Page 150 of Spiced!

Adrian’s eyes were wet.

Mine, I was aware, were not entirely dry either.

“I can’t imagine my life without you in it,” I said. “I tried this morning, in the car, as a test, and I couldn’t build the picture. There’s no version of my life worth living that doesn’t have you in the middle of it, making coffee by feel, talking to bread dough, leaving orange Fanta in my refrigerator. I want all of it. I want every ordinary morning I have left to have you in it.” My voice held steady, which surprised me, because nothing else did. “I’m not asking you for anything. I’m telling you where I am. This is it, for me. You’re it. I wanted to say it out loud, in the daylight, once, all the way.”

Adrian put both hands over his mouth.

Marisol chose that exact moment to huff loudly and press her entire snout against the rail with what I can only describe as emphasis, as though a Malayan tapir had opinions about the proceedings and wished them entered into the record.

Adrian laughed through the hands over his mouth, the wet, broken, helpless kind, and took his hands away. “Even the tapir—“

“Even the tapir agrees,” I said.

“I’m here, too,” Adrian said, quiet and certain. “All the way. You know that.” He pressed his forehead to mine. “You didn’t have to say it in the daylight for me to know it. But I’m glad you did.”

I kissed him at the fence at the Lowry Park Zoo at nine-twenty in the morning, with a recovered tapir huffing approval eighteen inches away. It was not a quiet kiss, and it was not a careful one. For once, I didn’t try to make it either.

When we broke apart, Adrian was crying and laughing at the same time.

I was somewhere in the same country.

Marisol had drifted back toward the middle of her enclosure with the satisfied air of an animal who had witnessed something, given it her blessing, and now had a full day of being a tapir.

“You set this all up?” Adrian asked, wiping his eyes.

“The early entrance, the quiet slot, Marisol at the fence—yeah. I wanted you to have this.”

“Dr. Reyes,” he said, shaking his head, smiling. “The whole time.”

“Tarpon Springs I planned for a week. This one I just wanted to be right.”

“You told no one?”

“I told Puck.”

“Puck is a ferret.”

“Puck approved. Dr. Reyes knew. She set all this up—the early entrance, the quiet slot, Marisol at the fence. She said it was the first time she’d ever set something like this up at the zoo.”

“You set this up with the tapir and a doctor and told no human being?”

“I don’t do the loud version,” I said. “You know that.”

“I do,” Adrian said, and pulled me back in, and I let him.

“Oh, come on,” said a voice from about twenty feet down the path.

We turned, still wrapped in our embrace, to find Peter standing near the otter enclosure with a clipboard under one arm, a visitor lanyard around his neck, and the frozen posture of a man who had walked into something he had no preparation for.

“Peter?” Adrian said.

“I’m consulting,” Peter said, too fast. “On the otters. There’s a behavioral issue with the—it’s a completely separate matter. I had no idea you’d be—that I was walking into—“ He gestured vaguely with the clipboard at an enclosure he had demonstrably not been walking toward. “This is a coincidence. I want that on the record. I was not invited to this.”

“You weren’t,” I confirmed. “Nobody was.”

“Good. That’s good.”

Peter cleared his throat.