule was a nightmare—it was too late in the evening, there were too many transfers. Everything was wrong.
    Danny called Rachel. Only he knew where she was, and she knew he knew; therefore if she saw it was him calling, she would know it was important because she would know that he would know that she’d kill him if he was calling her for no reason—or, worse yet, to check up.
    Her phone rang, then went to voicemail. He wondered if she had broken her promise. He called again. The third time, finally, Miles picked up. Fucking Miles! “Hey, man,” he said. Presumably he’d recognized Danny’s name on her phone’s little screen. Danny told him to put her on. “She’s kinda . . .” he said, and then Danny started screaming at him. No idea what he was even saying. Miles told Danny to chill out and then he put the phone down. Danny heard voices, but he couldn’t tell what was being said. A couple minutes passed.
    Minutes. It was excruciating.
    â€œWhat,” she said, finally, in a blank voice that set Danny’s guts churning. He launched into a garbled apology for having bothered her. “I’m hanging up,” she said, but then before she could he blurted the news. “Oh no,” she said, emotion seeping through the drug screen and into the two hushed syllables.
    He wanted to apologize again but was scared to. Another epic silence.
    â€œOkay,” she said.
    Half an hour later Rachel was banging on Ellen’s door. Her nausea had mostly passed, but her hands were shaking. There was sweat on her forehead. She had chills. But they were there for each other. Ellen and Rachel forever! Friendship would carry the day where love had failed. Hours passed, crying and screaming, and then Ellen on the phone with her mother while Rachel—thrilled for the distraction—snuck outside and painted the rosebushes blue, a rejection of the Gatorade she’d chugged on the way over.
    (Later, Rachel would tell Danny that Miles had gotten his hands on some seriously cheap shit. She’d drifted in a warm gray-on-gray la-la land for about twelve minutes; then the sickness had set in. Miles had called her to the phone from out of the bathroom, where she’d been huddled. All in all, she said, the biggest disappointment since the Matrix sequels.)
    Danny sat slouched at Percy’s kitchen table, swirling a wineglass full of Old Crow, his magnum opus splayed before him. His work was a disaster. He saw that now. His ostensible monument to Rachel was in reality a fairly astute but immensely boring exposition of his own most regrettable qualities and aggressive failures. His narrator was unreliable, unlikable, and calculating: a cipher for his worst self, a conniving sneak with a pornographer’s eye for exploiting sentimentality, matched only by his penchant for producing actual pornography. Every sex act was recorded, but not as a memory or emblem of love; more like evidence entered into the record at a trial.
    He finished the glass of bourbon and lurched about the apartment, flipping light switches off, closing shades.
    The pioneer cemetery on Southeast 26th was a designated historical site, easily mistaken for a park and protected only by a chain-link fence. He hopped it, plunged headlong into the blizzard of shadows cast by the great oaks, silence booming like the sea in his ears. He realized