francisco javier es una (pesadilla) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-02-10 10:23:00 |
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The drive from Meridian to Turnberry Place lasted all of eight minutes - it was basically a straight shot down Paradise Road, and then there you were. Not that it would’ve been hard to miss, even if the drive had been long and daunting. There was a huge marble-looking gatehouse out front, manned, Lin learned after trying, unsuccessfully, to get inside with his little beat up jalopy. The guard in the gatehouse gave him a once-over. He took in the dark-skinned boy’s even darker hair, all haphazardly slicked back. He looked at the kid’s - he was definitely a kid - military green jacket with the red checked scarf, his t-shirt, a stark white, that appeared to have a gigantic cat’s face on the chest, and his gray slacks. He frowned. Lin was sent away immediately. Not to be discouraged, the boy parked his car some ways away and marched down the road until he was once again faced with the frighteningly impressive gates and the rather irked guard. He informed the man that he was waiting for a friend, thank you. She’d be along, so the man could get out of his ass. He supposed he was a bit early, maybe that was why Sam had yet to show up. Or that’s what he told himself as he loitered awkwardly near the entrance. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and paced, a small dark figure against the white of the gates. Something about this whole setup felt suspicious to Lin. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Yet he had no idea what he was walking into, and, to be honest, that scared the shit out of him. - Nor did he have any idea as to why Sam, a woman he’d met only a few days before, wanted him to come along in the first place. Was she planning something? Was this some kind of weird couple-y revenge? Was he going to get shot and stuffed or something for some rich guy’s creepy human trophy room? Seriously, what? The question had run through his head countless times now. But with no answer, the knot in Lin’s stomach only managed to tighten. A part of him did want to meet Daniel. He liked the man, as much as one can like somewhat insulting, slanted handwriting on a screen. And, really, Lin did want to be his friend. But -- But what? What if Daniel didn’t like him back? The boy groaned and pressed his palms to his eyes. This, he didn’t want to think about. He wished Sam would hurry the fuck up. If he was going to be taxidermied, he’d rather it be sooner than later. Sam was running late, but that wasn't actually her fault. She had no car, and she usually used Neil's driver to get anywhere she wanted to get, but Neil had been unexpectedly out with his driver that morning. That left Neil's cars, but Sam couldn't remember when the last fucking time she'd driven something was, and she couldn't help but think it would be bad fucking news to try now, when she was still dealing with the drug haze of approved pharmaceutical in her system. Yeah, no, bad idea. That left a cab or the bus system. But, yeah, that posed another problem. She didn't carry cash these days, and Neil's ATM and Black card had been given back and locked away, where they couldn't be used in a fit of weakness. So, the bus it was. And the bus didn't stop somewhere like Turnberry fucking place. Living there meant having enough money not to have to schlep it using public transportation. So, the end of Sam's journey involved a few blocks of walking in the Vegas sun, which fuck that. Less than a block into the trek, she flagged down a car - some beat up piece of shit - and she got a lift the rest of the way. The woman who climbed out of the rusted multi-colored junker at the Turnberry gates had long blonde hair to her waist, which was currently held up in two long pigtails. She'd been on the plump side once, but these days she was all hard corners and jutting bones. Dark circles lined her eyes, and her cheeks had the gaunt appearance of someone who'd been sick with something much worse than a fucking cold - the kind of thing you just didn't ask about. And, yeah, Sam was a little worried about facing Daniel down that way. She'd lost a good thirty pounds since she'd seen him, and she'd only managed to start keeping down food in the past week or so; none of the weight had returned yet. Still, she felt good enough to flirt with the guy riding the shitty car, and she approached the gatekeeper with a confident sway of hips clad in a tan-camo mini to there. Combat boots and a white tank finished off her ensemble, and she had a blue sweatshirt tied low on her hips, which she slipped on almost immediately. For some reason, she'd forgotten that Lin would have trouble getting into the place; maybe because she'd been getting in there for months now. But she noticed the pacing boy, and she cupped her hands around her mouth almost immediately, yelling louder than she needed to in order to get his attention. "Lin?!" And, yeah, he was younger than she was expecting, but she'd already figured out that