The Spiced Baker

Bounced! Chapter 2

The bar didn’t care about my feelings. The bar only cared about the ice machine, which had died sometime between two and six that morning.

I discovered this when I walked into a kitchen that had become a shallow lagoon.

The machine sat there, silent and smug, radiating the energy of an appliance that had thought about this for a long time and picked its moment.

“You did this on purpose.”

The machine said nothing. Machines never confess.

I’d slept maybe three hours. The other five I’d spent staring at the ceiling, re-litigating a night I didn’t want to even remember. Every time I got close to the part with the shoulders and the ink, I made myself think about drywall instead.

It half worked.

So, I wasn’t at my sharpest when Finn came in at seven and found me on my knees in an inch of water with a wrench.

He froze, took in the lagoon, took in me, kneeling in it, soaked to the thighs.

“Are you baptizing our ice maker? Was it a bad machine? Did you need to cleanse its sins?”

I rolled my eyes and resisted the urge to flick him and his chipper Irish lilt a bird. “I think it’s dead. It needs absolution, not baptism.”

“So you drowned it. That’s murder.” He tossed his keys on the nearby counter and stepped around the water like a man avoiding hot coals. “You look like hell. Get any sleep?”

“Some.”

“How much is some?”

“Three.”

“Three hours? Jesus, Mark,” He crouched at the dry edge and looked at me the way one looks at a dog that’s been into the trash. “You’ve got the face of a man who did a lot of thinking. You worry me when you think.”

I dropped the wrench. It hit the water and splashed me directly in the face.

Finn grinned and watched me wipe ice-machine runoff out of my eyes and didn’t offer to help.

“What?” I asked.

“Nothing at all,” he said a little too merrily, and went to start the coffee, which was the single most alarming thing Finn O’Brien could’ve done, not giving me shit.

By nine o’clock, the lagoon was mostly a memory, and the repair guy had made promises I chose not to believe. I’d changed into the emergency pants I kept in my office for exactly this genre of morning. Yes, at forty-eight, I had a contingency wardrobe. My father would’ve been so proud.

Benji arrived at nine-fifteen with hair a color that hadn’t existed the day before.

“Morning, lovelies!” He dropped his bag onto the bar. “Why’s there a wrench up here?”

“Don’t touch the wrench,” I growled.

“I’m not touching your wrench. I’m asking about your wrench. Those are different.“ He leaned both elbows on the stainless steel counter and looked at me with the frank, wide-open curiosity of someone who had never once had a thought and kept it to himself. “You look like shit.”

“Thank you.”

“Not your face. I’ve made peace with your face. You look terrible structurally, like a parking garage they’ve condemned but can’t afford to knock down.”

Across the kitchen, Finn snorted.

I counted to three.

It was a thing I did, especially when Benji was present.

“That’s a compliment,” he said. “People love old buildings. There’s a whole preservation society.” He tilted his head. “Rough night?”

And there was where I made my mistake.

“Nope.”

It would’ve been fine if I’d said it at a normal speed and a normal volume, like a man reporting a boring fact. Instead, it came out fast and bright and about a third of an octave above my usual register, the audio equivalent of a man diving behind a couch to avoid bullets.

Benji’s whole face lit up.

“Oh!” he breathed. “Oh, that was a guilty ‘nope.’”

“It was a regular ‘nope.’”

“Mark, sweetheart, I’ve been lied to by professionals.” He was already climbing onto a stool, already settling in, the way you settle into a comfy seat before the start of a movie you’ve been waiting to see. “That was a ‘nope’ with a floor plan.”

“The ice machine broke.”

“That’s not where you were at midnight.”

I opened my mouth to say he didn’t know where I was at midnight, and then didn’t, because the not-saying was already an answer and we both heard it.

“Oh . . . my . . . God!” He grabbed the edge of the counter with both hands. “You went somewhere.”

“I go lots of places.”

“Was there a man?”

“There’s no man.”

“There’s always a man, Mark, that’s the whole premise of gayness.“ He gasped, an actual, audible, theatrical gasp, one hand flying to his chest. “Was it an app? Mark, did you meet somebody from your phone?”

