DYLAN WAS woken up by the sound of a teakettle whistle. It was especially disorienting because he couldn’t remember putting it on and then realized he hadn’t. Was Roan making tea?
Although he was still tired, he became aware the kettle sound was actually a Whistling Pete. For a second there, he almost forgot what day it was. Boy, that was nice.
He went and took a shower, trying to will himself into calm. The Fourth of July was a horrible holiday for him. His therapist called it PTSD, but Dylan felt that was a little dramatic. The sound just brought back bad memories.
There were differences between gunshots and fireworks, but sometimes the difference was slim. And while logically, he could tell himself it was a firework and nothing to be concerned about, his body still panicked. His heart raced, and he got uncomfortably sweaty, and in really bad cases, he struggled to breathe normally. And it never stopped being stupid. His body and mind conspired to make him a coward.
No firework had ever sounded the same as the gunshot that killed his mother or the subsequent gunshot when his father turned the gun on himself. But that didn’t change the fact that all similar sounds could cause a cascade of terrible memories.
Most July Fourths found him in movie theaters, where the loud noise of whatever was going on onscreen blocked out most of the blasts from outside. And yeah, for some reason, movie gunshots didn’t make him react the same way at all. Maybe because their noise was too dramatic, too loud, nothing like the real thing. It was the realism that killed him.
He got out and got dressed, turning on the radio for noise. It was funny how when you needed something good to be playing, it never was.
When Dylan started downstairs, he was greeted by the scent of cooked food, and Roan was uncharacteristically bustling around the kitchen. “There you are,” Roan said upon seeing him. “I thought I was gonna hafta get you up.”
“What’s the occasion?” Dylan wondered. Not that he was complaining.
“Well, I thought we could make a day of it,” Roan said, scraping scrambled eggs onto plates. Roan could scramble eggs pretty well, and he’d say that was the only thing he could cook, but that wasn’t exactly true. He could cook maybe five things. But cooking was one of the rare areas of his life where Roan had no confidence at all.
“A day of avoiding fireworks?” Dylan asked, taking a plate of eggs with a grateful nod.
“In a manner of speaking.” As soon as Roan was done plating eggs, he grabbed his own plate and joined him, sitting beside him on the couch. “It’s a movie marathon. I got us tickets for an indie horror film, an Indonesian action film, some sort of French nonsense, and the latest superhero film to end it all, which should be so loud it’ll block out everything short of a nuclear strike. That should put us out of there by one a.m., by which time most of it should be over.”
Dylan smiled as he pushed his eggs across the plate. The “French nonsense” was clearly for him, as Dylan liked some of those slower French films that drove Roan bananas. The fact Roan meant to try to put up with one meant a lot. “We should make bingo cards. It sounds like we’ll be crossing a lot of pop and foreign culture barriers tonight.”
“We could bet on which film will be the best.”
Dylan tried the eggs. They were pretty good. “Oh hon, you know as well as I we’ll never agree on that.”
“We could. Stranger things have happened.” Roan gave him a brave smile, but it was mostly for show. They both had very different tastes in movies. Sometimes they agreed on things, but Dylan had a taste for depressing foreign films, while Roan often liked stupid action films that at least made some stab at internal logic. To be fair to Roan, he hated ones that didn’t even try or that were just offensively dumb or mean-spirited. “Well, we could bet on whether any of the films have gay characters in them. And if they live to see the end of the film.”
Dylan smirked at that. “That’s a high-stakes bet. Do gay people even exist in the superhero movie universes?”
“They ought to. I mean, all that spandex and leather. Ain’t a straight boy dressing them.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Fabrics aside, a lot of the costumes are pretty awful. So maybe a bi.”
“Don’t tell Scott that.”
They ate in companionable silence while Dylan contemplated how people from his past reacted to his problems with the Fourth of July. He lost a friend in college because of it. A lot of guys—and it was mostly guys—couldn’t fathom not liking fireworks. Everyone liked fireworks, right? And the fact his father had murdered his mother and then himself with a gun was of no concern to them at all. Oh, they felt bad for him, but they couldn’t see the connection and didn’t see why he couldn’t just have a few drinks and “loosen up.” Some suggested therapy, unaware he had been in therapy for most of his life and that it had had no effect on his physical reactions. You couldn’t talk yourself out of trauma, no matter how hard you tried. Some wounds just echoed through time.
