12. Adrian
Adrian
My abuela taught me to always be honest and open with myself. So, I freely admitted, I was honestly, genuinely nervous, and I wasn’t afraid to admit it.
I had danced in front of rooms full of strangers, auditioned for Broadway productions, then performed in said productions.
I’d even auditioned in front of Finn and Benji with three minutes of music and zero preparation and had not been nervous in the slightest. Hell, I had dirty-danced with a bride named Madison while her bridesmaids livestreamed it to the world and had not been nervous (or turned on, but please don’t tell Madison. She was sweet.).
And yet, there I sat in my car outside a modest condo building in South Tampa, holding a box of pastries, terrified at stepping away from the safety of my vehicle.
Mofongo squirmed in his carrier on the back seat and sneezed.
“I know,” I said.
He sneezed again.
“I’m aware of the irony. Thank you.”
After a couple of deep, calming breaths, I got out of the car.
Brendan’s building was exactly as I’d seen it from the street the one time I’d driven past for entirely legitimate Mofongo-related reasons.
It was two floors of cream stucco with a row of mailboxes by the entrance.
Dr. B. Davis DVM was printed on the second one from the left, exactly where I’d seen it before, in the neat script of a man who did things correctly.
I pressed the buzzer.
“It’s open,” came through the crackly speaker, and the door clicked.
I climbed to the second floor, found the right door, and knocked. It opened almost immediately, which meant he’d been close to it, which meant something I chose not to examine too carefully because I was already nervous and didn’t need additional information.
Brendan wore a gray, loose-fitting T-shirt and shorts. His hair was doing its opinion-having thing, and he had the look of someone who had recently showered after a run and was as put-together as he intended to be, which was just the right amount.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I replied.
We stood there for a second, a pair of unmoving idiots.
Then his eyes drifted straight past me to the carrier.
“There he is,” he said, crouching to Mofongo’s level. “Hey, little buddy.”
“He couldn’t stay home alone. He gets lonely and gets into things.” I held up the pastry box with my free hand. “I also brought pan dulce. My abuela would consider it a moral failing if I showed up empty-handed.”
He smiled and stepped back to let me in.
His condo was both what I’d expected—and nothing like what I’d expected.
It was small, clean, and remarkably well organized in the way of someone who had thought about where things went, put them there, and left them there.
The books on his shelves were arranged methodically but appeared well read, not put on display.
The kitchen was clean and neat but looked used. A dish rack by the sink held two mugs.
On the windowsill, a pale green succulent appeared self-sufficient and exactly as advertised. I assumed this was Gerald.
His was the kind of apartment where you could tell, instantly, that the person who lived there had never once had a utility shut off, never once done the math on a prescription at the pharmacy counter, and never once counted out rent in cash.
It wasn’t anything showy. It was just—settled.
It was the apartment of a man whose life had always had a floor under it.
I had a floor under mine, too, these days, at least.
I’d built the floor myself, board by board, during 4 a.m. shifts and Saturday nights.
I was proud of it. Still, I noticed, standing in Brendan’s tidy living room with a box of my abuela’s pan dulce sweating in my hands, that I was suddenly very aware of the flour permanently worked into my knuckles.
This was the thing I didn’t advertise about myself: I could read a room in four seconds flat, and every so often, the room I read was the one inside my own head.
That room was a mess with the lights off.
Because there had been a look on Brendan’s face, back in his doorway.
It was small, there and gone, the kind of micro-hesitation I’d spent a lifetime learning to catch from a bar top thirty feet away.
It was a flicker that told me which table was about to complain about the music.
I’d caught it on him before and filed it away.
Now, in his spotless apartment, I took it back out and turned it over.
Maybe it was my dog. I’d brought a puppy to a first home visit. That was a lot for some people, but Brendan was a vet. I doubted he cared.
Maybe it was the pastries. Did they say, “Too much, too eager,” or “Too abuela’s boy”?
Maybe it was that I’d said something in Spanish again without noticing. I did that, and not everyone found it charming. Brendan was a precise man who might not love a boyfriend who kept slipping into a language he didn’t—
He’d gone for the dog before he’d gone for me, I reminded myself. He’d done it grinning. That wasn’t a man bracing for too much. That was a man glad the puppy came.
I told myself to knock it off.
Overthinking wasn’t an attractive look on anyone.
