Love and Its Lies

Twelve - Dinner part 2

John innocently sat at the head of the small wooden dinner table, with Aly and Danny sitting across from each other—Aly to his right, and Danny to his left. In front of them was the modest feast that John had personally prepared for more than an hour. Unbeknownst to him that his seemingly normal guests were either suspicious of him or deeply in love with him, and both in an unspoken competition to prove themselves right to one another.

“The food is just great, John,” Aly commented as she took another bite. “Don’t tell me you really cooked all this?” Danny doubted she was even paying any attention to the food. She had mostly been staring at the other man ever since they sat at the table, which had been a good 5 minutes.

John smiled and graciously accepted her compliment. “You’re too kind, Aly. I did cook everything. I lived alone in the city for so long that I had to learn how to cook.”

“I wish I knew how to cook like this,” Aly replied dreamily.

“Oh, I’m sure with enough time in the kitchen, you would,” John encouragingly said.

Aly put a hand on her chest. “Really? You think so?”

Danny lifted his drink to his mouth and commented under his breath, “Careful not to choke on your delusions, cousin,” which made Aly glare at him and John chuckle. To John, he asked curiously, “You mentioned you lived alone in the city. Why did you move back in town again?”

“I wanted to take a break from all of it. How about the two of —”

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Danny cut him off quickly. “what exactly is the line of work you're in?”

Aly looked at him with a deadpan expression, which he chose to ignore as he displayed an innocently curious expression to their host. John only gave him a small smile and started putting more servings of vegetables onto his own plate. “I'd prefer if we didn’t talk much about work. I did come here to escape it, after all.”

“Escape, huh,” Danny inaudibly muttered.

“Yes, let’s not talk about work, Danny,” Aly said through gritted teeth and a fake smile. “So, John, what else have you been up to? I remember back in college, you used to be part of many organizations. Always the busy-bee.”

Busy-bee? Danny’s upper lip curled in horror at Aly's act.

John beamed at her as he recalled. “You remember that? I kind of lost touch with some of them, but I did reconnect with a few of the nature club to carry out donations to landslide victims last year.” To that statement, Aly saw Danny almost choke at his food.

“I’m also still friends with some of my football teammates, but now we only play tennis on weekends. Oh, did you have that professor in… was it Philosophy? Mid 50’s, tall and slightly awkward, has a great head of white hair, who was it? Professor—”

“Professor McManus!” Aly exclaimed, eyes wide and leaning closer in excitement.

“Right! I saw him a couple of months ago and turns out, he finally got married to his—”

“Boyfriend of 35 years! Marcus, I think is his name. He used to talk about him a lot during class.”

John clapped his hands together and laughed, making his eyes turn into small slits. “And then he would always have that huge frown whenever he’d walk into class on days when he fought with Marcus!”

“Then he'd spent most of his lecture ranting and forget to give out handouts!”

John and Aly laughed at their shared college memories, while Danny sat there eating his dinner—he could not care less about the display in front of him. The only reason he was there was to get the lay of the land—figure out where John was hiding important paperwork. He had to have them there somewhere.

Irked and impatient, but somehow contented that he was being left alone, it was much to his annoyance when John turned to him and bridged for him to join the conversation. John explained, “Professor McManus is one of our old professors in college. He just got married to his long-time boyfriend. How about you, Danny? Any particular college memories you were fond of?”

Danny knew he was just being a good host, trying to include everyone in the chatter. Aly looked at him expectantly, and almost smugly, as he tried to jog his brain for an answer that would satisfy John enough to return the topic to himself. He thought that maybe sharing about how boring his college life was would do the trick, so he plainly said, “I had my fair share of rambling professors, but most of my time then was halved between studying and soccer.”

Aly did not try to hide her disbelief. “You? Soccer?”

John, on the other hand, seemed impressed. “You played soccer? I used to play football, but I used to watch college soccer a lot. Which team were you on and what position did you play?”

Obviously, Danny’s error was mentioning sports in the first place. He suddenly remembered Aly saying that he was part of the football team.

“Were you the water boy or the mascot?” Aly asked with an innocent smile.

Danny returned the fake smile, then turned to answer John, “I became a goalie for the Leopards 5 years ago. Played for 2 years until I graduated.”

John's eyes went wide. “No way!” he said with so much enthusiasm that it surprised both his guests. “I watched those games! You won 2nd place 5 years ago, then the championship after that! I remember because that’s the first season I’ve ever watched that got me hooked. 5 years ago, you lost by one to the North Cubs but you beat them by 2 the year after.” He threw his hands up in the air, as if he couldn’t believe his luck. “Wow! I can’t believe this! Aly, you didn’t tell me your cousin is basically soccer royalty!”

