Page 50 of Spiced!

“See, that’s exactly the kind of unverifiable claim I’m talking about.” He pointed at me. “But the worm, my good man, the worm I understand. The worm is binary. Either your body does the wave down its whole length and travels across the floor, or it doesn’t. There’s no artistry to hide behind, no mood lighting, no crowd doing half the work. It’s a controlled experiment. It’s pass-fail. Even a dance-challenged guy like me will know it when I see it—or don’t. There’s always the ‘don’t’ possibility.”

I blinked at him.

“You’ve turned my worm into a lab practical.”

“I’ve turned it into the one part of your job I can peer-review,” he said, entirely too pleased with himself. “I’m a scientist. I like a clean variable. Give me my clean variable, Adrian.”

And that—that was the whole man, right there, in one sentence. Of course, the vet who alphabetized his own bookshelf had found the single falsifiable claim in a body built entirely out of unfalsifiable ones and decided that was the hill on which he would die.

Also, it was, I was realizing with some alarm, deeply attractive.

“Move the dog,” I said.

“What?”

“I need a runway. I’m not doing the worm into a coffee table. Move Puck’s cavalry unit.”

Brendan scooped up Puck, who was deeply displeased to be separated from his mount. Mofongo trotted after them both to see where his passenger was going. That cleared a strip of hardwood between the couch and the balcony door—maybe eight feet of clean floor and the good afternoon light coming across it, which, I’ll be honest, I noticed, because you should always know your lighting.

“First,” I said, “I need music. I can’t worm in silence like an animal. Put something on.”

“I can do that,” Brendan said, already reaching for his phone, entirely too confident.

A beat.

Then, from a speaker somewhere on the bookshelf, a gentle acoustic guitar began to fingerpick its way through something that belonged in a commercial for a mattress. A soft male voice came in and sang, tenderly, about a dirt road.

I stood up out of my crouch.

“No,” I said.

“What?”

“Oh, hell no. Turn that off.”

“This is a good song.”

“It’s a lovely song for staring out a rain-streaked window and thinking about a woman named Delilah who got away. It is not”—I gestured at the whole length of my body— “worm music. You cannot worm to a man softly forgiving his father. The worm has bass. The worm has attitude. The worm requires a beat to drop.”

“I didn’t realize the worm was a genre.”

“There is an entire canon, Brendan, and you have insulted it. Give me the phone.”

“You don’t get to pick the music at my house.”

“Then pick correctly. I have standards. My whole career is a standard, and I’m not going to do the single most requested move in my repertoire to something that scores a yogurt ad.”

He was laughing now, which was undercutting his defense of the dirt-road song considerably. He scrolled, made a show of deliberating, and put on something with an actual beat under it—and a low, filthy bass line, the kind of thing that lived at the bottom of a good set.

I felt my eyebrows go up. “Okay.”

“Acceptable?”

“That’s—yeah. That’s worm music. Where was that thirty seconds ago?”

“I was easing you in.”

“You were embarrassing us both.” I rolled my shoulders and let the bass find me, that first involuntary “settling into a rhythm” that happened whether I invited it or not. “Now, watch and be changed.”