Page 110 of Spiced!

I couldn’t stand.

My throat had closed, and my eyes had done something they never do, and I needed a moment before I trusted my body to hold me. A man who reorganizes cabinets for recreation was completely undone in a folding chair by six minutes of a language he didn’t even speak.

Whatever small, comfortable idea I had walked in carrying about what the dancing was—entertainment, a talent, a good time—it did not survive contact with six minutes of his truth. I sat there and felt that small idea come apart in my hands and understood that what he did was not a smaller thing than what I did for a living. It was a larger one. He told the truth with his whole body in a language most people never learn to speak, and a room full of strangers who understood every word.

I did not have a shelf for this, and I found I didn’t want one. Some things you are not supposed to file. Some things you are supposed to just stand up and witness.

Finally, I got my legs under me and stood in my dark corner and clapped for the man I was falling for, across a room full of people who’d figured out before I had that he was worth climbing three flights of stairs to see.

He took his bow, briefly, almost shyly, nothing like at the bar. His eyes went to the row barely containing his family. Something crossed his face at Jacks’s silly sign. And then, before he straightened, his eyes came up and drifted to the back corner.

To me.

In the dark, where he shouldn’t have been able to find anyone.

He found me.

He didn’t smile, exactly. It was smaller and worth a million times more than a smile. It was the look of a man who had reached, one more time, toward a spot in the darkness—and this time, found warmth exactly where he’d left it.

Chapter 30

Adrian

After the performance ended, the bar family took me to the diner on Nebraska, the loud one with the good pie and the bad lighting. I let them, because there was no saying “no” to Benji when he has decided a thing was going to be celebrated. They ordered too much. Jacks made me hold the glittered sign for a photo. Rod told me, in the fewest words he had ever assembled at once, that the dance was “good, real good, made me think about my mother, don’t know why,” and then looked deeply uncomfortable about having said it and ate an entire slice of key lime pie in what appeared to be one motion.

Brendan came to the diner.

He sat at the end of the booth, a little outside the noise, the way he usually did. He let my family have me. Every so often, I would glance over. He would already be looking at me.

He drove me home after, but not to my place, to his, because at some point in the last few weeks, his place had quietly become the place we went when neither of us wanted the night to end. Neither of us had said anything about it, which was how I preferred the important things to happen—sideways, without a ceremony that could be taken back.

Mofongo was at Abuela’s for the night.

The apartment was quiet.

Puck did a lap of inspection, confirmed I was the same intruder as last time, and retired to his hammock.

Brendan made tea he wouldn’t finish, and I held a mug I didn’t want, and we sat on the couch in the lamplight. I felt the performance drain out of me the way it did when a set was truly over, leaving only the guy underneath, who was more tired and less certain and nobody’s idea of a showstopper.

“Can I ask you something,” I said, “before I lose my nerve about the whole night?”

“Always.”

“How were you there? I didn’t tell you.” I turned the mug in my hands. “I’m glad—God, I’m so glad—but I specifically didn’t tell you, and I told Benji not to, and then I looked out from that wing and there you were in the corner like I’d ordered you from a catalog. How?”

Brendan had the grace to look mildly caught, which on him meant one eyebrow twitched. “Benji texted me on Wednesday night, from a number I didn’t have saved, which means he got it somewhere, probably my brother.”

“Of course he did.”

“I kept the message.” He took out his phone, thumbed to it, and read in a flat, clinical voice that made it funnier. “‘Saturday, eight p.m. Old cigar factory on Seventh, third floor. Come alone, sit in the back, don’t make it a thing. He didn’t invite you and he’s going to be weird about that, but trust me, you want to be in that room. Delete this text. —B.’” He set the phone down. “I didn’t delete the text.”

I laughed. It came out wet, because . . . of course.

Of course, that was what Benji had done. He’d watched me go flat and fast at the bar—“Not the vet”—and he’d said, “Okay,” simply, with no pushback, and I’d believed him. The whole time the serene little calm I’d thought I’d clocked but failed to understand had been Benji quietly deciding to override my worst instinct on my behalf. I shook my head. It was classic Benji. Go behind your back for your own good, then leave a paper trail he orders to be destroyed.

“I’m going to kill him,” I said, meaning the exact opposite. Brendan knew I meant the opposite, because he’d gotten fluent in me faster than anyone I’d ever met.

“Before you do,” he said, and set his mug down and turned to face me on the couch, “let me say the part I drove over here to say, in case I lose my nerve, too. I know you didn’t invite me. I want you to hear there’s no hurt in me about that anywhere—not a molecule. I’m not keeping score. The second Benji’s text came through, I understood I was being let into something you hadn’t opened yourself, and I decided the right thing to do with that was sit in the dark and be quiet and grateful and not make you manage my being there.” He paused. “And then you danced, and being quiet about it internally stopped being an option. I don’t have words yet for what I watched you do tonight, Adrian, but I’m going to try anyway, badly, because you deserve the attempt. But the first thing, the only thing that goes first, is—thank you. Thank you for a thing you didn’t even hand me. I’m so glad I was in that room. I’d climb those stairs every Saturday for the rest of my life to watch you dance.”