REPOSTING. For whatever reason ff replaced all my "Mindy's" with Danny's?! I'm SO sorry, my god, I can't imagine how awkward that must have been to read. Thank you so much to the kind reviewer who pointed it out!

2000+ words and barely any dialogue, just Danny and his over-wrought brain, you've been warned

He's trying to be the guy, the good guy, you know, the one that his mother'd be proud to call her own. He's trying to be the guy who's good at work, good at financing, good at fucking, good at loving.

The last one he's always had a little trouble with, if he's gunna be honest.

Christina, he'd loved her well. It's been years, but Danny thinks he describes it like that because that's how Richie had explained it the week after he'd discovered her infidelity:

Dan, you loved her well. That about all you could have done, it's a two person act. The rest was up to her.

Danny knows it's a little cheap to blame it all on Christina, his forever failings with love, but it's the excuse he falls back on most often, the one he's sure fucked it up for the rest of the women in his life, Mindy most exclusively and comprehensively included. He'd been good to Christina, maybe not always great, but he'd been good for the most part, and what he lacked in late-nigh, deep-hearted conversations on feelings he'd always made up for in, well, loving her most completely. He hadn't cheated on her, had he?

So Danny's trying, even when it seems not good enough, even when it seems like he isn't, with women in general, with love in general, Jillian and Alex and several other women Danny can recall only with vague, foggy familiarity, as though he'd been seeing them through opaque shower curtains, swirls of hair and a rush of scent, women he remembers sometimes only by the taste at the hollows of their throats.

Mindy, though.

That seemed about as far as his mind would let him wander with her these days—Mindy though—a thought all its own, the silent parenthesis on his every conversation, his every habit, Mindy, though, a trailing ellipsis of a woman, rolling over to the empty stretch of his bed and thinking how if he wasn't going to get any shut eye he might as well go for a run and catch the sunrise, a slow smile, Mindy, though, would surely have ranted for an hour and a half if she'd heard this line of thinking, if she were lying beside him and he'd spoken it—going for a run, I wanna catch the sunrise—

Mindy, though, had seemed like a turning point, a real and honest one.

Their copulation was inevitable, if common sense hadn't whispered that to Danny, then Peter had, again and again, his high, childish voice, his meaty fingers pantomiming the theatrical sounds and actions he imagined Mindy'd make in bed (back when they'd spooned for days at a time it seemed, Danny was somehow delighted by that most of all, by Peter's complete inaccuracy of bedroom Mindy, that she came apart with her mouth shuddering silently, her blunt fingernails digging half-moon carters deep into his bare back, her usual hysterics put aside for this most primal act). Danny should perhaps have seen it coming before the appearance of Chloe Silvardo, before Mindy was already running full-steam ahead into a new man, away from him, before the jealousy he'd been known his entire life for reared its ugly head and made him see: not again, not another loser, another asshole who doesn't deserve you, doesn't know you.

That he shouldn't have grabbed her and kissed her that day on the plane is a thought her entertains every day he's without her, several times in the span of a few hours, his eyesight swimming, his calves screaming from his run, sweat dripping from every pore on his body, Danny murmuring in his mind again and again, you shouldn't have done it, you knew how this would end.

Except, well, he hadn't. Not completely. Danny will admit he wasn't thinking light-years into the future when he kissed her, not when he dragged her into the bathroom and shoved her up onto the sink, not even on the elevator up to her apartment when he was imaging just what it would feel like to slide into her for the first time, if it would be better than the dreams he sometimes denied having after eating too much fried chicken and falling asleep on his couch, her mighty thighs open wide, her mouth panting with need, Danny, Danny, Danny, his Mindy, never shy, never ashamed. Even seeing Cliff's drooling, pedantic face hadn't clued him in. Beyond hoping Mindy would end it with him and soon, Danny wasn't thinking too far ahead. His entire future with Mindy seemed deep and infinite, the passion of new romance somehow so much thicker with her than with anyone in recent memory as he grasped her full ass and kissed her loud mouth in all the places he'd imagine doing just that in all the time that he'd known her, this little secret bubble they'd climbed into stretching endless, intimate.

Should he have thought on it, though? Should he have calculated all this in his frantic mind on that shuddering airplane, the scent of Mindy so clear and recent as she climbed past him for tonic water, the armrest still warm from the weight of her? Danny doesn't like to give himself breaks, not when he thinks he doesn't deserve them, but this instance he'll allow: his time was running out. Mindy was all Cliff-brained, the entire time she'd been dealing with his family's shit, the trip to LA was all Cliff, all the time. There was a small window then, when it was just the two of them, and maybe Mindy's mind was still swimming with Cliff and with what Danny assumed was Cliff's very inadequate penis, but they were still thirty minutes from New York, thirty minutes from her trying to devote her entire life yet again, to yet another shmuck who had the sickeningly expected qualities in a boyfriend she now considered made her lucky to be with—not cheating and not flaking to become a DJ—and yes, maybe he should have thought on it more clearly, after they'd landed maybe, the fear of a falling out of the sky not so immediate.