Daniel liked to be entertained, and people closer to his age probably didn't have the time for that. While she waited, she gave the gatekeeper her name, and she grinned a gap-toothed smile as he tried to figure out what to do next. Because, yeah, people just didn't walk up to the opulent lobby of this place. She almost felt sorry for the guy. But he called for a doorman seconds later, and directed them toward the opening gates, where a little golf cart was quickly approaching. The golf cart slowly grew larger--but not that much larger--as the seconds ticked by, and just as the driver’s form became clear (the side of his bottom spilling out over the edge of his plastic seat), a yellow cab pulled up along the curb, right up to the front of the gate. The guard at the opening gates turned around to deal with this new problem, and the cab accelerated forward with the kind of familiarity that cabbies have when directed by an authorized fare. Golf cart bumped forward, cab eased to a stop, gate clanged to its widest point, and everything stopped in a hopeless snarl of wheels and people. The doorman leaned over the wheel, the cabbie turned his head, the guard eased forward to eavesdrop, and Daniel opened the door of the back of his cab. He moved with thoughtless privilege, not at all concerned about traffic or anyone else’s time any more than he was concerned about his lack of footwear or that state of his clothing, which resembled the contents of a college dorm’s laundry room dryer. The blue eyes were all the sharper for the mess of dark curls, and judging from his color he was not only dead sober, but absurdly healthy for a long term drunk. Thank the hotel and the monster in the door. He stared for a long five seconds at the pair on his figurative doorstep. The fat man in the golf cart leaned out to see who was in the cab and then sat back behind his wheel without a word. The doorman at the gate stepped back too. The blue eyes slid from Sam to Lin and back. He didn’t recognize the dark-haired kid, thought for a moment he might be this man Sam was wrapped up in, and then dismissed the notion just as quickly. He didn’t have the right set of his shoulders; Sam liked indifference, according to her. He stared at her a second longer. He’d never seen her look so bad before. He frowned. Another look at Lin, curious, worried. “What?” he demanded, hand on the door and toes on the curve of the cab’s back door. Sam. She was young. A skinny white girl, her hair fair, long, and divided into pigtails, called - loudly - to Lin as she approached the gates. She was all angles - pretty angles, but angles all the same. To the boy’s naive eyes, she didn’t look bad. Of course, he’d never seen her before. But he appreciated the sort of late '90s vibe he was picking up. (God, remember when camo was a thing?) With a bright smile and a flurry of butterflies, he hurried over. The whole golf cart ride was bizarre. He didn’t know why they couldn’t just walk, but whatever. Lin spent most of it just craning his neck to gawk at the utter, unabashed flaunting of wealth. He lived well enough, but he was far from rich - and despite being with Aubrey for four years, it still shocked him to see how the other half lived. Still, it didn’t last long. Only moments later, there was a bit of a commotion at the front door of what Lin assumed was Daniel’s... building? House? Whatever it was. His place of residence. The driver of the golf cart kept leaning over his steering wheel while the boy simply sat there, blinking confusedly. And likely, the blinking would have continued had a man not climbed out of the back of the cab. Was that Daniel? He was pretty, wasn’t he? The messy mop of dark hair, the blue eyes, the ...oh, good lord, the clothes. Lin frowned. Why had he imagined someone with a good sense of style? This was a disaster. He ...was barefoot. - The light eyes slid from Sam to Lin and back, though he kept moving toward the door with an air that the boy couldn’t quite decipher. It was blasé, in a way, but also... defensive? Like I said, he couldn’t figure it out. “You’re Daniel?” Obviously, he was very good at introducing himself. Lin extracted himself somewhat clumsily from the golf cart after the demanding “what?” He glanced sideways at Sam, but quickly returned his attention to the disheveled man. Now he had a face to put to the boozy handwriting. That was good. The butterflies flapped in his stomach with a little less insistence. The boy squinted at the man briefly, then smiled. “I guess I can see that. You look like an online chess player fer sure.” With a small lift of his not-very-indifferent shoulders, Lin shrugged, as if to say to the world, ‘okay, then. This will do.’ Strangely enough, Sam was used to thinking of Daniel of someone who was always holed up in his penthouse. It was weird, because she'd originally met him clear across the city at a fucking casino, but she still always imagined him there, in that huge place with dust and books and blinds that were only dragged open by someone other than him. And, yeah, so her mind was still wrapped in a methadone blanket, but it threw her off more than it should, seeing him outside. And the fucker looked good and healthy, which just felt like some kind of fuck you from the universe, especially when she knew that she looked like shit. She began to answer his bark, to quip about coming to visit, but Lin was answering instead, and Sam looked over and quirked a golden brow. Yeah, ok, the kid was definitely nervous. Huh. She hadn't realized this might really be some sort of love connection thing until that point. Not that it mattered, but it was still weird. And had she known that Daniel, even for a second, had mistaken Lin for Neil, she would have laughed her ass off right there. She had no idea how old Lin was, but he felt young in a weird way. Yeah, definitely not Neil. In the end, it was dry-cool air on her bare knees that got Sam moving and talking. "Hey, baby," she said, all Jersey in the round vowels. "Invite us up," she said, walking toward the door (and the doorman) like she lived in the joint, and perfectly willing to let Lin and Daniel manage their own introductions. Better to actually talk to Daniel once she was upstairs, in his dark enclave, where his piercing blue eyes couldn't see all her new fucking flaws. Anyway, she was counting on Lin to be distracting. Daniel slid entirely out of the cab and stood on the edge of the sidewalk, settling heavily on birdlike pale feet while the cab driver, the golf cart, two doormen and a security guard watched. Neither tall nor wide, Daniel’s unimpressive shoulders aligned with the set of his hips in wornthin jeans as he stretched himself upright. Despite his apparent physical health he seemed wrongly thin, the proportions not distributed correctly, the shadow on his jaw all the deeper instead of round or dimpled. Perhaps in a clean suit and on leather shoes Daniel would be as dangerous as a fallen angel, particularly with those eyes and a smile he was lacking, but right now he looked like someone had packed him into a box and forgotten him. Daniel gave Lin a look of mingled suspicion and obviously automatic dislike, but his eyes widened in recognition of the jab about chess a few seconds later. He knew exactly who Lin was, and the dislike vanished to be replaced by obvious, rather childlike fear. It was a fast flicker, and he soon hid it, but it was there--like Lin had suddenly drawn a knife. Daniel stared at him without responding, just stared, trying to reconcile the ridiculous letters and (to him) pasted pictures with the innocent appearance. A moment later, he did what he always did: he decided not to care. He looked away from his two guests and dug into one pocket for a wad of cash. There wasn’t a wallet, just a casino card (glittering purple--the Venetian), and clean twenties. He paid the cabbie to go away, his demeanor making it fairly clear that’s what he was paying for, and then turned away from the sidewalk. He moved through the lobby toward the elevator that took him all the way to the top of the building; he didn’t want to spend an elevator ride with either of these people. They knew too much about him, and he didn’t like feeling vulnerable. But he also didn’t tell them to go away. Not yet. Once in the elevator, Daniel addressed Sam, not Lin. “You look sick. Why’d you bring him?” He pointed at Lin as if the boy was a lost puppy. Though Daniel perhaps was different in appearance than Lin had imagined - shorter, maybe, paler, lacking the sharp-edged polish he’d come to expect of the rich -, he acted almost exactly as the boy had anticipated he might. (The film buff and trope spotter inside Lin noted with suppressed glee that Daniel fit the “Eccentric Millionaire” archetype perfectly. Or, more specifically, the “Upper-Class Wit”. Seriously, go look it up.) He was just as churlish, just as abrupt - and, yes, Lin saw it there, in the half second it was on display, just as afraid. He was, in short, the Daniel the boy had come to know, in his way, through the silly device he’d been sent by that fucking hotel. If the situation was weird - and it was -, Lin ignored it with his usual aplomb. He followed Sam and the man into the building and into the elevator, his heart beating just a little fast. Daniel’s lack of greeting didn’t bother him, honestly. He’d seen the recognition as it dawned on the other man, sudden and jagged, and that was all that mattered. The boy leaned against the ornate wall of the elevator, gripping the handle behind him, and kept his eyes on the pair in front of him. He still didn’t know what he was walking into. (Sam, he figured, for the record, was perhaps a mix of the “Broken Bird,” the “Chanteuse,” and “Badass Damsel.”) He watched as Daniel lifted a finger to jab it in his direction. Now it was Lin’s turn to cock a brow -, but he resisted the urge and smiled instead. “She promised me that we could watch Titanic,” he said, canting his head to the side as he looked up at the man behind the handwriting. “I’m a sucker for Leo. Da-reamy. Am I right?” "You know how to make a girl feel sexy," Sam retorted, all defensive straightening of