Page 145 of Spiced!

Something moved across his face—surprise, then a kind of soft permission. “Lo bailado nadie me lo quita.” He paused, and I watched him decide to give me the real translation instead of the easy one. “What I’ve danced, no one can take from me.”

“I know what it means,” I said, and to my complete lack of surprise my voice broke on it, because I did. I finally, entirely did. It was about building the one thing no one—not a mother on a plane, not a room that might change its mind, not the slow erosions of an ordinary life—could ever reach in and take. It was the whole of him in six words on a rib, and I had just spent an entire set watching him prove it to a room full of strangers.

“I love you,” I said.

It came out of me the way his tattoo had gone onto him—permanent, unhedged, no exit built into the sentence. I hadn’t planned it. I’d planned to watch the set and drink my drink and be good. But he was sitting next to me with the ink still catching the light and his breath still coming fast, and the words were just true, and for once in my life I didn’t file the true thing for later. I said it out loud, in a loud room, on purpose.

Adrian went very still.

“Brendan.”

“I know it’s the first time either of us has said it. I’m aware of the timing. I’m aware there are four hundred people in this bar and one of them is Tyler.” I turned the glass in my hands, then made myself set it down and just look at him. “I’ve known for a while. I do things quietly, and I do them once, and I mean them all the way down. I love you. I watched you dance a whole story tonight, and there was no version of me that could keep it in one more second.”

For a moment, he didn’t say anything, and I had time to notice my own heart doing something I’d have flagged as concerning in a patient.

Then his face did the thing—the reserve breaking up like ice going out on a river, the professional smile nowhere in it, nothing performed, just the whole of him arriving at once.

“I love you, too,” he said. “Obviously. God, obviously. I dedicated an entire contemporary dance piece to you in front of the whole neighborhood, Brendan. I don’t know how much clearer a man can—”

“You said he probably didn’t know.”

“I was being coy. It’s a whole thing I do. You’re supposed to find it charming.”

“I find it unbearably charming. That’s the problem. That’s the entire problem.”

He laughed, wet and undignified, the way he’d once laughed at a cartoon penguin, the way that had no defenses in it at all, and took my hand in both of his, flour long since washed off but the grip exactly as sure.

“You can start,” Adrian said, “by drinking your drink and watching me do it again next Saturday.” He considered. “And the Saturday after that.”

“I’ve got a lot of Saturdays banked,” I said. “I’m good for it.”

He picked up the Spiced Catalyst, took a slow sip, and handed it back so I could have the rest, which, from Adrian, who guarded his one orange drink like a state secret, spoke volumes.

Chapter 41

Adrian

Igot to the panadería at three-forty that morning, twenty minutes earlier than I needed to, because I hadn’t been able to sleep and there was no sense lying in the dark pretending I might.

The street was quiet, settled in the way Tampa was at that hour. A dog barked somewhere three houses down. I could hear the hum of the cooler through the front window. Every sound spoke of a neighborhood that had not yet decided to wake up.

I stood on the sidewalk for a moment with my key in my hand and stared at the sign above the door.

Panadería Carmen.

It had said that for as long as I could remember.

The sign was going to keep saying it. Some names you didn’t paint over. Some names were greater than the thing itself.

The kitchen in the dark before I turned the lights on was the most familiar place in the world to me. I could have moved through it blind, feeling the marble to the left, the ovens along the back wall, the proofing drawers, the racks, the flour bins that Doña Carmen had refused to label in fifty years because she knew what was in each one and considered labels a concession to people who didn’t. I knew the exact spot on the floor where the tile had cracked in 1994. I knew the sound the second oven made when it reached temperature, a small tick that Doña Carmen swore she could hear from across the room. I had never once heard that tick until the day I suddenly could.

I turned on the lights and fired up the ovens.

Doña Carmen arrived at five, which was later than usual, because today she was not opening the bakery. Today she was watching someone else open it.

She came in through the back with her husband, Rafael. She wasn’t wearing her work clothes but a dress, a deep green one, the kind she wore to church and to weddings and to the two funerals I had attended with her over the years.

She had dressed up for this.