39. Adrian
Adrian
The back room at Barbacks always changed before a set.
It was never fully quiet, because the bar’s noise came through the wall, muffled but present, the sound of a room filling with people on the other side of thin drywall.
Even so, the back room stayed separate from all of it.
Over my years of Saturday nights, I had learned to use that thin veil.
This was my place, the room where I became the thing I was about to be.
I stretched first, the way I always did, working through hip flexors, shoulders, and my back in the same sequence and in the same order I had used since learning to dance as a boy.
Mofongo, who’d been permitted backstage on account of being Mofongo, watched the whole process from his travel bed in the corner.
“I know,” I told him.
He sneezed at me.
“It’s a big night. I get it. You’ll be fine.”
He rested his chin on the edge of the worn bed and kept watching me, because some moments required a witness, and he had appointed himself to the role without consulting anyone.
Through the wall, the bar was growing loud.
It wasn’t a regular-Saturday loud, though.
It was somehow fuller than that. There were new voices mingled with familiar ones.
There were more of them, and many belonged to people who were discovering our little bar for the first time and deciding that they liked it.
This was the neighborhood showing up exactly the way we had hoped they would.
Standing in the back room with the noise leaking through the wall, I felt the good kind of nerves, the kind that showed up only when what I was about to do genuinely mattered.
I was partway through my second Fanta and checking myself in the small corner mirror when Finn’s head poked through the doorway.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
His body followed his head, and he leaned against the doorframe. “A few years ago, I hired a dancer because Mark said we needed one. I put out an ad, and eleven people showed up. The first ten of them were fine.”
“And the eleventh?” I asked, knowing where this was headed but unable to resist prodding Finn. He looked emotional, which made the prodding all the more appropriate.
“The eleventh walked in with pastelillos and did a three-minute routine on the bar. Before he even climbed down, I knew I wasn’t going to need to see anyone else.
” He held my eyes. “That was the best decision this bar ever made, and I’ve made a lot of decisions.
Mark keeps a spreadsheet on all of them. ”
I didn’t say anything, because he wasn’t finished yet, and my will to prod had caught in my throat.
“You helped build something here, Adrian,” Finn said.
“What you do . . . it’s not just dancing.
It’s the whole thing around your dancing.
It’s what the room turns into when you’re up on that bar, and why people keep coming back for it.
” He pushed off the doorframe. “That’s not a small thing, and I wanted you to know that I know it. ”
He stepped out into the hallway, picked up his clipboard from where he had left it on the floor before he knocked, and turned back toward the noise.
“Have a good set tonight,” he called back.
“Always.”
The door had barely closed before it opened a second time.
I expected Benji, because Benji always came back before a set. Officially, he did this to check on something practical. In reality, I thought he did it just to hover in the doorway like a man who cared about what was coming.
But it wasn’t Benji.
Brendan stepped through. He wore dark jeans and the blue shirt Alan had given him, the one that did unfair things to his eyes in warm light.
“Hey,” I said, an involuntary smile bursting from my face.
“I hope you’re okay with me coming in. Benji told me you were back here.”
“Of course he did.” I chuckled.
“His exact words were, ‘Get back there and do something useful for once.’”
I laughed. “That’s Benji telling you that he loves you.”
“I gathered as much.” He looked at me, calm and unhurried. “You okay?”
“I’m good. It’s a big night.”
“It is. I came in through the front. Looks like Dante’s idea worked. There are people out there I’ve never seen before.”
“The neighborhood showed up.”
“The whole neighborhood, from the looks of it,” he confirmed.
He crossed the small room without any hurry and stopped in front of me, close enough that the bar noise seemed to fade away beneath the sound of him breathing.
“I came to watch the whole thing,” he said. “Front row, all of it. I told you I had Saturdays to make up.”
“You didn’t have to come back here to tell me that.”
“I know.”
He put one hand on the side of my face, leaned down, and kissed me.
It wasn’t a quick kiss, nor was it a hungry one.
It was something quieter and deeper than either of those, slow and warm and deliberate.
It was a kiss he had crossed a crowded bar and walked down a hallway to deliver because he meant every second of it.
It held, and somewhere in the middle of it, the room on the other side of the wall stopped existing entirely .
. . until there was nothing left but Brendan and the warmth of his hand and the weight of a person who had somehow become the most important thing in a life that was already full of important things.
When he pulled back, he looked at me, his palm still pressed to my cheek.
Four days ago, I might’ve caught a flicker on his face and spent the set writing a story about it.
Now, I just had his hand on my cheek and no story at all, which was going to take some getting used to.
Unpacking a bag you’ve lived out of for twenty years, it turns out, leaves you standing there holding nothing, wondering what to do with your arms.
I wasn’t saying anything.
I couldn’t.
“Good luck,” Brendan whispered, quiet and certain.
I nodded because I didn’t trust my voice not to crack.
Then he was gone, and the door clicked shut behind him.
I stood in the back room of Barbacks on our anniversary Saturday—the public one, the loud one, the night the whole neighborhood came—and my fingers rose to my lips before I had decided to lift them. I held them there for a moment, only because I wanted to keep feeling it a little longer.
Mofongo lifted his head.
“I know,” I said.
He huffed and set his chin back down.
I set down the Fanta and rolled my shoulders.
Tonight is for you, I thought. Even if you’re the only one who ever finds out.
It wasn’t announced, and it wasn’t performed. It was simply true, quietly and completely, and it needed no confirmation from anyone else in the building.
I walked out of the back room, down the hallway, and into the heat and light and noise of a bar that was fuller than I had ever seen it. When I stepped up onto the counter, the room turned toward me. I found Brendan’s booth in my very first scan without meaning to.
It was empty.
He was sitting on a stool at the bar only a few feet away.
Before I could process that, the music began.