shoulders and eyes going shifty with uncertainty. Yeah, she knew she look like shit, at least compared with that last time he'd seen her. "Do I look that different from the last time when I was in your tub, baby?" she asked, and it was an intentional jab, a rattlesnake bite that she realized (belatedly) would probably make Lin more uncomfortable than it would make Daniel. "Yeah, whatever, I look better than I did at Christmas." A lot fucking better, and her inky eyes were defiant in their circles of bruises. She glanced over at Lin; Lin, who had already answered the question of why she'd brought him, at least in his own way. But his way wasn't hers, and she shrugged her too-thin shoulders beneath the blue of her hoodie. "He hadn't met you. He knows you better than anyone else, and he hadn't met you. What the fuck is up with that?" she asked, waiting until the elevator dinged its last stop and pushing past both of them to exit into the hallway first. She glanced, while stood there, toward the door of Daniel's apartment. She knew there would be booze there. Good booze, like the kind Neil had kept around until she asked him to go sober for her. Yeah, ok, she could do this. She suspected Daniel would want to look good in front of Lin, and Lin didn't look like a user. It would be fine. She fished the Redbox version of Titanic out her pocket, and she waved it. "We can all watch it on your computer, and you can mock every last second," she offered. Mocking = comfort zone. "Or we can just laugh while Lin drools over Leo." She smiled a genuine, gap-toothed smile there. Yeah, so she liked the kid. Not as much as she liked the crotchety fucker with the blue eyes, but it was a work in progress. The closer they got to the apartment the more relaxed Daniel became, but he was watching Lin in case the kid attacked him with questions or started tearing at him with accusations. Bricking up a defense behind a mulish expression, Daniel pressed a little farther back into the wall outside the elevator and glared at both of them. Sam got him with the comment about the bathtub; the effect was to ice over the bricks. His chin came up and he gave her a look that said he wouldn’t be inviting her back into it any time soon. A little grain of betrayal soured his mouth. The look of pure horror Daniel gave the movie waving around in Sam’s hand adequately communicated his feeling on the subject of watching it. He shut his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at it. “If I wanted to watch a movie I’d go to a movie theatre,” he said. Daniel again glanced sideways at Lin, scowling outright at the idea that anybody knew him at all, and pushed into the mirk beyond the door. A blast of air conditioned cold lurched out to embrace them, and it took time to adjust to the grim light kept dark by the heavy curtains drawn across the high windows. Daniel moved forward into a chaos of newspapers shipped in from New York, Paris, and Berlin. A hoarder would keep everything and stack it together, but there was only a week’s worth there and it looked more like he just tossed things aside when he got bored with them. The weekly maid came through on Mondays, so clusters of sticky tumblers and near-empty whiskey bottles still balanced on most of the shiny black ebony surfaces. In the wide living room, odd furniture picked out by the previous owners stood out in big graceless lumps of striped black and teal. There wasn’t a television in sight, and a laptop was buried on the bar counter that divided the kitchen from the rest of the apartment. Towers of books as high as Daniel’s head stacked against the walls, spines out, probably more neat than anything in the room. It was like a packrat and a circus bear had struck it rich and holed up together in a library. A lot was happening in subtext in here, wasn’t it? Lin wasn’t sure what it was, but he wasn’t as oblivious as he was often mistaken to be, and outside of the obvious verbal jabs, both Daniel and Sam’s body language proved defensive. The boy could only wonder, then, why Sam had wanted to come over in the first place - and why she had wanted him to tag along. Obviously, Daniel wasn’t one for visitors, or... apparently, for twenty-two year olds poking at him about his reclusive tendencies. As the outsider here, Lin said nothing when the girl asked Daniel why he hadn’t yet met the boy he conversed with over the journals. He did nothing to correct her notion that somehow Lin was one of very few people who knew the... shall we say, contumacious man, nor did he move to assure Daniel that his scowls were unnecessary because he didn’t actually agree with Sam on that count. No. Instead, he just sort of stood there, blinking, looking between the man and the girl, comparing and contrasting them. He ignored the bathtub comment. All he could do was offer Sam a silly sort of smile at the mention of Leo and watch as Daniel’s face became a mask of horror at the brandishing of the DVD, before following the pair again, this time out of the elevator and into Daniel’s - well, his lair. It was dark. And dusty. And