Who: Daniel and Micah What: Micah tries reason; Micah fails. Where: R1 When: After all the cheating threads; before the moon. Warnings: CRUDE LANGUAGE. Seriously, men being men, cursing in Spanish and English, and lots of crass talk about sleeping with the female of the species.
Daniel was under no illusions. He knew exactly what kind of person he was (or thought he did) and there was no way that anyone else’s estimation of his character was going to be any more ruthless than what he thought about himself. He was out of the habit of wallowing in it, however, and being dry for this long had made him a much cheaper drunk than he could ever remember being before. He hadn’t actually meant to get quite so wasted, but it seemed to just happen after the first drink (it was that horrific stuff Will drank, Jack Daniels, but he barely tasted it anyway). He was aware how tenuous his hold on Ella was now, after she had seen Jane the day before, but as soon as he lost her in one quick forum post, the blow was so real it literally took the breath out of him.
He knew how it was supposed to go if you were living with a woman, and he well knew that the nights with Ain--two, total--were not allowed. Daniel had difficulty comparing the women in his life, and he wasn’t replacing one with the other, not then and not now. It was a short, sweaty escape from thinking, and like the alcohol he understood it was as healthy as a death knell. At a point, however, he just figured that the survival instinct kicked in and you did what you had to just to get through the day.
He found a spot on the balcony with his bottle, and if he imagined hard enough he could remember the warmth on the concrete that would be there in the early evening, were it not so cold and late.
Micah didn’t have time for this shit. He’d stopped by Cole’s for boxes of bones, which he had under his arm - funny how a human boy fit so neatly into containers and labeled bags with paper lining) - and he placed Aaron on the floor outside R1 when he knocked. He was about to knock harder, however when the door opened under the pressure, and he picked up the boxes and walked into the apartment.Micah drank. He drank socially, and he drank after a hard day of work. A beer and a cigar made everything better - beer and Chivas did even more than that. But this wasn’t the smell of beer, and it wasn’t the scent of good whiskey. It was the scent of the cheap booze the jineteras drank once they were too old to work the Malecon at home for American dollars.
He sighed, closed the door behind him, and he went in search of the idiot who lived in the apartment.
The balcony door was open, thankfully, and he didn’t have to look too hard. The apartment, as he passed through it, looked decidedly more feminine than it had the first time he’d seen it. It made him think of Iris, of her blank slate and empty walls.
He had a completely selfish moment where he hoped Ella didn’t even consider moving into 206.
The garden on the balcony was dying. That was immediately obvious to Micah, who was so accustomed to the scent of death that he could smell the beginnings of it, before anything could be seen. It was a little too sweet, a little too thick, the scent of the flowers on the air, and by the time he’d walked across the concrete and toward the man and the bottle, the petals were falling off the flowers he passed by.
He reached a hand out for the cheap whiskey. “Démelo.”
Daniel wasn’t watching the lights of the traffic passing or letting his eyes drift shut in the abstract cold; he was watching the garden, watching the flowers tip and burn, the leaves wilt, the trees monochrome. There wasn’t much of an expression there, he’d wiped it slack with a decent mount of the bottle, which he had curled under one arm to keep it upright in his slump against the wall.
Looking up, he was quite obviously surprised to see Micah (all his emotions were brittle and painfully obvious). “Not everybody speaks Spanish,” he said, tripping over so many s’s in one sentence. “Consigue uno propio.” He squinted up at the man, who really was absurdly tall, and distantly remembered something he’d said once about being alcoholic. “...n’I don’t want any of your pills for this, either.” It was aggression, but not much of it, considering he didn’t move and he looked back to the garden almost immediately.
Micah grabbed the bottle easily, inebriation making Daniel’s reflexes slow and sluggish, and he summarily took the thing and threw it to the floor, shattering glass and amber liquid over the growing collection of dead petals. “What the hell are you solving with that?” he demanded.
That got his attention, at least. He didn’t protest--he was already drunk enough that protesting seemed too much effort--but he flinched when the glass went everywhere. “Well,” he said, dragging the word out and almost forgetting to answer entirely, “nothing, really. It doesn’t solve much’ve ‘nything, really.” He looked morosely down at the glass.
Micah crossed his arms, and he turned toward the apartment. “Get inside. Coffee and water, and then we’re fucking talking this out. Because Iris is going to be livid, and I want to at least tell her you had a good reason for what you did.”
Daniel dropped a piece of glass he’d retrieved for bemused inspection, and at least made the effort to get on his feet. He made a little cough laugh sound. “Iris. She doesn’t care about anything.”
