She caught herself swaying back and forth as she held onto him, an instinctive rhythm not connected to the distant blare of taxis or rumble of the train. She wished they were back in Montana still, where she’d been certain everything she’d been asked to do was helping someone.
“Poached,” Teagan said, apropos of nothing.
“What?”
“They could poach the eggs without using butter. Do you like poached eggs?” he asked.
Darcy leaned back and goggled at him. Teagan had a great portion of his mind devoted, at any given time, to worrying about other people’s needs. She’d entirely forgotten about brunch, Sloane waiting for them, and Sloane’s need for productive employment. Teagan hadn’t. He was still solving those problems in the background.
“Yeah, I’ll eat a couple of poached eggs,” Darcy said slowly.She frowned at him, recalling the hour on the train. “Did we come out here just for the eggs?”
Teagan ran a couple of affectionate fingers across the fluffy tip of her braid. He smiled at her, and this time, it reached his eyes. “Don’t worry about it.”
twenty-five
Friday night found Teagan in the back seat of his mother’s car, head bumping against the driver’s seat every time his sister approached a stoplight. She kept flooding the engine when she tried to shift gears. He wasn’t even sure she had a driver’s license, and he was too afraid to ask at this point.
He’d entertained the passing thought thatwhile driving Sloane and Darcy to the Westchester Zoo’s annual Art Walk gala would be a very bad time to have a panic attack, and of course, no sooner had he pulled onto Broadway than he felt that now-familiar surge of adrenaline course through his veins like snake venom.
He pulled over at a gas station, palpably aware of the stares that he drew leaning against the car in his tuxedo as two women in evening gowns argued around him.
“We should just go home,” Darcy said. “I looked up the Westchester Zoo. It’s a private zoo, owned by some eccentric finance jerk. Private zoos are terrible. They select for the most charismatic species rather than paying even lip service to captive breeding programs and species reintroduction. Everyone has a Bengal tiger when they ought to have a Przewalski’s horse. And this dress is itchy.”
“Teaganshould go home,” Sloane retorted. “I look hot.You look hot. I got my hair blown out for this. We can probably hit up, like, a lot of donors if we work together.”
“I have to go to this,” Teagan said, struggling for air. “Just give me a minute.”
Darcy and his sister regarded him with disappointment, and Sloane none-too-gently shoved him into the back seat.
“I’ll drive,” his sister announced.
The past two weeks had been hell. Nora was coming by the office almost every day to case the art on the walls like a Wet Bandit in Lanvin pumps, Sloane was making noises about changing her major a third time or possibly dropping out of school entirely, and, most ominously, Darcy had purchased a new pair of snow boots for the coming winter. The boots were stashed away in the coat closet of his mother’s house, but Teagan felt their dire presence like a gothic heart beating under the floorboards.
His symptoms were all in his head. He was not having a heart attack. His terror was just a misfire in his brain. The woman crowding into the back seat next to him was real, and she cared about him, and if he just put his head down and worked hard enough at it, he could fix all the problems that were sending her out of his life.
These precisely dictated thoughts were launched at the invading mass of anxiety until it gradually began to retreat.
Darcy rubbed a soothing palm between Teagan’s shoulder blades until he sighed and moved his head to her shoulder, feeling some of the storm in his skull subside. “Private zoos aren’t even good at wildlife education,” she gently chided him. “The animals don’t perform their natural behaviors in the kinds of enclosures these zoos have room for, and they don’t have enough individuals to maintain their typical social groupings.”
“We can leave as soon as I’ve given my speech,” Teagan promised.
“What speech?” Darcy asked.
“Mom was on the board of this zoo, and this was Mom’s favorite event,” Sloane called from the front seat. “She’d bring one of us as her date every year. There are pictures of teenage Teagan in a tuxedo, holding a lemur.”
Teagan felt the weight of Darcy’s judgmental stare, even though he didn’t think it was fair to condemn him for not intuiting animal welfare concerns as a fourteen-year-old.
“Since she died on the way back from a board meeting, they decided to name the new tiger exhibit after her two years ago. I think they were afraid someone would sue them. As if Mom needed an excuse to get drunk. So, anyway, Teagan gives the annual update about the tiger exhibit now,” Sloane finished.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Darcy muttered, hand still pressed against Teagan’s back, the anchor he was clinging to. “This zoo basically killed your mom, and you have to give a speech every year?”
“Too many vodka sodas killed my mother,” Teagan mumbled. He forced himself to sit up and take deep breaths. “I’m not worried about the speech.”
He was worried about the speech. He’d spent ten minutes before the speech dry heaving last year. Public speaking didn’t bother him any more than it did most people, but saying nice things about his mother and this nonprofit that he didn’t really believe in did bother him. But his worries about the speech were not even visible over the pile of worries he was carrying for his other plans tonight.
If Darcy was serious about what she’d said—that she wanted to be with him, if all the other extraneous bullshitin his life didn’t get in the way—he thought he’d put together something to offer her. He just had to keep it together for the next few hours.
They made it to the zoo’s valet stand before Sloane could wear out the transmission. Darcy squinted suspiciously at the big flags depicting happy penguins dancing around bits of avant-garde sculpture while Teagan summoned every scrap of optimism he possessed. This could go well. He could end tonight happy. Maybe it would all work out for him this time.
