“I would have waited for you to put on a robe.” She stepped through the door and Danny closed it behind her.
“I don’t own a robe.” He walked into the bedroom, picked up his jeans, and came back into the living room.
“Don’t bother,” said Pat. “I won’t be here long.”
“Long enough to sit down?”
Pat looked around. “On what?” she asked.
That wasn’t really fair-the house had come with an old tatty sofa, and there was a kitchen table with three wobbly chairs. But Danny always tossed his dirty clothes on the couch and the chairs were stacked up with books.
Danny gathered up the clothes from the couch and dropped them on the floor.
“Tidy,” said Pat.
Danny put his hand on her back to usher her to the couch.
Pat shied away. “What are you doing?”
Danny pulled back his hand. “Offering you a seat?”
“I can find my way to your couch without your hands on my body,” she said coldly. “I’m not Xena, I don’t want your hands all over me. And for what it’s worth, she isn’t, like, in love with you.”
“I didn’t think she was,” said Danny.
“Oh, she thinks she is,” said Pat, “but it’s not you she wants, it’s to have a god’s baby inside her belly.”
“I’m not a god,” said Danny. “There are no gods, just people like me.”
Pat faced him with fire in her eyes. “On the contrary, buddy-boy. People like you are proof that there are gods. Dangerous powerful beings who can do terrible things to people who don’t obey them.”
“What terrible things have I done to you?”
Pat touched her face. “Oh, isn’t it wonderful, my kind master! You have bestowed smooth skin upon your pock-marked servant! Now at last she’s worthy to have your hands placed upon her body!”
Danny was completely flummoxed. He hadn’t meant anything at all by touching her. He didn’t know why he had even done it. He didn’t go around touching people.
There was nothing he could say to change her false impression. “Have a seat while I put my pants on,” he said.
“I told you I’m not staying long.” But she sat down and watched him pull up his jeans. “I don’t even know why I came.”
“Well, we’ve settled that you aren’t here to have sex with me,” said Danny. He meant it as a self-mocking joke.
“Right, just because I don’t want your hands on me, you think I’m some kind of cold frigid bitch.”
Her words were so out of proportion to anything that had come before that Danny couldn’t imagine what was going through her mind. “Is that what I think?”
“For your information, no, I wasn’t molested as a child, no, I wasn’t abused, no, I don’t have any repressed memories of terrible things that now interfere with the natural development of my sexuality. I’m just a private person who doesn’t like to be touched.”
Danny just stood there for a couple of seconds. “It’s so good of you to come all the way over here and tell me that,” he finally said.
Pat sat there, looking at him in surprise. It was as if she was only hearing now what she herself had just finished saying. “That’s not what I came here to say,” she said. Her face turned red and she looked away. “I can’t believe I went off like that, I don’t know what I was…”
Danny pulled up one of the kitchen chairs across from her-he didn’t even have to take a step to do it, the kitchen being the other end of the living room-and sat on it. “Let’s pretend I didn’t touch you and so you didn’t react the way you reacted for whatever reason you reacted that way, and let’s just say that I asked you to come in and take a seat and here we are.” He put on an air of jovial welcome. “Pat, my good friend, what brings you here so late at night, considering that you don’t want to sleep with me or have my babies?”
Pat was not amused at his humor. “My parents made me see a shrink because I like to be left alone.”
“Well, that explains the ‘repressed sexuality’ thing.”
“She had an M.D. and a Ph.D., but that just shows they’ll give those degrees to any bonehead who puts in the time. She was a fake who wanted to hypnotize me and put false memories into my head. She actually thought she had hypnotized me and started suggesting all kinds of sexual things my father had snuck into my room and done to me when I was three. She was, like, a volunteer hypnotic pornographer. Serious child porn. Ugly.” Pat shuddered. “My parents kept making me go back until I finally told my dad what that bitch was trying to get me to ‘remember’ he had done to me.”
“But you hung on to the vocabulary.”
“Whenever people go off on how I don’t like to be glad-handed or stroked, she comes to mind. Being an introvert isn’t a pathology, you know.”
“I know,” said Danny. “I don’t like to be touched either.” He thought back to the way Lana had accosted him when he first came to Stone’s house, and he realized that he hadn’t spoken the actual truth. He hadn’t liked Lana touching him at the moment, because it was such a surprise and because he didn’t like her having control over him. But his body very much liked being touched, and he still remembered that encounter with Lana. He remembered it a lot, and he had imagined several different endings to the event that he much preferred to the way it had actually ended.
But he knew that was nothing more than the impulse of his DNA to replicate itself. In fact, like Pat, he didn’t like to have people touch him. At least not without an invitation. “I have no idea why I did that,” said Danny, “and I’m sorry. I’m also sorry your parents didn’t get you, and I’m sorry the shrink was a schmuck. Can we please get on to whatever you actually came for?”
Pat turned red again and curled up onto the couch, turning her body partly away from him. He had never seen her look vulnerable before. “What am I doing? Why am I saying these things?”
“Really. Please,” said Danny. “Tell me what you came for.”
“I’m worried about you,” she finally said. Still not looking at him. Still embarrassed. “You’re so. So.”
“Stupid?” Danny prompted.
“Yes,” she said. “Not school-stupid, not even people-stupid. I mean, you’re actually very clever and kind of sweet and I think you don’t have a malicious bone in your body, though your sense of humor is sometimes kind of on the mean side.”
“Senses of humor usually are,” said Danny. “But I see your point. Thanks for the counsel.”
“See?” she said. “You’re joking, but you’re also making fun of the fact that I came here at night, alone, and I’ve said everything wrong until I feel so stupid I could die, and yet you’re also sitting there waiting so patiently for me to finally say what I came to say, because you are sweet, and that’s why I’m so afraid, because I don’t think you know how evil some people can be.”
Pat had no idea what it was like to live inside a Family. “I know a little more about evil than you think.”
“I’m not talking about your family,” said Pat. “You’re the expert on mages or gods or whatever you people are. I’m talking about-people in general. Regular people. Even people who mean well. You’re so trusting! You came here to Parry McCluer and you decide you’re going to be friends with us, and why? Because the principal assigned Laurette to be your guide on your first day, and you just had to tease her and sit down with us and how did you choose us?”
Danny had no answer to that. “I was going with the flow. If I hadn’t liked you guys, I wouldn’t have stayed around.”
“But you didn’t like us,” said Pat. “I mean, how could you? We’re a mess, every one of us, weird on the outside and certifiably insane underneath that repellent exterior.”
“But Laurette has nice cleavage, and I am of the heterosexual persuasion,” said Danny. “Maybe that’s all it is.”
“You’re not one of those panting morons,” said Pat. “And in fact we really are pretty decent people, so you could have chosen a lot worse friends. My point is that you didn’t know, you had no idea who we were, but you plunged right in as if we were friends and. And.”