Page 83 of Why Cheese?
“Alone,” he adds and takes off down the street.
My feet are frozen to the cement. I nervously bounce up and down so the heels of my flats smack against the ground. Roq makes it to the curb before he turns around. His stare winnows above the rim of his glasses. “Well?”
“Mmkay,” I mutter.Oh, I am so dead.To comfort myself, I hug the lasagna dish. Warmth pools over my chest and I groan.
Eggplant and tomato sauce splatter across my breasts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
An Emmental of Emotion
INSTEAD OF LEADING me to their favorite park, Roq stops at a bench across from a bar and sits. He doesn’t even look back at me, just keeps watching the people huddled outside the dark bar smoking. One raises his head in my direction, reminding me I’m only wearing my dress and lasagna. I fall to the bench next to Roq and do my best to hide in the shadows.
“So…” His usually commanding voice is soft and scratchy like he sucked down all the smoke across the street. He’s gripping the bench’s edge so tightly veins throb on the back of his hands. I try to slide farther away from him without looking like I am.
“Cam explained everything,” I say to try to escape.
Roq pivots in his seat, an eyebrow lifted. “Did he now?” The question is so deadpan I can’t tell if he wants an answer, so I give him one anyway.
“Yes. He explained that you can, um, bottle up your, uh, you know. Stuff.”
“My stuff?”
“The…” I gesture to his crotch stained with dried semen without thinking. “No. Notthat.Stress. You bottle up stress and have to release it. Or else.”
He drops his elbows to his thighs and bends over, hiding his face. “Bear, I swear to high heaven…” Silence falls, the kind that makes me want to unzip my skin and run fleeing into the night. My ass is half off of the bench by the time he speaks again. “Last call.”
Lights flicker across the street and the bar door swings open. People wander out blinking into the darkness with either happy or annoyed confusion. “Dude, where do we go now?” one asks.
“Anywhere but here,” the bouncer instructs before guiding the drunks down the street.
“I came here nearly every night,” Roq says solemnly. “While the curds formed, I’d sit on this bench watching them. Drunks—happy, or sad, or just alive. All of them stumbling into the dark like a newborn colt.”
One of them crosses the street toward us, eyes me up, then turns to piss against the wall. Shielding my face with my hand, I try to stare at only Roq. “Why?”
He leans back but keeps running his palms up and down his thighs. “I suppose to be near the most human experience I can when the rest of the world is asleep. To not feel like I’m up there floating in the stars, adrift and alone.” Roq curls his fingers towards the mostly black sky, the stars blotted out by light pollution. “There used to be more.”
Dropping his hand, he shifts in his seat. “I’ve never told the others about this. We all have our little oases in the city night desert.”
“Cheddy’s park,” I say.
“A wide open field perfect for jousting. There used to be a little gallery right there on the corner. Brie would carry a torch and stare at the paintings for a few hours.”
Now it was a check into cash place. How depressing. “What about Cam?”
“Who do you think I’d be watching for in that bar?” Roq says. “It is a wonder that man has survived this long.”
“You care for him. Oh, shit.” I slam my hand over my mouth like that will suck back in the words that were supposed to stay in my head. Roq doesn’t explode on me, but his lips tighten and he clenches his nails into his thighs.
“Icarefor all of them. We’re all we have in this world, which can be a hard fact to accept. Is it love or a simple case of familiarity?” Roq stares at me, his face softened from his usual granite. “About Brie’s paintings…?”
“I just thought he might like it. I know you need him for cheese making. If it’s a distraction I could not get so many canvases next—”
Roq lifts a hand to halt my verbal explosion. “They’re wonderful. It was a kindness you did for him.”
“Well, I…I wanted to be…helpful. If I could bring Cheddy a horse or Cam a bawdy inn, I would. I said that out loud again. Damn it.”
The strangest thing happens. Roq, the terrifying, stoic man-fridge, laughs.
