Page 105 of Spiced!

Me: I don’t doubt it.

Benji: Adrian.

Me: Yeah.

Benji: I’m really happy for you. Also, my butthole is still clenching. Damn, you got railed. Can’t wait to see how you dance tonight, all wobbly and sore.

I sat on the edge of the bathtub in my own bathroom at four in the morning with toothpaste residue on my chin and my phone in both hands. I wanted to be mad at Benji for texting and intruding and being a general nuisance, but all I could think about was a man with spectacular bedhead asleep in my bed and a dock in Tarpon Springs and a framed piece of sheet music on my backsplash.

My thumbs moved of their own traitorous accord.

Me: Eleven.

Benji: OMG OMG OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!

Me: Go to sleep.

Benji: I may never sleep again. I am tooooooooo happy. Go make your bread, but kiss the vet first. My asshole commands it.

Chapter 28

Adrian

Iwas helping set up the bar, cutting limes, when Benji came around the end of the counter holding his phone out in front of him like it was evidence in a trial.

“Explain this,” he said.

The Ybor Contemporary Dance Collective had posted the season lineup that morning, a graphic with dancers’ names, and there—third from the top, in a font somebody had chosen to feel artistic—was ADRIAN VOSS. Under it was the title of my piece, and under that the date.

My stomach did a slow, cold roll.

“Oh,” I said, going for breezy and landing somewhere near strangled. “That. Yeah. It’s a little dance thing. Community thing. It’s not—it’s really not a big deal.”

“You’re in a dance collective?”

“I’m in a—it’s not like joining a cult, Benji. I do one piece a year—”

“For how long?”

I cut a lime. “Six years.”

The bar noise kept going around us, Jacks laughing at something down the rail, the door chiming, but Benji went very still in a way I had never once seen Benji go still. He was a creature of perpetual motion, of running commentary and of busy hands and eyes that catalogued everything at once.

And he just—stopped, looked at the phone, then looked at me.

“Six years?”

“It’s really not—”

“You’ve danced in this thing six years,” he said, and his voice did something I didn’t have a category for, because it wasn’t the bright tenor performance of him. It was quieter and had a crack down the middle. “And you weren’t going to invite us?”

I opened my mouth to do the thing, the deflection.

It’s small, you’d be bored, it’s not the bar, the parking’s a nightmare, modern dance is forty minutes of people being sad in unitards, you’d hate it, so don’t worry about it.

It’s the speech I’d given the empty air every year for six years, rehearsing the reasons no one would want to come so that their not-coming wouldn’t be another wound.

But this was Benji.