Chapter 23 #2
We've somehow drifted together again near the foot of the stage, all three of us this time, plus a donor who's telling Patrick about her rescue terrier, and I blame my feet. They kind of work on their own when I stop supervising them for three consecutive seconds.
On the perch above us, Hendrix goes still. I've known him long enough to know what stillness before movement means. I'm just about to turn to suggest a tactical relocation when he pins the three of us with one yellow eye and opens with his favorite banger. "Kiss kiss."
The nearest donor table laughs, because there's a famous feud standing right here, and a parrot demanding it end in romance. It's a great joke if you don't have the context.
I have the context. The context is that this bird has a perfect record.
Ask Ace. Somewhere in the deeper Hendrix lore there's probably a wedding he caused.
He does not aim that phrase at random, he aims where it does the most emotional damage, and he is currently aiming at the only three people in this ballroom who are actually hiding something.
"Kiss kiss."
More laughter. Phones are coming up. Theo has gone bright-eyed and dangerous next to me, delight and panic fighting for dominance, and Patrick has his camera face on, the pleasant one, which means he’s barricading the doors inside.
The donor with the terrier says, "I think he means you two," waggling a finger between me and Patrick, and the tables nearest us actually cheer.
Encouraged, Hendrix starts walking the podium rail, sideways.
He has the room and he knows it. Someone at a Vipers table calls out "Go bird, go!
" and it gets picked up, scattered, and chanted, and then there are twenty cameras, and a national feud, and a parrot with a flawless record all pointed at my life.
My pulse is doing playoff numbers. My face, I hope, is doing nothing at all.
And then Hendrix flies, and when Hendrix flies, he means business.
He crosses the space between the perch and my shoulder, lands with both feet, and grips on. He sidesteps up my shoulder, puts his beak an inch from my ear, and says, at volume, with the mic still hot enough to catch it, "KISS KISS. KISS KISS."
I look at Patrick. Patrick looks at me. Theo looks at both of us. It takes maybe half a second, it wouldn't register on any camera as anything, and it holds an entire conversation, or at least my read of one, and my reads have been good all season.
Not like this. Not as a bird's punchline at a charity gala.
But the other half of the look, the half that gets me through the next ten seconds, says, but soon.
Soon.
There's a protocol for this. It's older than the campaign, older than the three of us, established in Frank's bar by a firefighter with more marbles than an entire hockey roster. Hendrix demands a kiss. Hendrix does not specify participants. The greatest loophole in the history of loopholes.
I turn my head and kiss Hendrix directly on the beak.
The sound three hundred people make is not describable with the vocabulary I keep. Hendrix pulls back, looks at me with one eye, then the other, evaluating the offer.
"What the puuuuck," he announces, satisfied, and the tension bursts.
There’s a standing ovation. For me, or the bird, unclear, and I don't need the distinction. Mama Paws is laughing, the band, showing real professionalism, plays a little sting. Hendrix takes one lap of the ceiling to collect his applause and returns to the perch, where he preens like he’s been proven right about everything once again.
Theo is doubled over with his hands on his knees. When he surfaces, wiping his eyes, he passes close enough to say it under the applause, for me only. "Best save all season."
Patrick applauds like a rival applauds, which is perfect.
Crisis averted. Secret intact.
The coat check line is short by the time I get there some three hours later, gala thinning, my people scattered into goodbyes.
I'm holding two claim tickets, because Theo handed me his on his way to say goodnight to Wanda, a small domestic transaction that nobody watching would think twice about, and I'm thinking about nothing, trying to rest my brain, the first empty-headed minute of my whole night.
Right up until the whole night gets shattered.
"Both of them, huh?"
I turn my head so fast I get a whiplash, and find Becker standing next to me, bow tie undone and his voice down low.
My heart takes one long step down a staircase.
I could ask what he means and deflect. There's a version of me, from about October, who would. But that version didn't stand in a hotel stairwell arguing with himself, or learn a Polish name off an app, or buy a chair.
I take one, long breath.
"Pretty much," I say.
Becker's face goes on a journey. I count the stops. Shock, recount, vindication, something wet, and then it lands somewhere I didn't forecast, which is awe.
"You— You absolute legend, you!" he says, and I shush him. "You couldn't just get one like regular people. You had to win the category."
"Tell no one." I hand the attendant the tickets. "I'm telling the team Friday. Dinner, my place."
"You're hosting." He says it like I've just claimed the Sun rises on the West. "You've never hosted. Oh my god, so it is real. You—" He stops himself with both hands, physically. "I will carry this secret to the grave."
"Thank you."
"Wait. Wait!" His palms drop. "Friday's in four days. Wall. I can’t carry it four days. I'm asking you, man to man—" he points toward the ballroom, at the perch, at the entire concept of Hendrix "—I am begging you to move it up."
"Friday."
"Thursday. Meet me at Thursday."
"Friday."
He accepts the coats from the attendant because his hands need a job, looking at them for a few seconds, doing the math on whose is the one that isn’t mine, and his eye develops a small tic that I predict will still be there Friday.
"Four days," he says, mostly to the coats. "I'm going to need a new corkboard."
He walks off, practically vibrating, and I stand at the coat check with two coats over my arm, one mine, one not, in a hotel where nobody knows anything for four more days.
Soon has a date now.
I confirmed it myself. Twice.