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“Mark.” Finn looked at him with the flat pity of a man addressing a slow but beloved child. “The customers knew. The pelican on the flyer knew. There’s a fella in Sarasota who’s never met you who knew. Everyone knew.” He tipped his head toward Benji without looking at him. “Pay him, by the way. I owe him forty. I bet it’d take you till the new year. I underestimated the leather bar.”
“You bet on the—” Mark looked between them, betrayed. “You’re my best friend. You’re my business partner.”
“Yes, I am your best friend, which is why I bet. I’m also your business partner, which is why I bet responsibly.” Finn’s eyes were doing that dry Galway glitter, the devil dancing on the edges of every word. “Two years, Mark. Two years I’ve watched you moon down that bar at a man who could bench-press this whole building. I watched you go home alone and come in the next day and tell me the apps weren’t working. The apps, God love you. There was a whole man at the end of your bar and you were taking notes on strangers’ torsos.”
“It wasn’t like that—”
“It was exactly like that. I’ve had a front-row seat and a long memory and”—he pointed one finger at Mark, warm and merciless—“we are going to have a very long conversation about all of it, you and me, when it’s just us. I’ve got questions and a timeline and another bet to settle in my own head about when you figured it out. You’re going to sit still for the whole of it and buy the first round.”
“Finn—”
“The first round, Mark. You owe me a night of this. And don’t give me your ‘I own a bar. I always buy the rounds’ bullshit. You’re taking me somewhere nice and buying me the good stuff while I grill you like the best friend I am.”
And then—and this was the part I hadn’t expected, the part that got in under my own wall before I could get a hand up to stop it—Finn turned to me. The wheedling went out of him, just like that, as his whole devilish machinery powered down. What was left was quieter and steadier, a man being careful with a thing he could see was new and unguarded.
“Dante,” he said.
“Finn.”
“He’s a good one.” He nodded at Mark, plainly, no joke in it now. “Gruff as a gravel drive and thick as a plank about his own heart, but there’s not a finer man in this city. He’d walk into traffic for anyone he’s claimed, that includes you, long before this morning. I’d not say that in front of him on an ordinary day, but—” He paused. “You’re good for him. Anybody with eyes has seen it for as long as we’ve known you. Welcome to it.”
I didn’t have a wall thick enough for that, so I didn’t try to build one.
“Thank you,” I croaked out, and meant it all the way down to my toes.
“Right.” The devil flooded his face like a light switching on. He pushed off the counter and hoisted his limes. “That’s my kindness spent for the quarter year. Don’t come looking for more. Benji, stop crying on the prep surface. That’s a code violation. And the pair of you”—he waved a hand at the general tangle of us and Reina, already heading for the walk-in—“get off the ice machine. Wipe off any butt prints or other evidence. If Rod finds out you christened his queen, you’ll both be doing a lifetime of penance. We open in two hours.”
He disappeared into the walk-in. From inside, muffled, unbothered, floated one last line, “On the ice machine? Honestly. Have you no romance?”
Benji, who had watched the entire exchange while vibrating with the effort of staying silent, made a sound like a dying llama and pressed both hands to his heart.
“I’m keeping the secret,” he announced to the kitchen, to Reina, to God, “and it is going to kill me, but it’ll have been worth it.” He then turned and walked out with the stiff, careful gait of a man carrying a full glass across a moving boat. Right before the door swung shut behind him, we heard him whisper, to no one, in pure anguished ecstasy, “On the ice machine,” and then he was gone.
Mark looked down at me.
I looked up at him.
Reina hummed against my back and dropped another round of ice into her bin.
“That’s two of them,” I said. “Inside of twenty minutes.”
“Finn’ll hold. Finn holds everything.” He considered it. “Benji’s got about four minutes.”
“Six, if we’re lucky.” I heard the words come out of me, his words, the two of us already trading lines like a matched set. For once in my life, I didn’t fight it, and he didn’t let go of me. If anything, he pulled closer. His grin softened into something that made my chest do the thing it had been doing since his truck cab weeks before. “We should probably talk about what we are before those two tell the whole building for us.”
“We should.”
“Later, though,” Mark said, and kissed me again.
I stopped rehearsing being fine and just, for once, was.
Reina applauded, and neither of us let go.
Chapter 16
Mark
Benji lasted eleven minutes. That had to be a new world record.