freezing. Lin was glad he’d worn a jacket, and he tugged it closer at the throat as he stepped inside, eyes sweeping the dim room with interest. It was huge, cavernous even, but cluttered. Like a cave with stalactites and stalagmites comprised solely of print literature. Like some villain’s castle from a Disney movie, the drapes shut tight against any offending sunlight. There was no TV. The vague, familiar shapes of bottles lined the room at various heights, indicating to Lin that they were on all different manner of surfaces. Okay. Well, now he knew why Daniel looked so... crumpled. The boy’s eyes focused on a copy of a German paper and he picked it up without a thought. He coughed a little as he flipped it open and scanned the cover. He peeked over the top at the oblique forms of Daniel and Sam. He tossed it back down and found himself a place to sit between stacks of books on some kind of large, striped sofa. “If you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s because Daniel’s obsessively collected books have fallen on me and I’ve died,” was all he said. Sam was a hard exterior over something squishy, and she hadn't been expecting that hard, betrayed look in Daniel's eyes. Moreover, she didn't even really fucking get it. So, what? Was he embarrassed that they'd fucked? Did he just not like her bringing it up? What? She glanced from him to Lin, and she was suddenly really fucking sorry she'd come. Since the OD, she'd been onion skin over raw feelings, fucking drugs that did nothing but make her more depressed, all while keeping her from getting high. She scuffed a shoe against the elevator wall impatiently, and she sulked - yeah, it was a fucking sulk. There was no other way to describe it, and fuck that. He wasn't going to make her feel like shit. Not when he was an impossible son of a bitch himself most of the time. She considered shooting Lin an apologetic look, but she refrained. She really wanted the fuckers to like each other, but she just wasn't emotionally up for being fucked with just then. She would need to talk to the doc about getting off some of these pills; the fucking things were making her impossible, and even she couldn't stand herself. She walked into the apartment after Lin and Daniel did, and she stayed near the door, where she could watch Lin's reaction to being in place that was like something out of a movie. She was used to it now, the space, but the look on Lin's face immediately made her want to immortalize it. She wanted a torch and some metal, maybe some glass (she'd considered playing with that recently). It reminded her of a kid in a fucking candy store, though now, inside, she could see some lines around Lin's eyes that made her think he might be older than she was. She was terrible at age; she liked older guys, and that was all she cared about when it came to numbers. She grinned at Lin's joke about the books, a gap-toothed and simple grin. She didn't quip back; she didn't even bother trying. Lin was witty, and fuck if she had any wit to her name. She'd never been quick that way. Quick with an insult or a punch, sure, but not quick like that. It made her feel a little out of place. She knew Daniel was smart, but it had never seemed to matter until then, and she made a curious sound at the fact that she'd never noticed it. It took a second longer for her to quit thinking it over, and she looked at Daniel. "Well, now that I made a love connection, my ass is going to find someone who doesn't look at me like they hate my fucking guts," she said, all hurt blisters that showed through the skin of her teeth. "Use a condom, babies," she added, grin, grin and a cover for the blisters. Daniel didn’t embarrass easy. In fact, he didn’t embarrass at all. The mess of the apartment, the lack of shoes, the ugly state of his life. Lin could look all he wanted, and Daniel would only get more aggressive to fend off anything like busybody interference or, worse, pity. The betrayal in his expression wasn’t shame, it was anger. Daniel didn’t invite people into his house lightly, and into his bed even less lightly. Somewhere else, a pricey hotel sheet, that was different. But in house, no, not lightly. Daniel thought he’d put himself out there too lightly, since his concern was so casually thrown back in his face, but the blue stare stayed for a little while on the set of Sam’s bones under her skin. “Maybe if you didn’t act like you deserve it,” Daniel shot back at her. He decided he wanted Sam to be better, but he wanted her to be better far away from him. He wasn’t sure that she would be better if she left, though. He doubted it, even with the black hole around his person. Daniel looked at Lin, and the look was a question, a request of some kind. In German he asked, “See anything interesting?” It was sardonic and also designed to attract the boy’s attention. Daniel’s eyes darted at Sam and then back in an obvious gesture to do something about her. He set his lower teeth into the top of his mouth and picked up a bottle on the way to the larger couch clustered around the center coffee