“Limb chicken.”
He guffaws, and I discover what will be my kryptonite with Danny: When he shifts from neutral to amused, his face transforms. Something lights from within, his spine straightens, neck snaps back, and he lets rip: “Heh heh.” And it feels like an accomplishment, the ultimate payoff. I like what I do to him. I feel myself leap to attention between my legs.
I spend the rest of the night trying to make him do it again. I watch his face, watching the way he watches me when I’m dancing with Surly Cathie—hands deep in pockets, face serious, searching. I can’t remember the last time someone looked at me so closely.
At the end of the evening, when the group splinters, I take his hand. Tell him, “My place’s this way.”
He says, “Okay.”
We spend the following month cocooned together.
Making him come is even better than making him laugh. When he’s inside me, I take his face in my hands and I have him look at me, so I won’t forget what it feels like to be watched.
It’s the first time I’ve been inseparable from someone since Teddy; a honeymoon rush. It helps that Danny is so easy to be around. He’s worked PR long enough to have adapted aspects of his job as primary mode of operation. As a result, he is the most informed person I know—about the news, about celebrities, about stocks. He is ravenous for information. He knows the public story of Vaught and Kisses, things about me that I have not told him. Yet he does not insist on having his way with the conversation.
We pass a throwback theater in Alphabet City and see a movie poster for Tank Girl. “Loved that movie when I was a kid,” he says.
I say, “People used to tell my old partner she looked like Tank Girl.”
“Lucky her.”
“Yeah.”
“You hungry?”
We fall in together. He lets me be. Doesn’t pass pointed looks at the drafting table, heaped in a shifting tide of bills and papers and Post-its. Is perfectly content to let me watch TV in my underpants while he writes, researches, makes calls. Lets me leave work wherever I leave it. Only once did he try to push the career issue, suggesting that I start a Twitter account. In response, I drew him a picture of the Twitter bird getting fisted by the hammy, hairy hand of Truth.
“Noted,” Danny said. He folded the picture and put it in his pocket. Later I found it tacked on his bulletin board.
We move in together, into the bottom level of a house in Bay Ridge. I am surprised to find myself comfortable. It’s the first place that has felt like home since the studio. I am settled, and strangely itch-free.
“I had seen you before, you know,” he tells me. “You were with Mel Vaught. At some Animacon thing. You all were doing stuff for Nashville Combat.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“Oh no. I noticed you, for sure. But I was too scared to talk to you.”
“Why in God’s name were you too scared to talk to me?”
“Every time I saw you, you were surrounded by, I dunno. Light. And people. And noise. I just thought, there’s no way. There’s no way I could ever slip into that woman’s orbit.”
“Really?”
“Of course.” He puts his arms around me. “You’re all light and noise.”
“I’m not,” I say, and he pulls me in, muffling my voice into his shirt. “I’m the most alone person I know.”
—
A few months after Danny and I move in together, An Uncensored History of Modern Cartooning is released. It’s a big oral history of animation during the past thirty years, filled with process and technique and gossip. It receives positive reviews in the Times and Kirkus: informative, though perhaps more salacious than necessary due to the many anonymous, let-the-shitfly quotes within. Glynnis Havermeyer is a co-editor. She called Donnie early on to see if she could interview me.
I made a fart noise. “Not on your life. Tell her to suck it.”
“You don’t want a chance to give your voice?” Donnie asked me. “We should probably consider this a warning. If you don’t talk, people will gladly talk for you. You and Mel are going to figure pretty heavily into this book.”
I told her I didn’t care.
She sighed. “Well, forewarned is forearmed, I guess.”
Forewarned I am, but it doesn’t do much good. The week the book comes out, I find myself pinned to the wall with needling stares at work. I spot a copy sitting on the coffee table at the studio before Tatum whisks it out of sight. Everyone’s got a copy in their bag, whispers about it over drinks. I block it all out—a practice at which I have become fucking super—but am caught off guard when I walk into our apartment to find Danny lying on the couch reading it, marking his place with his finger, looking up at me expectantly.