Page 92 of Spiced!

“Yeah?”

He set the wine bottle down, reached into his jacket pocket, and set something on the table between us. It was a small framed print of sheet music cleanly mounted in a simple dark frame.

I stared at it. Then, slowly, I looked up at him.

“That’s the song,” he said. “The one that was playing the first night I came to Barbacks, the first night I saw you. It’s your warm-up track, before your set. It took me a few days to identify it and another few to find someone who could reproduce it.”

I picked up the frame carefully.

I knew this song. Of course I knew it. I’d been hearing it before my sets since Finn built the warm-up playlist two years ago. I knew every bar of it. I’d never once thought about it as anything other than the music that played before I climbed onto the bar. Brendan had heard it once in a room he’d only come to because Peter had casually mentioned it. He’d spent days figuring out what it was.

“The Shazam app failed you?” I said, keeping my voice as level as I could manage.

“Completely insufficient. I had to call someone.”

“Who?”

“Peter.”

“Peter knew it?”

“Immediately. He didn’t explain how. He frightens me more than my mother.”

“Your mother frightens Stavros. Peter frightens you. What does that make Peter?”

“The most frightening person in Tampa.” Brendan chuckled. “Who also happens to know every song ever written, apparently.”

I set the frame on the table and kept both hands around it. “You’ve been planning this for eight days?”

“Yes.”

“You planned the table. You found the song. You called your mother.” I leaned forward. “Brendan, she called Stavros three times.”

“She’s thorough.”

“This might be the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.”

He said nothing.

“I mean that.”

“Okay,” he said. “I wanted to do something that was specifically for you, not a restaurant I liked nor a place I knew was impressive. I wanted something that said—” He looked at the table for a moment and then back at me. “That I’ve been paying attention to who you are, not the dancer or the baker. You.”

The table fell utterly still.

Stavros appeared with food, read the table, and found something urgent to go look at in the kitchen.

“You’re going to make me cry in the middle of a Greek restaurant,” I said.

“Please don’t.”

“Why?”

“Stavros will come over.”

“Is that bad?”

“He’ll call my mother.”