table. “You’re not going to dump him on my doorstep and run away,” he groused in English, staring into a dirty glass he found in the couch cushions. Wait. What? Lin had obviously missed something. Sam was... leaving and feeling hurt, obviously, despite the smile and the jab, while Daniel was telling her, in so many words, to... go...? What had happened here? Jesus Christmas. Was this about that bathtub bit? So what? So they had taken a bath together - oooh, how bad. How wrong. God, it was the 21st fucking century. A bath was some high school shit. The boy frowned at the pair from his safe spot between the skyscrapers of books, his expression only changing to something brighter when Daniel's eyes fell on him. "I was looking for the Chef Boyardee coupons. I need to get my cheap-ass pasta on," he replied in a chipper voice, his own German very good, actually, even when colloquial. If there was one thing Lin was good at, it was language - accents, words, twisting words - all of it came easily to him. German, its prickly nature aside, was no exception. And it made learning Latin that much easier. (Thank God too. Classical Studies, yeesh.) He smiled, knowing full well that no one expected him to know anything more than the bastardization of English he generally parroted - which, after the man's next words and his look, he switched back into. "'Dump'? I'm not a dog, by the way. I know I'm cute and all, but - I have thumbs." Lin pushed himself up from his perch to show his hands, wiggling his thumbs as proof. He glanced between Sam and Daniel, eyes dipping briefly to the bottle in the man's hand. There was no pity behind the look, nothing really, besides curiosity. He ran a hand through his hair. "Are you guys really going to bicker about a bath you took together? Because, if you want to, I mean, okay, but I came here for Titanic. For Leo." Lin spread his hands in front of himself for emphasis, before raising them and then dropping them back to his sides because he was fairly sure he was making no impression. He sighed and navigated through the leaning towers of books, just walking and looking. Unfortunately, Sam was drug-raw. She was on a cocktail that made it so she couldn't get a high from opioids, one that kept the gnawing hunger from the heroin withdrawal at bay by giving her a constant "false" high that came without a nod. It kept her on edge, and it made her depressed, and it made it so much fucking harder for her to maintain that turtleshell exterior that she normally hid her feelings behind. She didn't understand the German, and she was still smarting from being chastised for something she didn't even fucking know she'd done wrong. She'd thought Lin would be uncomfortable with her comment, not Daniel. Yeah, no, by the time Daniel groused in English her decision was made. "That's ok, baby, you can gesture and talk in German all you want once I'm gone." She was very much her age then, twenty-two and not fitting right in her own fucking skin anymore. "We're not bickering, baby," she told Lin, even as she tossed him the DVD. "I'm bailing, and you get to spend quality time with the recluse. Hit me up after for an instant replay," she added, giving Lin a smile that she hoped was friendly. Yeah, she was out of her smarts league in the room, and she was so bailing. She turned for the door, navigated the books, and walked outside before anyone could stop her. She wanted a fucking drink. She needed to stop putting herself in emotional fucking situations, dammit. Fuck. She fished out her phone as she leaned back against the closed door. She'd call someone on the way to keep from buying a hit. Yeah. That's what she'd do. Daniel watched her go with no further objection, his momentary flicker of surprise at Lin’s German melting fast. Sensitive people were better off away from him, and he was still angry at her for throwing his attention and concern back in his face. Daniel didn’t take into account his own manner of address because he was never gentle or nice with the things he said or the manner in which he said them. If he said she looked sick it was because she did, and the fact he noticed was enough of an aberration to begin with. He made a half-hearted attempt to clean the sticky glass but then shrugged and poured himself three inches anyway. “What was the point of bringing it up if she was going to cry about it and leave?” he said, after the door shut. The question didn’t have the right intonation -- more like a statement -- and Lin was the only one left in the apartment so it was obvious that Lin was who he was talking to. The blue eyes reappeared as Daniel put the bottle down and settled back onto the couch with his glass set in the curve of his collarbone, the movement obviously very long practiced. “And what was the point of bringing you? She think you’ll get a good look and run the other way?” Daniel transferred his gaze to the movie, trying to understand its purpose. He couldn’t fathom why either of them would want to be here. It had to be one of the most unpleasant places in the city. It made absolutely no sense. |