23. Adrian
Adrian
Brendan’s hand found mine across the center console.
I threaded my fingers between his. It felt as natural as breathing, which surprised me, because nothing about my growing feelings for this man felt natural—and yet they did.
It was confusing and wonderful and frustrating and didn’t make one bit of sense.
I supposed that was how it was supposed to feel.
I looked down at our hands and smiled, then stared back out at the Tampa evening passing around us.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
“You said that already.”
“It’s still true.”
“It’s been true for three blocks. Can I have a hint?”
“Nope.” He popped the “P” in that word like he was proud of it.
“One hint,” I said, letting my thumb stroke a little firmer across his hand while leaning across to lay my head on his shoulder in a most affectionate, possibly pathetic, begging gesture.
“Not happening, dancer boy. You’ll just have to be patient.”
“Is it far? You can at least tell me that.”
“Depends on how you define far in Tampa.”
“That eliminates Miami,” I said. “And most of Georgia.”
His eyes crinkled in amusement. “Congratulations on your elimination of Georgia.”
I shifted to look at him. He was watching the road with one hand on the wheel and the other snugly holding mine. He hadn’t looked at me once since we’d pulled out of the parking lot.
My mind drifted back to him kissing me in the exam room, catching me completely off guard, which nobody ever did. I read rooms for a living. I saw things coming before they arrived. I had not seen Brendan’s lips coming until they’d landed.
This man had spent nearly a month moving with the patience of a glacier and then, suddenly and without warning, spun me around and kissed me like he’d been thinking about it for a lifetime and had simply run out of reasons not to.
I was still processing this.
“You’re thinking very loudly,” he said.
“I’m thinking at a normal volume.”
“You turned toward me twice and turned back without saying anything. That’s a physical tell.”
“I don’t have physical tells.”
“Everyone has physical tells.” A pause. “Yours usually involves your shoulders.”
My brow furrowed. “My shoulders?”
“When you’re working through something, your left shoulder drops slightly. It comes back up when you’ve finished.”
“You’ve been cataloguing my shoulder?”
“I’m a vet,” he said simply. “My profession is reading signals from patients who can’t speak.”
I faced the windshield so he wouldn’t see my face doing the thing it was doing. My shoulder drooped on its own.
“Tarpon Springs,” I guessed as we passed a sign showing the distance to the town.
He drew in a long breath, then let it out. “Yes.”
“It’s your hometown, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“You’re taking me to your hometown on a date you’ve been planning for how long?”
“That’s an accurate summary. Eight days. The planning started eight days ago.”
“Brendan.”
“Yeah?”
“This is a grand gesture.”
“It’s dinner,” he said. “And a walk.”
“It’s a grand gesture disguised as dinner and a walk.”
The corner of his mouth surrendered to a smile. “It’s a very simple, enjoyable evening with a man I may or may not like a little.”
“Nothing about you is simple.”
He glanced at me then, briefly, the steadiest sideways look from a man who was constitutionally incapable of being unsteady. Something in his eyes said he was glad I understood that. Then he looked back at the road.
I shifted again and faced forward.
Dios mío, I thought. I’m in so much trouble.
We drove into Tarpon Springs from the south. That’s when Brendan started talking. He wasn’t announcing or performing, simply offering the quiet narration of a man moving through a place built into him somewhere deep.
“That building over there was my school.
“That was where the hardware store used to be before it became a smoothie place, which I still find personally offensive.
“You see that fence? That was the fence my dad built in 2003, the one a car backed into two years later. That’s the better fence that replaced it because the second time my father measured differently.
“That spot near the water over there is where Alan, at fourteen, discovered that throwing things off the dock made little Brendan jump in regardless of the temperature. He deployed that tactic eleven times over two summers until our father found out and put a stop to it.”
“Eleven times?” I asked.
“He had a notebook.”
“Alan documented dock jumps in a notebook? That might be the most organized pranking in the history of pranking.”
“Alan documents everything. It runs in the family.” A pause. “The documentation, not the jumping.”
“Oh, right.”
“Right.”
I watched the neighborhoods pass, the grid of streets that had produced this particular man, and thought about me at eight years old in West Tampa and Brendan at eight years old here, two completely different childhoods in completely different kitchens, somehow ending up in a car with their hands linked on a Tuesday evening in late September.
