Page 141 of Spiced!

I was joking.

He knew I was joking.

But he answered it like I wasn’t, because he was Brendan.

“Adrian,” he said. “I’m going to watch you dance, and I’m going to know exactly what I’m looking at. That’s the whole point. I’ve got a lot of Saturdays to make up.”

Chapter 39

Adrian

The back room at Barbacks always changed before a set. It was never fully quiet, because the bar’s noise came through the wall, muffled but present, the sound of a room filling with people on the other side of thin drywall. Even so, the back room stayed separate from all of it. Over my years of Saturday nights, I had learned to use that thin veil. This was my place, the room where I became the thing I was about to be.

I stretched first, the way I always did, working through hip flexors, shoulders, and my back in the same sequence and in the same order I had used since learning to dance as a boy.

Mofongo, who’d been permitted backstage on account of being Mofongo, watched the whole process from his travel bed in the corner.

“I know,” I told him.

He sneezed at me.

“It’s a big night. I get it. You’ll be fine.”

He rested his chin on the edge of the worn bed and kept watching me, because some moments required a witness, and he had appointed himself to the role without consulting anyone.

Through the wall, the bar was growing loud.

It wasn’t a regular-Saturday loud, though. It was somehow fuller than that. There were new voices mingled with familiar ones. There were more of them, and many belonged to people who were discovering our little bar for the first time and deciding that they liked it. This was the neighborhood showing up exactly the way we had hoped they would.

Standing in the back room with the noise leaking through the wall, I felt the good kind of nerves, the kind that showed up only when what I was about to do genuinely mattered. I was partway through my second Fanta and checking myself in the small corner mirror when Finn’s head poked through the doorway.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

His body followed his head, and he leaned against the doorframe. “A few years ago, I hired a dancer because Mark said we needed one. I put out an ad, and eleven people showed up. The first ten of them were fine.”

“And the eleventh?” I asked, knowing where this was headed but unable to resist prodding Finn. He looked emotional, which made the prodding all the more appropriate.

“The eleventh walked in with pastelillos and did a three-minute routine on the bar. Before he even climbed down, I knew I wasn’t going to need to see anyone else.” He held my eyes. “That was the best decision this bar ever made, and I’ve made a lot of decisions. Mark keeps a spreadsheet on all of them.”

I didn’t say anything, because he wasn’t finished yet, and my will to prod had caught in my throat.

“You helped build something here, Adrian,” Finn said. “What you do . . . it’s not just dancing. It’s the whole thing around your dancing. It’s what the room turns into when you’re up on that bar, and why people keep coming back for it.” He pushed off the doorframe. “That’s not a small thing, and I wanted you to know that I know it.”

He stepped out into the hallway, picked up his clipboard from where he had left it on the floor before he knocked, and turned back toward the noise.

“Have a good set tonight,” he called back.

“Always.”

The door had barely closed before it opened a second time.

I expected Benji, because Benji always came back before a set. Officially, he did this to check on something practical. In reality, I thought he did it just to hover in the doorway like a man who cared about what was coming.

But it wasn’t Benji.

Brendan stepped through. He wore dark jeans and the blue shirt Alan had given him, the one that did unfair things to his eyes in warm light.