Page 96 of Rebel Summer

There was silence for a beat. Dax cleared his throat. “Anyway, that’s the tragic past. I’m over it.”

“Do people get over something like that?”

He drew in a ragged breath. “I don’t know. Maybe not. But it hurts less now, and I have moved past it.”

“Do you think he’ll come back?”

It was the hesitation, the slight pause before he spoke, that had me listening intently. “Probably not. If he was going to, he would have done it already.”

“But you still wonder sometimes?”

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. It wasn’t really a question.

“And the Lego car–that’s the one you built with him?”

“Yeah.”

And I had destroyed it. Guilt washed over me even as so many pieces of Dax began falling into place. How he had a mountain of friends who came to see him. Who adored him. How he kept them at arm's length.

“Is it like…a beacon for him? Having it in the shop window like that?”

Dax huffed out a laugh. “That seems like the cheesy ending of a movie. No. At least, I never thought of it like that. The car is huge and my mom wanted it out of her house. I told Keith about it, and he loved cars as much as I did, so we moved it to the shop. It became a thing with the whole town.”

“How is your relationship with your parents now?”

Dax rubbed at his cheek. “It’s getting better. In high school, I got a job at the shop, and Keith became an unsuspecting parent to me. I would have lived at the shop if he had let me. I started working, just doing some grunt work—cleaning bathrooms and sweeping.”

“Interesting,” I interjected.

“If you keep working hard, you could get a promotion too, Books.”

I laughed softly.

“Anyway, I made it a point to never listen to anybody. But I listened to him. He was one of those guys who, if he told you he was disappointed in you, it would gut you for days. At least, he was that for me. I had him for all those years and didn’t need much from my parents. So…after he died, I’ve been slowly trying to be better. To show up for things. I haven’t been great at that yet, but…”

“It's easier to let people need you. It’s probably a lot harder to allow yourself to need them,” I said softly.

The breeze on the water picked up as we lay in contemplative silence underneath the stars. Dax pointed out one constellation, the boat rocking gently, before he dropped his fingers into my hair, softly playing with the curls. It felt like heaven.

“Do I need to pay you for this session, Doc? I think you might be in the wrong profession.”

I smiled and buried my face in his chest.

“I love the straightforwardness of math. No games. Very few gimmicks. You just solve the problem and be on your way. People are much harder.”

“And you like teaching at a college level?”

My stomach clenched. “I haven’t actually done much of it.”

His fingers moved in a soft line back and forth along my shoulder. “Why not?”

“You don’t want to hear all of this.”

His hand dropped to my side, gently tickling me while I squirmed and attempted to scramble away. I made it halfway up before he caught my arm and pulled me back down.

“After what you’ve put me through tonight, I want to know everything.”

“Better be careful,” I told him, becoming quite comfortable using him as a human body pillow. “It’s starting to sound like you might care.”

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