10. Adrian
Adrian
Brendan was already in his booth when I arrived.
He hadn’t shown up during the set or after the crowd had filled in.
He’d come before everything, an hour before my shift, while the bar was still in its pre-Saturday-night state of organized preparation.
Many of the chairs were still upside down on tables, and Benji was doing his pre-rush inventory count with a most unusual silence for a man whose quiet state was generally akin to a volcanic eruption.
I strode through the back with my pastry boxes and Fanta and saw Brendan sitting there by the door with a glass of water and an untouched whiskey in front of him on the table.
His jacket was neatly folded on the seat beside him, and he was scanning the room the way I was learning he always looked at things—fully and without rushing it.
His eyes locked onto mine a few heartbeats later.
Neither of us said anything for a second.
Then I turned to Benji, who was watching me with the carefully neutral expression of a man pretending to count bottles.
“You knew he was here?”
“I’m doing inventory,” Benji said.
“Benji.”
“The Campari count is very demanding.”
I looked at the Campari, then I looked at Benji.
I set my pastry boxes on the bar, called through to Rod, got the usual one arm through the pass snatching the guava box, and took my Fanta to the back to change.
Only briefly did I consider walking over to say hello.
It probably would’ve been the right thing to do, the thing normal people did, but seeing Brendan in my space, before I’d had time to settle into it, had me feeling very, I don’t know, un-Adrian.
I was rarely shy.
Hell, I danced in so little clothing that guys could tell my religion by my bulge. Still, something about confronting Brendan—okay, confronting was a bad word choice—something about seeing him made my stomach do dance moves my feet weren’t trained for.
So I took slightly longer than usual to slip out of my clothes and into, well, fewer clothes.
Not because I was nervous. I was not nervous.
At least, I wasn’t nervous about dancing.
I had been performing in front of rooms full of strangers for years. I’d performed on stages before thousands. I’d competed in dance events, had been judged, and won awards. Nothing about dancing on a bar counter made my stomach do anything.
And I refused to admit that I might’ve been nervous about a man in a booth who had come an hour early on a Saturday, which was either very casual or very deliberate, and I wasn’t sure which.
Even though I probably was a bit jittery over that last bit.
Fine, I wanted to throw up.
But in a good way, if there’s such a thing when discussing regurgitation.
Anyway.
I returned to the bar ala Speedo and crossed the room.
Brendan locked on the moment I entered and watched me cross. He wasn’t “performing” the watching or looking away and pretending he hadn’t been looking. He just watched, directly and without apology.
I slid into the booth across from him, the skin of my legs squeaking against the unfortunately dead naugas of the seat covering.
“You’re early,” I said, possibly the worst opening line ever.
“Peter told me you were usually here early,” he said. “I thought I might get to talk to you before your work started.”
I cocked my head. “Peter told you?”
“Peter knows things.”
“Peter knows everything,” I grunted. “It’s unsettling. Benji thinks he was a spy in a previous life, possible the Oracle at Delphi.”
“The Oracles were women, but the spy guess tracks,” Brendan said. “Vet, surgeon, spy. They should make a movie. I’d watch it.”
I couldn’t help but smile. Brendan’s magic was impossible to resist, even when his jokes needed serious life-saving intervention.
He looked different at this hour in this light.
The pre-shift bar light was softer and more honest than the Saturday night version.
It cast him differently somehow; and yet, he was still the same man with the same steady blue eyes and brown hair doing its own thing.
Without the full evening around him, he was somehow more present, like a person versus the mere photograph of him.
I set my Fanta on the table between us, not realizing how neatly it fit between his water and whiskey. The tiny curl to just one corner of his mouth told me he noticed it immediately.
“You wanted to discuss my python,” I said.
His eyes bugged, then quickly resumed their usual smirky squint. Something twitched at the other corner of his mouth. “I did, though I was referring to the dance, not your, um, anaconda.”
Now it was my turn to grin. At no point had the dance been brought up. This was a diversion of the finest order. I chose to play along. “For the record, I can do the worm. It isn’t any form of reptile.”
“I remain unconvinced. I am a scientist, after all. I require proof in all things.”
“Brendan. I am a professional dancer. The worm is barely a bad-drunk wedding wiggle.”
He chuckled, picked up his whiskey, and took a sip. The skin around his eyes smiled over his glass as he drank. “The worm is not a professional dance move. I will admit that.”
“Everything is a professional dance move when performed by a professional.” I leaned back against the booth, draping one arm over the seat. “That’s not an opinion. It’s physics.”
“That is not physics.” He shook his head. “That’s you having pride in your work.”
“Body in motion. Newton’s first law.”
He looked very much like he was trying not to smile, warring with humor and muscles and delight—and losing the fight before it had even begun.
“That is a significant misapplication of Newton,” he said through tightly pursed lips.
“Newton’s dead. Who’s to argue with my logic now, Doc? Sorry, DVM?”
He didn’t just smile then. A laugh flew out, a caged bird suddenly freed. It was the real kind, the honest kind, the kind that made my insides warm beyond anything they did when I was hot and sweaty and moving and . . . shit.
I was smiling back. And then I was laughing, too.
Something about his smile and his laugh and his eyes, in this light, at this hour, landed differently than it had across a dark bar from forty feet away. They had more power, more pull. They had more, I don’t know, everything.
I looked at my Fanta, desperate for salvation from his gravitational pull.
“Tell me about the tapir,” I said, swallowing my sudden . . . whatever.
His grin smoothed as he slipped into vet mode. “You want to hear about the tapir?”