But it was like one of those sudden enlightenments, a shining epiphany, the burst of clarity that comes to a man after getting slammed by a car or seeing your Christmas Past Present and Future or reaching out for a hand when the airplane jostles beneath you, only to realize she isn't there, that there will come a time, if something is not done soon, that she will never be there again.

So that's why he kissed her. It wasn't exactly a choice, is what he reminds himself, pounding off in the bathtub, trying to get her stupid scent off everything, it wasn't a should-I-or-shouldn't-I, it was a sudden need, a clear impulse, it was, if the movies are to be believed, fate, clean and simple. That he would one day kiss Mindy Lahiri, the fiery woman he spent most of his working week with, who was neither ugly nor unintelligent, who could pull off a little black number with the likes of which Danny had never seen, was something that was bound to happen. But that he would come to—

Well, that he would actually come to—

That's neither here nor there.

The point is, with Mindy, there was no such thing as a rebound, not really. Obsessed as she was with getting her life on track, with marrying and having children and as convinced as she was that her time was running out, her biological clock ticking louder and louder each passing year, each and every man that bumped into her at a bookstore, made her giggle in the nightclub, stared a beat too long at her ass on the subway, was, to her, the man who she'd been waiting her whole life for.

Bullshit, if you ask him.

This Charlie Lang guy, for example. A cop, pheh! A fucking officer, could she have possibly picked a guy further off her mark? She was probably impressed by his gun; girls love guys who are packing heat. He must have been way over fifty, this guy. What was he doing slumming it with 60-year-old, frowning cops?

Danny, he's trying, he really is. He wants to be the guy a girl like Mindy would be happy with for a really long time, he wants a forever, a real one, an honest one, one with someone like Mindy. He's just not sure he can offer her that, and he's not sure he can make that happen, and even if somehow, magically, he can, he's not sure Mindy entirely deserves a grumpy toad like him raining on her parade, trying his best, but it not ever really being enough. He's not sure he can do this again, go down this road again, get down on his knees and ask and plan and spend ten-thousand dollars on a wedding that promises a forever, not sure he can disappoint again someone he's positive he loves completely, walk into his marital bedroom, once again on Mindy, his Mindy, with some asshole like Tom or Casey or Cliff or Charlie, not again, not with her.

It's a risk, one Danny isn't ready to take, will perhaps never be really ready to take, but the feeling begins to wash over him again, the same one that had propelled him to her on the plane—Mindy, in her endless quest for true love, winding up in yet another serious relationship, with this cop, no less.

Before, it had been a nuisance. A difficult nuisance, one that kept him up at night wondering, an itch he couldn't scratch, but still, bearable. Now, with all the knowledge he had of intimate Mindy, sweet-boned, silk-skinned, bouncing, writhing, silent orgasming Mindy, it was something Danny just could not possibly allow, another man, another man so, so soon.

So she was off to see the meteor shower, to see something she despised with a man she'd promised one night ago she wasn't on a date with, and he had to act. Danny, he can't credit much with her, can't say he's loved her best or treated her best, but Danny, he knows her best, of that he's certain.

"You don't even like that stuff," he reminds her, fights to keep his voice even, though a wild desperation roars to life in his chest, his words coming out in a frantic rush, "Last week there was a full moon and you were like if I wanted to see a white circle, I would draw one on a piece of paper, so you don't really like that stuff."

She tilts her head, smiling a little. She kept her makeup simple, the way she knew he liked, "Well, people change, Danny."

Yes, people do, most people. But not you, Danny thinks, not for him, and then, not us.

It's not his proudest moment, alright? Grabbing Mindy and trying to kiss her like that, a caveman robbed of his favorite club, but it was, Danny determines later, his most necessary.

It takes a big man to admit when he's fucked up royally, and Danny's always seen himself as a pretty big man. He shouldn't have tried that move on her, thinking since it worked with Cliff it would work with this jerkoff, thinking it was the same Mindy he kissed on that airplane, and he the same Danny, like he hadn't broken her heart like all the assholes before him, like he hadn't shrugged away from her like the coward he was, denied her the respect of being open about their relationship.

"I get to decide," she resolves, and her eyes are steely, her shoulders pulled back, her brow slightly furrowed as though she was realizing for the first time—hey, yeah, this is my choice.

He's never felt like more of jerk, more the opposite of the guy he's trying to craft himself to be post-Christina. He slinks out of her apartment trying to save face, trying to shrug it off, but it's useless, she knows, the way she's always somehow known. He stands outside her door for a moment, kicking his heel and trying not to grimace at the way she'd so quickly pulled away, he has one of those bursts of clarity, another one, brought on by the turbulent possibility of Mindy Falling in Love With Someone Else.

I raises his head, stares at her door for a long moment.

I have to win her back, he realizes, like all those unreal idiots in the romantic comedies she can't stop watching, I need to win her back.

Danny raises his hand and knocks.

I blame Christina for like, everything. Sue me. SEASON FINALE TONIGHT

Again, I'm SO sorry about the abundance of Dannys! I'm super upset; this was my first post in a long time and I was so excited about it. :( Hope those of you who clicked on and clicked away in disgust give it a second chance.