Micah wasn’t about to try explaining Iris to Daniel, not when Daniel wasn’t going to understand, and he waited at the sliding glass door impatiently. The wait however, made him sigh, soften a little. “Iris pretends, and she doesn’t want to care. That doesn’t mean she actually doesn’t. And you, why the fuck did you do this if it was going to eat you up? And don’t tell me it’s because she’s hot, because Ella’s young and she’s pretty. It’s not like you had to go outside to find a hot piece of naked ass. Now get inside. Todo aqui se esta muriendo, and I’m not on the clock right now.”
Daniel totally disliked Iris and everything she represented, and Iris felt the same about him. Neither one of them really cared to understand the other, so there wasn’t much point in trying. Daniel swayed over to the door, relatively plaint for such a stubbornly self-destructive man, and said, “It wasn’t s’posed to mean anything.” He tried to look over his shoulder at the garden, obviously mourning its loss, and almost fell sideways into the glass trying to walk forward and look back.
“Estupido,” Micah muttered under his breath, reaching forward and grabbing Daniel’s shoulder and hoisting him inside. “What if she slept with with someone, and she told you it wasn’t supposed to mean anything?” he asked, even as he pushed Daniel toward the kitchen unsympathetically.
Daniel stumbled along, unresisting. “It always means something to her,” he replied, clearly confused by the conversation and taking it literally word by word.
“So if I left here right now and slept with her, it would be fine, as long as it didn’t mean anything to her?” he asked, acting for all the world like he was going to walk out the door and do just that. “I can’t get Iris in bed, and Ella has a nice set of legs on her, mi herma,” he said, intentionally pushing, but keeping that dimpled smile on his face that was near-impossible to read. “She probably needs comforting, so it would just be a rebound screw.”
“I--” He didn’t know. Daniel had never been in a position to care when he was being cheated, if he ever had been. He hadn’t cared enough to find out. Micah’s casual compliment stirred a response out of him, though. “No.” He was angry enough to stop swaying, at least, and he was seriously considering taking a swing at the other man--but he knew as well as Micah did that he’d miss. “Just because you--” he tried to think of something suitably insulting, and failed, “can’t melt the ishe--ice--queen, leave Ella alone.”
Micah would have respected him more if he’d thrown the punch. “Iris isn’t an ice queen, comemierda,” he said evenly. “Someone hurt her,” he added, pushing Daniel aside as he walked past him into the kitchen, where all the herbs were also in the process of wilting, and he began throwing them out as he spoke, as he started making coffee (which at least wasn’t instant).
Daniel found the edge of the table for support as the room became a tilt-a-whirl, but he heard the first bunch of herbs hit the trash can and woke up like a bear in spring. He lurched across the kitchen and shoved Micah low in the chest away from the dying green things. “Leave them alone!” he snarled at him, angrier than he had been before. She was gone, but not entirely, and what there was of her would stay as long as he could handle.
Micah allowed himself to be shoved. If he had wanted to to stand his ground, he could have easily. He was much taller than Daniel, broader, more built. But he moved away, glad to see some sort of reaction from the man in front of him. “They’re just dead grasses,” he said, intentionally blunt about the wording as he resumed his actions around the coffee, setting the pot on, getting cups. “There are two types of mujeres, Daniel. The ones you fuck, and you don’t care who else goes there. And the ones you fuck, and you do care. Make up your mind which category she’s in.”
“She’s not a category,” Daniel grunted, teeth still slightly bared and with enough of the Beast in him to seriously want to tear something just because of the conversation. “And they’re her stupid grasses so leave them the fuck alone.” It made absolutely no difference to Daniel what Micah was built like or how many inches he had on him. It probably wouldn’t have made a difference if he was in armor. Daniel was perfectly willing to start fights with people, and he wasn’t one that much cared about winning. He had the scars to prove it. Deep, long scars.
“So it’s fine if I set her up with someone? Pete is a nice guy, and he’s lonely. A lawyer, and he makes good money. His wife left him for P3, sabes?” he asked, not addressing the stupid grasses and their presence again. “Because if it doesn’t bother you, the idea of her lying naked with another man, then let her go to someone who fucking will be bothered,” he said, and it was all blunt masculinity. Micah’s rules for men and women were cut and dry. If you loved someone, you didn’t hurt them, you protected them. If you didn’t love them, then casual sex was casual. The lines didn’t blur. You didn’t treat your woman like a whore, and you didn’t treat a whore like your woman.
“She can go be with anyone she likes,” Daniel growled, “Not that it’s any of your business who she wants and who she doesn’t.” It was different for Daniel, and he could care about a woman, sleep with a woman, without classifying them on either side of Micah’s line in the sand. “Stop talking about her like she’s a goddamn commodity.” The anger was burning off some of the alcohol’s effects, and the slurring was a little less even if nothing was focusing right. He sat down heavily into his kitchen chair, clearly marked just because of the heap of newspapers in various languages turned to face that side.
