“Dani, stop it,” Jo warns.
“Feck no, I’m not stopping it.” I’m so pissed, I’m vibrating. “He doesn’t deserve you and you deserve so much better!” It doesn’t help that behind Ryodan the fire-can folks have switched songs again and are now booming out a rousing rendition of “Hail Glorious St. Patrick,” clapping their hands and banging on cans with pieces of wood, getting all rambunctious. The louder they sing, the hotter my temper gets. “He’s always pushing everybody else around but nobody ever calls him out on the carpet. I say it’s way past time. Either you matter to him or you don’t, and he needs to say which one it is. I want to know which one it is.”
“She matters,” Ryodan says.
Jo looks stunned.
It pisses me off even more. She’s looking all dreamy-eyed and in love again. Anybody can see she ain’t his type. “You liar, she does not!”
“Dani, stow it,” Jo says.
I know him. I know how he tricked me. He’s splitting verbal hairs. Of course she matters. But he didn’t say “to me.” She matters to the club, for mercenary reasons, because she’s a waitress. “Does she, like, matter to you emotionally? Do you love her?”
“Dani, stop it right now!” Jo says, horrified. To Ryodan she says, “Don’t answer her. I’m sorry. Just ignore her. This is so embarrassing.”
“Answer me,” I say to Ryodan. The hymn folks are really rocking it now, dancing and swaying, and I’m almost having to yell to be heard. But that’s okay. I feel like yelling.
“For fuck’s sake,” Ryodan growls over his shoulder, “can’t they go sing somewhere else.”
“They want in,” I say. “They’re going to die on your doorstep because you’re too much of a prick to save them.”
“The world is not my responsibility.”
“Obviously.” I put twenty kinds of verbal condemnation in the single word.
“She just wanted to find Dancer,” Jo says. “I think it’s important. Sometimes you have to trust her.”
“Do you love her?” I push.
Jo groans likes she’s going to die of embarrassment. “Oh God, Dani, shut up!”
I expect him to scoff at me, say something bullying, throw an insult back in my face, but he just says, “Define love.”
I stare straight into those clear, cool eyes. There’s some kind of challenge there. I don’t get this dude. But the definition he wants is easy. I had a lot of time in a cage to think about it. I saw a TV show once that gave the perfect definition, and I say it to him now: “The active caring and concern for the health and well-being of another person’s body and heart. Active. Not passive.” In a nutshell, you remember that person all the time. You never forget them. You factor their existence into yours every single hour of every single day. No matter what you’re doing. And you never leave them locked up somewhere to die.
“Think about what that entails,” he says. “Providing food. Shelter. Protection from one’s enemies. A place to rest and heal.”
“You forgot about the heart part. But I didn’t expect anything else. ’Cause you ain’t got one. All you got are rules. Oh, and yeah, more rules.”
Jo says, “Dani, can we just—”
Ryodan cuts her off. “Those rules keep people alive.”
Jo tries again. “Look, guys, I think—”
“Those rules strangle folks who need to breathe,” I say, talking right over her. Nobody’s listening to her anyway.
All the sudden he has me by the collar, hanging in the air, my feet dangling off the ground, our noses touching.
“By your own definition,” he says, “you don’t love anyone either. An argument could be made that you only ever do one of three things to the people closest to you: make enemies of them, kill the people they love, or get them killed. Careful. You’re on thinner ice than you’ve ever been with me.”
“Because I’m asking if you love Jo?” I say coolly, like I’m not hanging helpless by my shirt. Like he didn’t just take a mean shot at me below the belt.
“It’s not your business, Dani,” Jo says. “I can take care of my—”
“Pull your head out of your ass and see the world,” Ryodan says.
“I do see the world,” I say. “I see it better than most folks and you know it. Put me down.”
“—self just fine.” Jo is sounding kind of pissed now, too.