“You mentioned a complicated zoo consult. I want to hear about it. Besides, I don’t even know what a tapir is. It sounds like a gut problem Mofongo might get.”
And there was that laugh again, unguarded and full and bouncing off the bar’s exposed brick walls like happy little gremlins who’d avoided the microwave.
“That’s a tape worm. Not the same thing.”
I shrugged and tried not to melt at the sound of his mirth.
He considered for a moment, then he told me.
It wasn’t a full clinical rundown or anything, just the shape of the thing.
Marisol was eleven years old and offered a presentation that didn’t fit any obvious answers.
Imaging told a layered story Brendan was still working through.
He talked about it the way he talked about things when he wasn’t explaining them to anyone, just thinking aloud.
His hands moved more than they usually did, and he stopped twice to reconsider details, then came back to them from different angles.
He was, I realized, genuinely inside the problem.
Watching him work through an unsolved mystery was fascinating in ways I hadn’t expected.
He finished talking, and I was quiet for a long moment.
I took a sip of Fanta. He took a sip of whiskey.
“Is she scared?” I asked suddenly, startling us both.
His eyes narrowed, brows knitted, then everything smoothed. “The tapir?”
“Yeah. I mean, when something’s wrong and a patient doesn’t understand why, isn’t that scary?
It would be for a person. Don’t you think animals know when something’s off even if they can’t voice what it is?
” I spun my Fanta can so the label faced me.
Then, for no reason, spun it back toward Brendan.
In a smaller voice, I asked again, “Do you think she’s scared? ”
He thought a moment, actually thought about it. He didn’t toss me some reflexive reassurance or bullshit answer he might use to placate someone else. Finally, he said, “Probably. She’s been quieter than usual, less interested in the things she normally likes.”
“How do vets comfort patients like that? Is there something special you feed them? Some kind of treats? Do nurses—or whatever you call them with animals—sit with them and talk to them? I heard there’s a spray to calm dogs when they’re afraid of storms. Would something like that help a tapir?
Is there some technique that’s unique or special for patients like this? ”
I didn’t know why I was asking all this. It just came out in a jumbled flurry of words. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t even know what a tapir looked like, and yet, in my mind’s eye, I could see a poor animal in a metal cage, utterly confused and feeling unwell, and seriously, sadly, terrified.
The thing about a cage is that nobody explains it to you.
You just wake up in one.
I did not say this out loud, because it was a first date, technically, and “let me tell you about the nature of confinement” is not in anyone’s top ten opening moves, but I thought it.
Spinning a Fanta can I wasn’t drinking, some back room of my brain that I kept locked for a reason quietly begged to be opened.
Because that was the part that really got me.
Not the being-sick part.
The nobody-explains-it part.
The waking up somewhere new, with people talking just outside the bars in a language you don’t understand, deciding things about you that you can’t argue because no one asked.
Animals don’t get a heads-up.
No “This is temporary,” no “This is for the best,” no “You’ll understand when you’re older”—which, for the record, is the single most useless sentence adults have ever invented, right behind “We’ll see.”
I knew, distantly, that I was no longer entirely discussing the tapir.
I also knew this was a wildly inappropriate amount of feeling to have in a Speedo while seated in a gay sports bar.
So I did what I do.
I spun the can back toward Brendan, put my face back on, and gave him the grin that had paid my rent for six years.
“Anyway,” I said. “Sorry, I get invested. I once cried at a documentary about a penguin who lost his little penguin family. It was a cartoon one, Brendan. It was animated grief. I have no defenses.”
“I . . .” He seemed to struggle with how to respond. “We do what we can. Healing the patient is usually the greatest comfort we can offer.”
I wasn’t sure I liked that answer, but I was sitting in a bar in my underwear. I wasn’t about to argue.
“Then you’ve got to figure it out, right?” I said. “She deserves to feel okay again.”
He looked at me across the table with an expression I couldn’t fully name. I’m not even sure he could give it a name. After a moment, he nodded slowly and said, “That’s the plan.”
“Good.” And then, again for no explicable reason, I added, “I’d like to meet her sometime.”
The smile that bloomed on Brendan’s lips nearly stole my breath. “I think she’d like that.”
We sat for a minute in the comfortable way of people who had run out of words and didn’t feel the need to fill the space.
Outside, the Saturday Ybor crowd was starting to gather and wander and make their way inside one bar or restaurant or another.
Inside, Barbacks was waking up around us.
Jacks and Benji stood behind the bar, the music thrummed its warm-up cycle, and Finn moved throughout the dining area with purpose, setting up tables and greeting the early arrivals.
“I should get ready,” I said.
“I know.”
But I didn’t move right away. Instead, I looked at him across the table, at the easy way Brendan occupied the booth, at the glass of whiskey he’d been nursing for an hour, and at the jacket folded beside him like he was planning to stay.
“You came early,” I said.
“I did.”
“You could’ve texted.”
“I could’ve,” he agreed, then picked up his water. “This was better.”
I took my Fanta and slid out of the booth. I was three steps away when he said, “Adrian.”
I turned.
“The worm conversation isn’t finished.”
“It really isn’t,” I said, tossing him a wink.
He took a sip and looked at the room with that steady, unhurried attention of his, and I went to finish getting ready.
My first set started at nine. As I stepped onto the bar, the energy shifted, the Saturday night becoming what Saturday nights were supposed to be.
I ran my scan of the room during the second song.
Brendan was still in his booth.
He had a new whiskey now. Jacks had brought it at some point, probably without being asked, and he was watching me dance.
The room was warm and full and giving me everything it had.
So I gave it everything back.