Page 27 of Spiced!

Then I turned it over.

On the back, in clean, steady handwriting that somehow looked exactly like I would have guessed, it read,

For personal use only. Not for puppy emergencies.

And below that, there was a number.

I read it twice. Then I looked at the door. Then I looked at the number again.

My left-cheek dimple came out before I could stop it, which was fine because there was nobody in this corner of the bar to see it except Dante at the door, and Dante was reading his book and exercising his considerable gift for minding his own business.

I took out my phone and photographed the bill so I wouldn’t lose it. Then I stood there for another moment in the space where Brendan had been sitting for the past two hours, watching me work, sending notes through Jacks with a completely straight face.

“Be careful,” Benji had said.

I thought about a man who kept to his booth by the door and took his time and wrote things down clean and steady and left before you could catch him at it.

Yeah, I thought. I should be careful.

“He left his number.”

I spun so fast I nearly knocked Benji over. He stepped back, a fresh Fanta in hand, already open, which meant he’d been planning to come over here regardless of what he found.

“I know,” I said.

“On the bill.”

“Benji.”

“Just making sure you found it.” He handed me the Fanta, looked at the empty booth, then back at me. “Jacks delivered eight messages tonight.”

“Nine,” I said. “The last one was about bread theft versus shoe theft and whether one constituted a more morally coherent position than the other.”

Benji blinked at me, his mouth open yet uncommitted to words. Then he managed to ask, “You had a philosophical debate? Through Jacks? While performing?”

I shrugged. “It was a good debate.”

“Adrian.”

“He had valid points about the bread.”

“Adrian,” he said again, the way he said things when he wanted them to land. “You just crossed the entire bar to get to that booth.”

“I did.”

“In your Speedo while covered in sweat . . . while the crowd is still here watching your every move.”

“Yes.”

“For a man who’d already left?”

My head ducked enough for my hair to fall across my face. I pushed it back but didn’t look up. “That’s . . . accurate.”

Benji picked up his tray, started to turn away, then turned back. “What does the note say?”

I thought about telling him it was personal, about folding it and shoving it into my pocket and heading to the back to change and letting Benji’s very considerable imagination fill in whatever it wanted.

Instead, I handed him the bill.