Page 40 of Spiced!

Adrian: I survived the khakis.

I smiled before I’d finished reading it.

Me: Details. Now.

What followed was twenty minutes of texting about a man named Randall and the chaos of corporate events. Somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped thinking about the tapir imaging entirely, which had not happened once in the preceding two hours. I sat at the kitchen island with my shoulder-ferret and my phone and laughed at my screen more than once.

Me: You ever had a ferret snoring on your shoulder while you stared at the insides of a tapir?

Adrian: Um, no, I can’t say that I have. Is that a challenge or an offer, Dr. Davis?

Me: I’m a DVM, remember?

Adrian: Is that a challenge Dr. Davis, DVM?

I snorted, then looked at Gerald, then craned my neck to look at Puck still asleep on my shoulder, entirely unbothered.

Me: I’ll find my booth Saturday and we’ll discuss it. It could be both. Depends on how you handle your Speedo.

Adrian: Wow. He went there. Straight to the Speedo.

Adrian: You’ve seen me handle it. The real question is can YOU handle it?

Me: I’ve treated much larger . . . snakes . . . with much bigger fangs.

Adrian: I have no words. There are no words.

I put the phone down and sat there for a moment. The imaging lay on one side of my brain, the chat with Adrian on the other, and the specific feeling of a Friday night that had turned out better than it started settling in my chest.

“She’s going to be okay,” I told Gerald. “I don’t have all of it yet, but I think she’s going to be okay.”

Gerald said nothing.

“We’re seeing each other Saturday.”

Gerald continued saying nothing, which I had come to find genuinely encouraging.

Puck made a sound in his sleep that might have been agreement.

“Thank you,” I said. “Both of you.”

On Saturday morning, I called Peter, though not about the tapir. I wasn’t ready to present my theory yet. I wanted one more day with it. I called about something else, something small, a question I’d been turning over since the previous Saturday.

He picked up on the third ring.

“Brendan.”

“Peter. Quick question.”

“All right.”

“The bar, Barbacks,“ I said. “When you recommended it, had you already told him about me?”

A pause, which meant something different with Peter than with other people. Pauses weren’t uncertainty or discomfort. They were Peter deciding exactly what to say.

“Who? Who would I have told about you?”

“Adrian, the dancer.”