16. Adrian
Adrian
My body had no respect for context.
It didn’t care that it was Monday. It didn’t care that I wasn’t in my own bed or that there was a very good reason to stay horizontal for a few more hours.
It simply woke up at three fifty-eight, the same way it had every morning since I was nineteen, tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Vamos, the bread isn’t going to make itself. ”
I lay there for a minute and had a quiet mental argument with it.
My body won. The dumb thing always won.
It also won faster than usual because my mind was spinning.
Once I started thinking, I was done sleeping regardless.
Mind you, it wasn’t anxious thinking. It was the other kind, the kind where something good had happened and my brain wanted to hold it up and look at it from different angles, the way I held fresh bread up to check the crust.
I lay in Brendan’s bed in the dark and did exactly that, with his arm warm against mine and the city outside doing its 4 a.m. thing.
It felt like the moment after a proof came out right.
It wasn’t exciting, exactly.
It felt more . . . more like settled, as though something had been slightly off balance and had magically found its correct position.
I was, I realized, in a bit of trouble.
The good kind. Maybe the best kind.
That’s when I turned my head.
In the dark, I could just make out his face, and his hair, and—dios mío—his hair.
Whatever the morning had done to it was something.
The part that was usually only a little bushy had made life choices, multiple life choices, in various directions simultaneously.
One section was attempting an angle that had no relationship with gravity or common sense, while another had given up entirely and flopped sideways across his forehead like it had somewhere to be and had reconsidered or run out of gas halfway there.
I had bedhead issues, as anyone with long-ish hair would understand, but Brendan? Sweet mother of pearl.
I stared at it for a moment longer than was necessary. I was probably going to be thinking about that hair for a while. That was painfully clear.
God, I was so screwed.
Reluctantly, I left the warmth of his arms, dressed in the dark with the practiced quiet of a man who had been not-waking people at 4 a.m. his entire adult life, and went to find the kitchen.
Gerald glared at me from the windowsill.
“Buenos días,” I said quietly.
He didn’t respond, because he was a succulent, likely an English-speaking one, and silence summed up his position on mornings. I respected that.
I found Brendan’s coffee maker by feel. The filters were above and the coffee canister beside, exactly where a logical person would put them. Lord knows, Brendan was nothing if not logical. I got the coffee going and leaned against the counter in the dark kitchen while it huffed and puffed.
Mofongo’s carrier was in the corner of the living room. Brendan had set it up the night before without being asked. He’d just found a corner and assembled the little bed inside without making a thing of it, the way he did everything that was simply the right thing to do.
I was thinking about that when Puck appeared.
He came in low and fast from the direction of the bedroom, assessed me, glanced around the kitchen, and climbed up my leg and onto the counter in one fluid motion, where he sat facing me with his bright, complete attention.
“Hey, little guy.”
He dook’d, soft, not wanting to wake Brendan. At least, that’s how I interpreted the ferret’s speech.
“Coffee’s almost ready,” I said. “You want some?”
He looked at Gerald, then he looked at me.
“I know it’s early,” I said. “It’s always early. This is just what mornings are.”
He dook’d again, and then he yawned, a gesture wider than his whole face, one in which his tiny arms reach toward the sky, and his itty-bitty fingers stretched in all directions.
It was utterly adorable.
“It was a good night,” I whispered.
He made the quieter sound again.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
I poured my first cup as it came through the strainer.
This was the impatient pour, the one I’d been doing since I was nineteen while the world was still dark and the bread needed me before anyone else did.
I drank the juice of life standing at the counter with Puck beside me and Gerald holding down the windowsill.
Outside, the sun was still resisting leaving the comfort of her covers.
I was most of the way through my second cup when I heard the distinct sounds of someone navigating a familiar space while only partially conscious.
Brendan’s slow footsteps were barely audible.
There was a small pause, then more slow footsteps.
I knew that shuffle. I had made it myself many times in the early hours when my brain hadn’t fully committed to being awake yet, when my body was running on muscle memory alone.
Brendan appeared in the kitchen doorway, eyes squinty and hair, well, doing that finger-in-the-light-socket thing.
