Page 142 of Spiced!

“Hey,” I said, an involuntary smile bursting from my face.

“I hope you’re okay with me coming in. Benji told me you were back here.”

“Of course he did.” I chuckled.

“His exact words were, ‘Get back there and do something useful for once.’”

I laughed. “That’s Benji telling you that he loves you.”

“I gathered as much.” He looked at me, calm and unhurried. “You okay?”

“I’m good. It’s a big night.”

“It is. I came in through the front. Looks like Dante’s idea worked. There are people out there I’ve never seen before.”

“The neighborhood showed up.”

“The whole neighborhood, from the looks of it,” he confirmed.

He crossed the small room without any hurry and stopped in front of me, close enough that the bar noise seemed to fade away beneath the sound of him breathing.

“I came to watch the whole thing,” he said. “Front row, all of it. I told you I had Saturdays to make up.”

“You didn’t have to come back here to tell me that.”

“I know.”

He put one hand on the side of my face, leaned down, and kissed me.

It wasn’t a quick kiss, nor was it a hungry one. It was something quieter and deeper than either of those, slow and warm and deliberate. It was a kiss he had crossed a crowded bar and walked down a hallway to deliver because he meant every second of it. It held, and somewhere in the middle of it, the room on the other side of the wall stopped existing entirely . . . until there was nothing left but Brendan and the warmth of his hand and the weight of a person who had somehow become the most important thing in a life that was already full of important things.

When he pulled back, he looked at me, his palm still pressed to my cheek.

Four days ago, I might’ve caught a flicker on his face and spent the set writing a story about it. Now, I just had his hand on my cheek and no story at all, which was going to take some getting used to. Unpacking a bag you’ve lived out of for twenty years, it turns out, leaves you standing there holding nothing, wondering what to do with your arms.

I wasn’t saying anything.

I couldn’t.

“Good luck,” Brendan whispered, quiet and certain.

I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice not to crack.

Then he was gone, and the door clicked shut behind him.

I stood in the back room of Barbacks on our anniversary Saturday—the public one, the loud one, the night the whole neighborhood came—and my fingers rose to my lips before I had decided to lift them. I held them there for a moment, only because I wanted to keep feeling it a little longer.

Mofongo lifted his head.

“I know,” I said.

He huffed and set his chin back down.

I set down the Fanta and rolled my shoulders.

Tonight is for you, I thought. Even if you’re the only one who ever finds out.

It wasn’t announced, and it wasn’t performed. It was simply true, quietly and completely, and it needed no confirmation from anyone else in the building.