Aly tried not to look too confused. “I didn’t know. We weren’t that close.” She looked at Danny with questioning eyes, but he only shrugged at her. He seemed to be telling the truth, but Aly never would have thought it—what with all those ill-fitting clothes and tweed jacket that made him seem more of a nerd than an athlete. She couldn’t even imagine him holding a ball, let alone kicking one.

“So, tell me more about the games you played,” John said to Danny, looking like a child who had just met Santa. With that statement, all of Aly’s hopes to use the evening to learn more about her love’s childhood and reminisce about their past turned to dust. The conversations went on to be about athletes and training and teams. John tried not to make her feel left out by also asking her about sports or explaining to her technical terms—which she was grateful for, but it ultimately was not the romantic night she had planned. Also, the amount of knowledge she had on sports was about as much as she cared for playing them: zero.

More or less than 20 minutes of chatter passed with Aly mindlessly nodding along as John eagerly sustained the conversation and Danny was obviously starting to regret ever saying he played a sport, when a phone suddenly rang. John excused himself to take the call, and as soon as he stood up and left the room, Aly and Danny sighed in relief almost simultaneously.

They frowned at each other. Aly placed both her hands on the table and leaned forward. She angrily hissed at him, “What are you doing?”

Danny scoffed. “What am I doing?” he asked incredulously. He leaned closer and pointed a finger at her. “What are you doing?”

“John is supposed to be flirting with me, not bonding with you when you only came here to do some digging!”

“I was trying to be a good guest, but he’s the one who kept talking my ear off!” He said, pointing a thumb towards the kitchen door, “Control your damn boyfriend, won’t you? I didn’t come here for dinner and to converse about college football and soccer.”

“Then why don’t you—”

Danny immediately brought his hand up to stop Aly from talking.

“Don’t shush me!” she threatened, but he only did it again.

Danny aggressively nodded towards the kitchen, where John had walked off to. “He’s talking now, and I can’t hear. Pipe down for a second, will you? Truce.”

Aly looked annoyed, but didn’t continue to speak. To Danny’s confusion, she stood up without a word and went to the living room. He was torn between going after her to see what she was up to, or to try to listen in on John’s phone call. Reluctantly, he chose the latter and stood by the wall dividing the dining area from the kitchen.

It was quite difficult, but he was able to make out, “Tomorrow, yes… let’s meet by the town's entrance, near the arch. People would think it unusual if some new person is suddenly seen by my house… the last thing we want is for the town to talk…”

Aly entered the room once again and stood right next to Danny, looking quite happy with herself. Her smile looked like it was of mischief, and it didn’t give Danny a good feeling.

“What did you do?” he whispered, but she just put a finger against her lips for him to stay quiet. He rolled his eyes and they both continued to press their ears against the wall.

“7 in the evening tomorrow… bring me all of the files, I want to look it over… I’ll talk to you tomorrow, I have guests right now… make sure you’re not followed. Oh, and tell him to call me.”

With that, Aly and Danny both hurried to get back to their seats. They sat down just in time as John walked in. Aly pretended as if she had been eating all that time, while Danny put his phone back in his pocket as if he had been using it for a while. John flashed an apologetic smile to them and said, “Sorry about that. I guess there’s no such thing as an escape from work.”

Danny laughed and wildly agreed. “Amen to that, brother.”

Aly almost choked on the bite of lasagna she was eating at the sound of Danny calling someone “brother” uncharacteristically. John tended to her and patted her back as she coughed into her napkin.

“Are you okay?” he asked, and Aly wordlessly nodded—feeling embarrassed with all the attention he was giving her.

“Yeah, just ate a bite too big,” she answered as she cleared her throat. She looked up at John—whose face had mixed expressions of worry and amusement.

“You have some sauce on your chin,” he said as he wiped it off with his thumb. Aly did not know if he was aware of it, but his face had come a bit close to hers that it made her expect a kiss.

To her dismay, however, the scene that could have been a clip from a romantic movie was cut short when she heard Danny snicker in the background.

“That’s what happens when you bite off more than you can chew,” Danny wisely remarked, tipping his knife towards Aly. With a chuckle, John sat back in his seat and wiped his thumb on his napkin as if nothing had happened.

Aly had never wanted to kick someone under the table more than she did at that moment.