Free The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris Page B

she saw Russell, back from the bathroom and approaching the dartboard. And Tristan, she saw, was watching her now. “You get that look on your face,”
she said to him. “Where are you when you’re like that?”
    “I could ask you the same thing,” he said.
    Russell was talking to a little man with gold-rimmed glasses. The man took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his forehead. “Maybe,” she said. “But I asked you.” Russell and the man went over to a table and looked at some sheets and Russell laughed, not his natural laugh, not the one she knew.
    “ El hombre que desaparece ,” Tristan said. He picked up the pitcher in front of him and poured himself a glass of beer but didn’t take a drink. El hombre —the man. But what was that last word? She’d taken two years of Spanish. She should know. Tristan leaned in closer to her, raised his eyes to her, looked like there was something he wanted to say.
    “Tristan, you playing darts tonight, or what?” Russell called out. He sounded angry, and Russell was never angry. What was wrong with everyone tonight? Maybe it had something to do with her and maybe it didn’t.
    “I’m here, El Capitan ,” Tristan said, smiling, still looking at her and not Russell. “Just call me when it’s time.” He took a drink of beer and set the mug on the table. Desaparece —what was it? “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do you want to get out of here?”
    Now maybe they were making some progress after all. “Out of this bar, you mean, or out of this town?”
    “Either,” he said.
    “All the time.”
    “Really?” he said.
    Really. Now Russell threw a dart and the man with the glasses threw a dart and then there was some kind of brief discussion and she was afraid any second Tristan would get called
away from the table. “All the time,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like. You’ve been gone for four years.”
    “But still—”
    “No,” she said, “you don’t know.” She leaned in closer. “Are you saying you want to stay ?” She didn’t mean to sound angry, but if Tristan Mackey thought for one second that he intended to stay in this town, she was going to slap him. If there was one person in her whole life whom she’d ever been sure about, ever known for sure would move on to bigger and better things, it was Tristan. She wanted to make sure he stayed put long enough to get accustomed to having her around, to grow fond of Hayley, to come to think of them as a family, and not a second longer.
    “Most of the time I don’t even realize I’m here,” he said. “It’s like I’m not anyplace at all, I mean it’s like I’m somewhere in my head but not actually in a physical space.” He took up a cigarette pack and a lighter from the table, lit a smoke. Desaparece . He sat there smoking for a few seconds, his foot tapping. “Does that make sense?”
    “Sort of,” she said. “Not really.” What else was she supposed to say? He could sit there and stare at her accusingly all he wanted to, but if she didn’t get it, she didn’t get it. And she wanted him to sound comprehensible.
    “I get focused on one thing inside so that I can’t see the things outside it,” he said, “and then I feel like that one thing inside is the only real thing, and that outside of it I’m not really anyplace.”
    “OK,” she said. “Got it.”
    “And then there’s a night like this. Everybody’s just hanging around, and I’m in a pretty good mood and not thinking about
a lot of things, and then you come walking in”—he motioned toward her with the cigarette, the cigarette taking in the hair she’d fixed just so, the eyebrows she’d plucked just right, the tight blouse that maybe wasn’t too tight after all, the skirt and her legs underneath—“and you look good, and I remember what you’re like, and it’s like I’m coming up from under the surface somewhere, like I haven’t been able for a long time to breathe and look