Micah, who was carefully listening to tone of his words, as much as he was listening to the words themselves, took the two fresh mugs of coffee and set them on the table. He turned the opposite chair around, and he folded his arms along the back. “Esta bien, so then you’re saying you can sleep with who you want, and it shouldn’t bother her, because it doesn’t mean anything to you. And you don’t mind her doing the same? Entoces dicelo, so she doesn’t get hurt when you do that. Assuming que eso es lo que quieres,” he said, looking around the kitchens at all the feminine touches, then back at Daniel. He took a sip of his coffee. “And what’s the redhead?”
Bleary eyes glared at him over the edge of one wrist as Daniel scraped a hand over his jaw. “I didn’t say it shouldn’t bother her.” He looked down at the coffee but didn’t touch it, slumping back and folding his arms. As for Ain, well... “She just wants someone to take care of her,” Daniel said, bleakly. “She knows that’s not me, but she likes to pretend sometimes, I think. I don’t know. She’s using me for something.” He shrugged one shoulder. If it made her happy, he didn’t see anything wrong with it from her angle. From his, obviously, that was something else, but he hadn’t set out to hurt her.
Micah rubbed between his eyes, and he wondered if this entire building was entirely comprised of people that were fundamentally fucked up in one way or another. “Okay, and what do you get from her that you don’t get from Pete’s future girlfriend?” he asked, trying to get to the bottom line here. “Variety? Is she better in bed? Does she do a fantastic lap dance? Que?”
Daniel shook his head. “I really hate you.” He pulled his coffee closer, but still didn’t drink. “I don’t know. It just happened. I just wanted to see if she was okay. Some bastard drugged her up and raped her and I--I was worried. I don’t know, she just...” he trailed off. He frowned.
Micah had forgotten about the rape connection with Red, probably because he’d been so intent on keeping that particular bit of information from Iris. “Let me see if I have this right. She was raped and upset, so you comforted her with your dick, and you didn’t think about your girlfriend once throughout the entire process?” he asked. “Is la caperucita in love with you, and please tell me you didn’t have sex with her and just-” he paused. “You did, didn’t you?”
Stung, Daniel scowled. “She wasn’t upset about that. She said she was fine, and she left the hospital a few weeks ago.” He frowned, though, doubt now transparent. Maybe that was why she needed him that night--and if that was so, he just majorly fucked up. It was easy for him to believe. He put his fingers into his eyes. “Shit.”
Micah looked at him without saying anything for a few, long moments. “Is one warm body the same to you as another, is that it?” he asked, because he knew men like that. He didn’t particularly like them, and he always found it easy to steal their women, because all you had to do was give half a damn, because they were so starved for emotion. “Red, Beauty, whoever - does it matter? As long as it’s someone you can roll over in the morning when you’re hard?”
Daniel looked up sharply. “No! Jane--once before she moved across the country.” His expression flickered with obvious pain, then hardened again. “Ain, only twice since that first time and the both of us didn’t even know what we were doing the first time, it was just--fuck, I don’t know. Comfort. Not just because I wanted it but because she did too.” He shoved away from the table and lurched upright, without direction. “Ella was just staying...” he said, helplessly. “I was trying to protect her, keep her here. It wasn’t about sex, I don’t care what you think.”
Micah sipped his coffee, acting like all this talking wasn’t the goal of this exercise. “So you don’t want to have sex with Ella? Es el problema?”
“I do. It’s just not as important as the rest of it. You wouldn’t understand.” He turned away, to end the conversation, and swayed out into the living room toward the couch.
He followed behind him, watching him find the couch and waiting until he had steadied before he said anything. He leaned against the chair across from the couch, his hip against the arm. “I’ve slept with more women than you have, Casanova,” Micah said with utter certainty. Sex was much more open and commonplace in Cuba than in the United States, and women there had gravitated toward men like Micah - pale as he was, with light eyes and a good, government job. “I want to get Iris in bed,” he admitted openly. “I would love to get Iris in bed, but the reason I don’t push it, is because I know she’d be more than a casual lay, entiendes? And I know that because I like listening to her talk and watching her laugh every bit as much as I want to fuck her. And it scares the living daylights out of me when I think she’s going to have a panic attack walking to a job interview without me around to take care of her. That is how I know, mi herma. Figure out what the hell you feel and for who. If Ella’s not about sex, then don’t sleep with her. If Red isn’t about emotion, then don’t sleep with her. Cristo.”