That’s when I realized a judgmental ferret, at that very moment, was staring at me like I owed him money. Puck lay sprawled on the back of the couch, looking at me with the bright, unshakable attention of an animal encountering a new variable and running a rapid assessment.
“That’s Puck,” Brendan said with a grin that made me slightly less comfortable than I’d been when I walked in.
“Hi, Puck,” I said, waving at the creature as though hand signals were his native tongue.
Puck dook’d once without moving from his full-length spread.
He did not wave back.
I set the pastry box on the counter, set Mofongo’s carrier on the floor, and crouched down to open it.
Mofongo emerged with the innocent confidence of a puppy who had arrived somewhere new and intended to understand it immediately.
His head spun, ears flopping, as he took in the apartment.
Then he looked at me. Finally, his gaze landed on Puck on the couch.
Puck stared at Mofongo.
Mofongo stared at Puck.
I looked up at Brendan.
Brendan shrugged with his brows, and I swear he was holding his breath.
What happened next happened fast, like “don’t blink or it’s over” fast.
Puck launched off the couch, having decided there was an intruder in our midst. He skidded to a halt in front of Mofongo, who was approximately three times his size but clearly had not expected the velocity of the strange beast headed toward him.
Mofongo sat down hard on his haunches and cocked his head as if to say, “What the hell are you?”
Puck sniffed him from one end to the other with the thoroughness of a customs inspector.
Mofongo sat utterly still—except for his nose, which wriggled and twisted every time Puck’s whiskers brushed by—and looked at me over Puck’s head with an expression I could only describe as deeply uncertain about all of his life decisions.
“Papi,” I said. “You’re fine.”
Puck completed his inspection, sat back, and dook’d.
Mofongo sneezed directly on him.
Puck looked down at his fur, at his tiny arms and the spittle oozing off them, then he looked at Mofongo and blinked rapidly.
He dook’d again, differently this time, shorter, with a quality I couldn’t identify, and climbed directly on top of Mofongo’s back.
Mofongo froze. It looked as though he’d been shot with a tranquilizer dart and might never move again. Only his eyes darted back and forth in a failed attempt to see the ferret mounting his back.
Puck arranged himself there with great satisfaction.
Mofongo finally looked at me, his eyes pleading.
I looked at Brendan.
Brendan pressed his lips together very hard.
“Don’t you dare laugh at—”
He lost it, and his laugh was the real kind, full and unguarded.
Mofongo turned toward the sound with his ears at full deployment, and Puck rode the turn like it was nothing, still installed on Mofongo’s back like a medieval knight ready to charge into battle.
“He does that,” Brendan said, when he’d recovered. “When he decides he likes something.”
“He’s riding my dog. Like, literally, bareback.”
“Ferrets don’t use saddles, Adrian,” Brendan said through chuckles. “I’m pretty sure he’s decided your dog is his now.”
I looked at the pair of them—Puck draped across Mofongo’s back, Mofongo standing extremely still with martyred patience, struggling to accept a situation he hadn’t agreed to.
I felt the laugh coming before I could stop it.
“Gerald and Mofongo,” I said. “Puck and Mofongo. You’re collecting things to put on my dog.”
“Gerald isn’t on your dog.”
“Gerald’s on him in spirit.”
Brendan looked at Gerald, shrugged, and said, “Fair.”
Then he turned to the situation at hand. “Okay,” Brendan said, still watching Puck ride Mofongo in a slow victory lap of the living room. “Before any grilling happens, before anything happens, you made a promise, and I need to collect.”
“I make a lot of promises.”
“You said—and I’m quoting—‘Your life will change.’” He crossed his arms and leaned against the counter with the insufferable patience of a man who had been waiting a full day to collect on a bet. “The worm, Adrian. You drove over here to prove your skill. It’s time.”
And there it was, the thing I’d been holding on to since his kitchen texts: the smug little certainty of a veterinarian who didn’t believe a professional dancer could do a wedding-reception novelty move.
“Can I ask you something first?” I asked.
“Why do you care so much? You’ve seen me dance on a bar.
You watched me do things on a pole that are, medically speaking, ill-advised.
Out of everything you could choose to make me prove my pedigree, the thing you’ve decided to litigate for two days is whether I can do a move eight-year-olds learn at birthday parties. ”
He considered this as though reviewing a patient’s chart.