Page 29 of It's a Love Story

“Asparagus.” I turn my head toward him, and our faces are no more than six inches apart. I don’t know when I’ve seen him this close, the way his eyelashes seem even darker than his hair. The way his upper lip bows at the top.

“It was very heated,” he says. “Good source of vitamin E versus makes your pee smell. It was a whole thing.”

“So this is where you learned to be a pain in the ass?”

He smiles at me. “Yes.” The back of his hand shades his eyes, but I can see the playfulness there.

I look back to the sky.

“I’m an only child,” I say after a while. “And my dad died when I was five. It was very quiet.” I don’t know if it’s my discomfort with the quiet that’s made me say this. I don’t know if it’s the whole Jack Quinlan thing or all thisPop Rockstalk, but I am feeling unusually unmasked, digging up the old ghosts and tossing them out there. My eyes are closed against the sun, but I can feel him looking at me.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “About your dad.”

“It’s fine,” I say.

“It’s not fine,” Dan says. “I mean, your dad being dead can’t be fine.” He turns onto his stomach and rests his chin on his hands.

I turn my head and find his eyes right there. “It’s a long story,” I say. It’s not really even that long. It’s a sentence. But it’s something I’ve never said to anyone besides Clem. Not even to my mom. Sometimes the simplest facts are the most painful ones. They’re the ones that cut to the essence of who we are.

His eyes are intensely focused, and this is the difference between Dan and his brothers. They let things roll right over them, and Dan doesn’t miss a thing. It’s almost like he could pull that sentence right out of me.

I hold his gaze for a few beats before I actually feel myself weakening. There’s power in his quiet; it makes room for something. But I’ve said way too much on this topic already, so I say, right into his eyes, “You totally listen to folk music on a gramophone.”

He laughs, and I feel better. “Yes, obviously.”

“It must be so weird to have all those brothers who look so much like you.”

“I even have an identical twin,” he says. He smooths the sand between us with his hand.

“Well, yes. Even weirder.”

He doesn’t say anything more and I want him to. So I go on. “Do you like that, coming home to people so much like you?”

He looks at me, and there’s something in his eyes; it’s a vulnerable something. “Sometimes when I’m here with all of them, I worry I’ll get swallowed up. Like I’ll forget who I am.”

The white noise of the ocean surrounds us, and it’s an active sort of quiet. It reminds me of the quiet in an airplane, that loud hum that shifts your brain waves.

“I have no idea who I am,” I say. It comes out more solemn than I intended, as if it was something that should be said in a church. I don’t know where this thought came from, but I do know this is something I’ve never said out loud. I grew up pretending—for the camera and even for my mom. I’ve never stopped.

“What does that mean?”

I turn onto my side to face him, propping my head up on a hand. “I grew up in a costume and reading from a script. That’s not a metaphor, as you know. And every once in a while I sort of saw something underneath all of that, and I thought that might be who I was.” I scrunch up my face. I don’t know why I’m telling him this.

“And you liked it?”

“I did, I think.” For a second, I thought I was beautiful and important. “But then a bunch of stuff happened and I decided maybe chasing that girl down wasn’t worth it. It seemed easier to just come up with a better costume and show up as the kind of person the world liked.”

He doesn’t even blink. “I hope we read the same script, Jane. It’s all about being brave enough to be your full broken self. You needTrue Storymore than anyone.” He turns back to the sun. I feel the truth of those words in my heart, though I don’t have an adequate reply.

We listen to the waves for a while, and I try to get comfortable with the silence. I just overshared and there’s something seeping out of me now that I’ve said that thing to Dan. I know it’s the script that has these old feelings brushing up against the surface. I look at him with his eyes closed and the hint of a smile still on his lips, and I’m glad I’m not currently working onStar Crossed.I’m glad there’s a chance thatTrue Storymight be my first movie. The quiet complexity of it is like Dan himself, authentic and weirdly under my skin.

“Aidan, can you come help us?” There’s a twelve-year- old boy casting a shadow over Dan.

“I’m his brother Danny,” Dan says.

“Wow, weird,” the kid says. “I’m Tucker. My parents know him.”

“What do you want help with?” I ask.

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