“I’m going to fire you.”

“You’ve never fired anyone. You kept Trevor on payroll for six weeks after he moved to Georgia.”

“He was going through something.”

“He was in Georgia.”

Finn drifted past with a case of limes and said, without slowing down, without so much as turning his head, “He was somewhere last night with a towel.”

I stopped wiping. My rag, about the size of said towel, went still.

Benji’s head swiveled so fast I heard something crack in his neck. “A towel?”

“He’s guessing,” I said.

“I’m not guessing,” Finn called from the walk-in. “I’m a witness to a man’s suffering. I said the word napkin at seven o’clock this morning and he dropped a wrench on his own face.”

“You said what?“ Benji whispered to Finn, as though I couldn’t hear him, and I don’t think I’d ever seen a human being so purely, completely happy.

“It’s not what you think.”

“It’s a bathhouse.“ Benji flew off the counter, both hands pointed at me like he’d cracked a murder. “Mark Delgado went to a bathhouse.”

“Keep your voice down. We’re a business.”

“We’re a closed business. There’s nobody here but us and one guy outside, and he’s a pelican.”

I looked. He was right. There was a pelican.

“I’m allowed to go places,” I said, a sulking ten-year-old.

“You’re so allowed. That’s the beautiful part.

“ Benji put his face in his hands, then took it back out to keep talking, because Benji couldn’t store joy.

It had to gush out immediately or he’d rupture.

“You went to a bathhouse like a normal, healthy, deeply repressed gay adult, and then you came in here and told me ‘nope.’ You can’t ‘nope’ a bathhouse, Mark. The bathhouse is the whole story.”

“There’s no story.”

That’s when Benji went still.

He examined my face for about two seconds. Whatever crossed it I didn’t authorize, but he read it anyway, because that was the trouble with Benji Kwon. He played the fool with such commitment you forgot he was the fastest read in the building.

“Oh,” he said, softer. “You didn’t—“

“Didn’t what?”

“Nothing happened. You went, and nothing happened.”

“The towel was very small,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than the towel.

“Mark.”

“There was applause.”

“Mark.”

“Somebody clapped . . . and a man called out a number. I think he was scoring me.”

That did it.

Benji made a sound like a kettle coming to boil and folded slowly over the counter until his forehead touched the metal, wheezing the word applause to no one.

Good, I thought. Let him have the towel.

The other part wasn’t a story.

The other part was a set of shoulders across a steam room and a name that had been ringing in me since eleven o’clock the night before.

Dante sat at the end of the counter.

I couldn’t have told you when he’d come in.

That was the thing about the man, he arrived the way pressure changed before a storm, with no announcement, just a shift you noticed after the fact. By the time you clocked his presence, he’d already been there long enough to have read four pages of whatever weird novel he was lugging around.

Dante always arrived early, an hour, sometimes more, before the door needed guarding.

He usually took the far stool at the bar with a coffee and a book, and he sat so still and so complete that regulars had told me, straight-faced, that the man didn’t walk in so much as condense out of the corner at dusk.

Today’s book was thick and battered and Russian, because it was always thick and battered and usually Russian.

This time, he hadn’t sat in the bar proper.

He’d come into the kitchen, which he never did.

He hadn’t said a word. He hadn’t needed to.

He was six-two of banked stillness, shoulders like a doorframe and a face you couldn’t read with subtitles.

Dante carried all that size the way athletes do, the ones who’d been coached young.

He wasn’t a big man who’d wandered into his body.

He was a big man who’d been trained in it.

Most people took one look and decided he was a wall.

I was fairly certain that was his intended effect.

Dante gave a room exactly as much of himself as the room had earned, which for most rooms was a nod and nothing else.

What most people missed, and what I only half let myself notice, was that his stillness wasn’t absence.

The man was always counting the exits. He knew who was in his bar, and where, and how much they’d had to drink, and whether the guy by the jukebox was getting louder in a way that might turn into a problem.

He kept that watch even off the clock, even nose-down in Tolstoy, because as far as I could tell, Dante didn’t have an off switch for the part of him that decided who he was responsible for.

