12. Adrian #2
“Okay, here’s the thing.” He set down the dish towel he’d picked up for no reason.
“The bar stuff, the pole—I have no idea if that’s good.
It looks good, but I don’t know dance. I couldn’t tell if you’re a genuinely great dancer or just a very confident man with excellent lighting and a crowd that’s had four drinks.
I have no instrument to measure it. You could be a six.
You could be a nine. I’m not qualified to say. ”
“I’m an eleven.”
“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.”
“You’re stalling,” Brendan said.
“I’m timing it. There’s a difference. Amateurs move on the count. Professionals move on the one after.”
I dropped to the floor, planted my palms, and did the thing my body knew how to do better than it knew how to do almost anything.
The first ripple started at my shoulders, traveled clean down the length of my spine, and pushed off through my feet.
I moved across Brendan’s hardwood floor like water going somewhere on purpose.
Chest, hips, knees, everything was one continuous wave.
And then another. And then a third for the people in the back, gliding the full length of that strip of light without a single stutter, because I’m a professional, and because he dared to have questions.
I finished at his feet, popped up onto my knees, and threw my arms out. “Ta-da, cabrón.”
Dead silence.
Puck had gone completely still in Brendan’s arms, watching me with the electric focus of an animal witnessing the approach of an apex predator.
Mofongo had sat down.
And Brendan—Dr. B. Davis, DVM, precise man, man who did things correctly—was staring down at me with his mouth slightly open and a look on his face I would have driven across the whole city to see.
“Oh no,” he said quietly.
“Oh yes.”
“That was—” He stopped. Recalibrated. “That was genuinely upsetting. How did your spine do that? That’s not—vertebrae don’t—”
“You’re a doctor. You tell me.”