At least Roan understood that. He probably had some of his own, although he didn’t talk about that much. Roan was naturally taciturn. The talkiest he had ever been was when he was dosed with that club drug.
When he was about done with his eggs, Dylan asked, “I’m not keeping you from any festivities, am I?”
Roan looked genuinely surprised by that. “What? No, I hate fireworks.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “First of all, my hearing can be a little wonky sometimes. The lion thing, I’m sure. And when my hearing decides to be better than average, those explosions are like punches to my eardrums. But worse, the smell. The powder and the other chemicals they pack the fireworks with, each one is like a knife being stabbed through my sinuses over and over again. They can be an instant migraine trigger.”
“I had no idea.” Although Dylan felt he should have been able to guess. Because of Roan’s lion-enhanced sense of smell, he was a legally recognized bloodhound, but it was also such a source of woe for him. It could make solving some cases easy, but it also triggered migraines and made him nauseous and could chase him out of rooms. The weirdest things triggered them too. Not just bad smells like cigarette smoke and public toilets, but stuff most people thought of as good, such as perfumes, flowers, and air fresheners. They could disable Roan as much as tear gas, leave him sick and reeling. Until he’d hooked up with Roan, Dylan had had no idea that smells could be honestly assaultive. In fact, if he was a supervillain, he’d have the perfect way to incapacitate Roan. You wouldn’t fight him—that’s a battle you’d lose—you’d just throw a bottle of Chanel Nº 5 or Old Spice at him. You’d win the fight without even engaging him once.
And you could disable him with the sound of fireworks. It was sad how such little things could be so devastating.
As soon as they were both done with their eggs, Dylan collected their plates and carried them out to the kitchen. “Are we going to gorge ourselves on concession-stand food, or should we stop somewhere for dinner?”
“I was thinking we could do both. Eat way too many Junior Mints and in between, maybe stop in at Sky for pizza. And hey, if we smuggled in some airline-sized bottles of booze, we could make the concession sodas more interesting.”
That made Dylan smile. If they timed it right, they could have a nice buzz going when they got to the superhero film, which might make it even more tolerable than usual. Dylan could hardly watch one now without thinking that, if this were real, Roan could totally kick their ass. “That means we’ll have to stop and get little bottles of booze.”
Roan gulped down the rest of his tea before standing up and stretching. “Sounds like a plan. I’ll wear my coat with lots of inside pockets.”
“There is no rule breaker like an ex-cop.”
“We are bastards,” Roan said on his way up the stairs. Dylan knew him well enough to know he was only partially kidding. Roan wasn’t the type of guy to reflexively defend all cops. In fact, he was more than likely to tell you horror stories. He was loyal to those who deserved it, not to a job.
Dylan put the dishes in the sink and was aware of the irony. He hated noises like gunshots, and his troubled father had been a cop. And yet here he was, with an ex-cop who had a few guns of his own, even if he hadn’t needed to use them much lately—Lion trumped guns it seemed, or at least was much more startling, especially in an urban environment. This might seem like a terrible pattern repeating, if it wasn’t for the fact Roan was so sweet and so kind. And with his background, you’d think it would have gone the other way. But Roan lived to defy expectations all across the board.
Dylan took a sip of his own tea and heard a firecracker off in the distance, which made him wince. He felt like a wimp, but he knew Roan would never let him feel that way.
Perhaps that was the best thing about being with Roan, and the thing that was most difficult to explain to his friends. Roan had this way of making it seem like it was you and him against the world. He was the point man, being what he was, but Roan always made it feel like not only a natural fight, but a totally winnable one as well.
And as long as Roan was with him, he felt good. So fuck all the fireworks. If it was him and Roan against the world, the world didn’t stand a chance.