Daniel wasn’t going to start throwing numbers out and arguing with Micah about logistics. Suffice to say that he had a lot of money and generally that was enough, even if he wasn’t spending it. That situation was different in R1, because Daniel perceived the world from his cocoon and it was as cotton white as the rest of the building. Daniel put his arm over his eyes. “I told you you wouldn’t understand.”
“Oh, it’s different than what I just said? Explain it to me then. Make me understand,” he said, all understanding and willingness to listen. Any desire he had to strangle the man across from him was completely and totally missing from his expression. “Explain Jane too, while you’re at it.”
Daniel grinned humorlessly into the black at the back of his eyelids. “Because it’s never casual anymore, doc. There’s no such thing. I don’t know enough people, much less women, to take make anything casual.You think this is a fucking subway station?” He took his arm down and half-sat up. It made his head spin but he did it anyway. “You get too frustrated trying to get your ice queen to take her pants off for you, you can take a walk and find someone else. I can’t do that any more. I don’t want to do that any more. I just want Ella safe, I don’t care about the rest of it. If she doesn’t want me to touch anyone else then I won’t touch anyone else, but I dunno what to tell Ain, she just keeps going back to Shane and he just keeps tearing her up again, and she can’t hide with me anymore.” He didn’t elaborate about Jane. He didn’t have to really say anything about Jane. Jane was gone, and it hurt too much to do anything but say it: “Jane is gone. I can’t hurt her or help her anymore.”
"Unless you've fucked on every surface of this apartment, you shouldn’t even be thinking about other women yet," Micah said, thinking aloud, although he knew some men were like that - always wanting something new in bed.. "Wanting to take care of her doesn't mean you want to be with her, Daniel. Does Red do it for you sexually in a way Ella doesn’t?”
“Just needs me in a different way.” Another lift of Daniel’s shoulder.
Jane was harder the address. “You know, you get do-overs.”
Daniel didn’t even look up. “No, I don’t.”
Micah took a deep breath and considered the Ain situation. “If she’s in an abusive relationship, then we help her out of it.” He paused. “I don’t hear you talking about feelings with any of these women. If it’s just caring about them, then that isn’t all there is. And there’s nothing keeping you in this apartment but you..”
Daniel flopped backward and put his arm back over his eyes. They were starting to ache, and he could feel the headache coming. “I’m so done talking about this with you,” he slurred. “I’m gonna regret it in the morning, I know it.”
“Tienes miedo contestar me? No me sorprende,” Micah pushed, calling Daniel out as a coward for not wanting to talk about it. “If any of these women matter to you, you’ll stop being such a self-absorbed comemierda and go after whichever one you want. If you don’t, your liver is going to fall out of your asshole before you’re fifty.”
“I told you you wouldn’t get it,” Daniel said, not bothering to open his eyes. Then he turned over so his face was to the back of the couch. “Don’t worry. I won’t make it to fifty anyway.”
“Get what?” Micah demanded, truly frustrated at this point. “They both need you. I get that. Which one do you want? And have you ever considered you don’t want either of them?” He took a deep breath, willed himself not to send his fist flying toward Daniel’s nose, reminded himself that the man was drunk. And then he sat down on the coffee table, and rested his arms on his spread knees. “I understand that they need you, Daniel. What do you feel for them? All three of them - include Jane.” He was starting to think taking the asshole to a club so he could see what really casual sex felt like might be a good idea. Or hookers. Cuban hookers.
Daniel’s problem was definitely not that he didn’t understand casual sex. Daniel’s whole life since he could sneak out of his bedroom was casual sex. The problem was that he couldn’t have it any more--it was emotional because everything was emotional, and his world was too small for someone to pass through it so easily.
Daniel’s voice was muffled by the couch and the alcohol and the sleep that kept pulling him down away from coherent thought. “I was just trying to keep her safe,” he replied, vaguely, muscles loosening as he sighed.
“Which one?” Micah asked, starting to realize something about this entire conversation.
“All of them,” Daniel replied.
“You have no idea what the hell you want, do you,” he said, and it was a statement, not a question. “You’re just running around, trying to give them what they want, and you have no fucking idea what you want for yourself.
“Want you to shut up so I can go to sleep.”
“Do us all a favor. Don’t fuck anyone else until you manage to get out that door once a day, and until you go on a fucking date or two, and until you figure out who the hell you are and what the hell you want. You want to help Ella? Help her. You want to help Ain? Help her. But not with your cock.” Micah stood, and he looked down at the couch. “Starting Friday, you’re going to the gym with me at seven, and don’t even give me shit about it.”
With that, Micah turned, grabbed Aaron, and left R1 behind. “Idiota,” he muttered under his breath, slamming the door behind himself.