He’d never say any of that out loud. He’d simply let you think he was just a big man who liked books.

But Dante I knew was more than that—and he was always listening.

Benji wiped his eyes, and his gaze slid past me, down the length of the counter to Dante and snagged there.

Dante flipped a page.

“He heard all of that,” Benji said toward Dante who didn’t look up.

“He’s reading,” I said.

“Mark.” Benji was grinning now, a new and more dangerous grin, the one he got when a second toy joined the game. “That’s the face of a man who heard about the applause and is choosing, out of mercy, not to say anything.”

I looked. Dante’s face was a sealed door with a nice paint job. His eyes moved along a line, reached the end, then dropped to the next. If he’d heard a single syllable, there was no evidence a jury would accept.

“He didn’t hear anything,” I said.

“That man hears everything. It’s his whole job.“ Benji cupped a hand to his mouth and called, “Dante! You want in on this?”

Dante didn’t look up.

He flipped another page, unhurried.

After a few seconds, in a low voice that seemed to start somewhere down around his boots and travel up through the floor, he asked, “In on what?”

“Mark’s night.”

“Wasn’t listening.”

“See,” I said.

“But if I had been,” He let the pause sit there the way he let everything sit there, until the whole bar was leaning toward him without meaning to.

He still hadn’t looked up. “I’d say a man that size shouldn’t be handed a towel that small.

That’s not a wardrobe. That’s a safety hazard.

Somebody should file a complaint on your behalf. ”

Benji made the kettle sound again and slid clean off his stool.

Finn let out his stupid leprechaun chortle behind me then fled to the office.

I stood there with my rag at the exact center of my own damn kitchen, outnumbered by a twenty-six-year-old wheezing on the floor and a man reading Tolstoy who had, without once lifting his eyes, landed the best line of the morning.

In that moment, I caught something else, a thing under the joke.

I’d watched Dante do the same thing to rattled customers and skittish first-dates and once to a kid having a panic attack by the bathrooms. He hadn’t ribbed me.

He’d reached down, picked up the most humiliating thing on the table, and turned it into something I could laugh at so I wouldn’t have to keep holding it alone.

That was the whole of Dante if you knew where to look.

He guarded you even when the only threat was your own bad night.

Something warm moved through my chest. I didn’t examine it because examining it wasn’t on the schedule, and there was a pelican to consider and an ice machine to bury.

“Thank you, Dante,” I said.

“Wasn’t listening,” he said again, turned a page, and that was the end of what he was going to give us.

Finn reappeared and hauled Benji up off the floor by one arm. “Alright. That’s enough. You’ve had your fun, and everyone’s whole again.”

“I’ll never be whole,” Benji said, still laughing.

“He got scored in a bathhouse by a man wearing nothing but a grin.“ He then drifted out of the kitchen, toward the fruit at the end of the bar, buoyant, a man handed a gift he hadn’t earned. At the corner, he turned, walked backward, and pointed at me one more time. “For the record, I think it’s great, you finally getting out, going to a bathhouse or bar or whatever. I love it for you.”

“Thanks,” I said, suspicious of every word.

“Although.” He paused, and I watched an idea arrive on his face and make itself comfortable. “Can I say something as your friend and not your employee?”

“No.”

“The bathhouse is a lot, Mark. It’s the deep end.

You’re standing at the edge of the pool in floaties talking about the deep end.

“ He spread his hands, reasonable and dead serious under his usual nonsense. “There’s an easier way to meet people now. It’s on your phone.

You download the app, you make a profile, and you swipe on the nice ones.

My cousin met her husband online. It’s civilized, and it’s got pictures. No towel required.”

Down the bar, without a word or any inflection at all, Dante turned another page, but his eyes had stopped moving along the line. They stayed stopped for exactly one beat too long before they started again.

Benji saw it. Of course, he did.

Benji saw everything that wasn’t about him.

I watched as his grin twitched.

“An app?” I said.

“An app,” Benji echoed, beaming, already halfway to the fruit. “Trust me. You’re going to love it.”

I want it on the record that at no point did anyone in the room tell me which app.