The universe clearly had some explaining to do.
We parked near the sponge docks as the sun finished its work for the day, the sky doing something with oranges and purples that Tampa proper could never have managed.
I got out of the car and stood on the sidewalk.
The air smelled of salt and something frying and that strange warm-cool that came off the Gulf at dusk.
“Greek sponge divers started settling here in the 1880s,” Brendan said, coming around the car to stand beside me.
“They came from the Dodecanese islands of Kalymnos, Halki, and Symi. The sponge industry built this whole waterfront. The Greek community never left.” He looked at the docks with an affection of a man describing something he’d absorbed so early in his life it had become part of how he saw the world.
“My mother’s family came in the 1920s. She grew up speaking Greek at home and English at school and considers both equally hers. ”
“And you?”
“My Greek is functional,” he said. “My mother’s Greek is considerable. There’s a difference.”
Two blocks from the water, he stopped in front of a small Greek Orthodox church, worn at the edges the way things got when they’d been standing long enough to stop caring whether anyone noticed them.
I might have walked past it on any other day, except for the mosaic above the door.
It caught the last of the evening light in the way of something placed exactly there to catch exactly that light.
Blue and gold and white tiles were arranged into a scene that made me stop walking without deciding to.
Brendan stood beside me and let me look.
“My mother’s family has been coming here since the 1940s,” he said. “Her grandfather helped build it.”
“It’s extraordinary.”
“I never really looked at it until I was in my twenties. I’d walked past it my whole life.”
“What made you look?”
He was quiet for a moment. “I’d had a complicated case at veterinary school that I couldn’t resolve. I was walking and not paying attention. I looked up and there it was.” Another pause. “I think sometimes you have to get far enough away from something before you can actually see it.”
I thought about the panadería in West Tampa I’d been walking into since I was nineteen and had never fully seen until recently, when it started to feel like mine.
“Sí,” I said. “I understand.”
His hand found the small of my back and stayed there until we started walking again.
Stavros’s was three blocks from the water.
It was small and charming, lit from inside with the warmth of a place that had been feeding the same people for a very long time and had no intention of changing anything about how it did it.
A hand-painted sign creaked as it swung above the door in the evening breeze.
White paper covered the tables. A glass case near the entrance filled with pastries made my professional eyes narrow, because whoever made the pastries had either trained somewhere serious or had an abuela with very strong opinions about process. Probably both.
A snow-topped man in his sixties appeared from the kitchen. The moment he saw Brendan, he bolted across the room and pulled him into a tight embrace, kissing both cheeks with the warmth of someone who had known this man since he was someone else’s height.
“Brendan, come here, boy.”
Brendan kissed him back without hesitation. “Stavros, it’s good to see you. Thank you for this.”
“Your mother called three times.” He grinned conspiratorially. “She frightens me.”
Brendan’s smile was immediate and wide. “She frightens me, too.”
Stavros’s laugh was deep and resonant, filling the space around us.
When his eyes found me, he stilled, studying me the way only certain people could.
It was the evaluating depth of someone who had spent their whole life reading the humans that came through their door and knew within thirty seconds whether a person was worth knowing.
He said something in Greek to Brendan. Brendan smiled, then nodded toward the table Stavros was already leading us toward. “He says welcome.”
“Mmhmm.”
“What?” Brendan said.
“That’s not what he said.”
“Do you speak Greek now? How do you know?”
I rolled my eyes. “I just know. What did he actually say?”
Brendan looked at the table, then looked at me. “He said you have kind eyes.”
I sat with that for a moment as he picked up a menu.
“That’s really what he said,” he confirmed without looking up. “Promise.”
Brendan buried himself in a menu he had memorized when he was eleven. I sat back and watched this man across a paper tablecloth in his hometown restaurant, in that blue shirt doing something genuinely unfair to his eyes, and thought about the church mosaic and Stavros.
Kind eyes, Stavros had said.
Right back at you, I thought.
Stavros brought bread without being asked. It was good bread—not the panadería’s bread, mind you—but it was warm and real and made by someone who understood the process. I tore off a piece and dipped it in olive oil. That first bite made me close my eyes.