Page 26 of Spiced!

Adrian

Iwas three songs into my second set when I noticed Jacks had stopped moving.

He hadn’t stopped working. Jacks never stopped working; but he was standing at the far end of the bar wearing an expression that screamed “quiet internal calculation.”

I filed it away and kept dancing.

Then Benji appeared out of nowhere with a bottle in each hand.

“Jacks,” he said.

Jacks looked at him.

“What are you doing?”

“Delivering messages,” Jacks said.

“Between?”

“Adrian and—”

Benji set his bottles down with care. “Between a mostly naked man on that bar and a guy at that booth who has not checked his phone once? Do you not find this unusual at all?”

“I, uh, well—”

“You might be the world’s least efficient postal service.” Benji shook his head.

Jacks straightened. “I’m a barback. What do I know about postal delivery?”

“You are currently a messenger for two adults who are talking about a ferret and a dog instead of setting a date for dinner or something more normal.”

“The dog is medically relevant,” I called down from the bar.

Benji looked up, rolled his eyes, then picked up his bottles and walked away without another word, which, for Benji, was somehow worse than anything he could have ever said.

Jacks looked at me.

I shrugged and gave him nothing.

He went back to stocking glasses and filling ice buckets.

I finished my set the way I finished all sets—giving the room everything it had coming. The last song was as good as the first, because the room deserved that and so did I. When the music wound down, I stood at the edge of the bar for a second and looked out at the crowd as regulars shoved dollar bills into my leg band.

My eyes flicked to the booth by the door.

Brendan was watching the end of the set with complete, unhurried attention, no part of him somewhere else. When the last beat dropped and the room came back to itself, he picked up his drink, shot back what was left of it, and then looked straight at me from across the room.

Two seconds passed, maybe three.

Then he reached for his jacket.

I dropped down off the bar and handed Benji an empty Fanta can. I moved through the crowd toward the booth by the door, past the regulars and the post-set noise and Benji saying something behind me that I chose not to hear.

By the time I got there, the booth was empty.

Brendan’s jacket was gone, but his glass was there, completely empty. His bill was there, too, tucked under the glass with a pen lying across it. It was one of his branded vet clinic pens with an elongated wiener dog that stretched almost from clicker to ballpoint. The name and phone number of the clinic was printed in neat white lettering inside the dog’s outline.

I picked up the bill and stood there for a second.