Ay, ese hombre, I thought.
His hair had not improved. It had, if anything, expanded its range of opinions during the time I’d been up.
The section I’d admired in the dark was now doing something new, still sideways, with the confidence of something that had made a decision and wasn’t taking questions—or of the final surrender of a dead squirrel.
He’d donned a worn T-shirt and silky shorts.
Squinting against the kitchen light, his face appeared to believe it was still in bed.
He looked nothing like the composed, steady man who’d grilled chicken thighs on a balcony and listened to me talk about bread lamination like it was the most interesting thing he’d heard all week.
He looked better, actually.
He looked real.
His eyes found me, then the coffee maker, then me again.
“You made coffee,” he said, his voice lower than usual, roughed up by sleep. The sound of it did something to the bottom of my gut that I was going to need to think about later when I had time.
“Your system is logical,” I said. “Filters above, coffee beside.”
He looked at the cabinets, then at me again. “You figured out my system.”
“It took about four seconds.”
He padded into the kitchen, moving with the unhurried shuffle of a man whose body was present and whose brain was on its way, and reached past me for a mug.
He was close enough that his shoulder pressed briefly against mine, and he didn’t move away.
He then poured his coffee, leaned on the counter beside me, and looked at Gerald the way I imagined he looked at Gerald every morning, checking on him, confirming he was fine, giving him the quiet acknowledgment of something that had been there a long time and was trusted to continue.
“How long have you been up?” he said.
“Since four.”
He looked at me. “It’s four twenty-three.”
“I made productive use of time.”
“You talked to Puck?”
“Puck and I had a conversation, yes.”
Puck dook’d from the counter, confirming this.
Brendan looked at him with the fondness of a man who had long ago accepted that his ferret participated in household discussions.
Then he took a long sip and sighed deeply, his eyes closing briefly.
“What?” he asked as he focused on me.
“Nothing.”
“You’re looking at my hair,” he said. One hand reached up and tried, very unsuccessfully, to push some of his mess back into place.
“Your hair is remarkable.”
“It does what it wants.”
“Right now, it appears to have abandoned its usual limits entirely.”
He smiled, took another sip, then leaned against me and crooned, “Come back to bed.”
He said it simply, without performance or strategy or thought. It was a brief sentence, in that low morning voice, from a man who meant it.
I looked at him, at his hair, at his coffee, and at the sleep still clouding his features. Puck sat between us on the counter like an extremely opinionated moderator. I genuinely wanted to crawl back under the covers with this man and his ferret. God, I wanted to.
Instead, I said, “I have to make bread.”
Brendan’s eyes opened, and he stared at me, unblinking.
“I’m serious. Dona Carmen opens at six. The first dough needs to be shaped by five-thirty or the whole morning falls behind.”
He glanced out the window. It was still dark outside. “It’s four twenty-three, maybe four twenty-six now.”
“I know.”
“In the morning.”
“The bread doesn’t know that,” I said. “The bread only knows the schedule.”
He was quiet for a moment, then he said, “That is the most Adrian thing you have ever said.”
“It might be the truest thing I have ever said.”
Something moved across his face. It was warm and quiet and not quite a smile, but it was definitely in the neighborhood of one, then he drank his coffee and looked at me over the rim of his mug with those steady blue eyes.
“Will you come back?”
I knew he didn’t mean to bed.
Just—back.
It was the sentence underneath the sentence.
I thought about a parking lot in Ybor where I’d sat with eight pounds of beagle and replayed a two-second moment.
I thought about, “Hey,” sent at 6 a.m. with flour on my hands, because I couldn’t find anything more honest to say.
I thought about driving past a building on a street in South Tampa and finding a name on a mailbox and convincing myself that my pseudo-stalking was for entirely legitimate reasons.
“Saturday,” I said. “Barbacks.”
“I know Saturday,” he said. “That’s not what I’m asking.”
“I know it’s not.” I set my cup in the sink and turned back to him. “Yes, I’ll come back, Brendan.”
He nodded. It was one small nod, the kind that meant he’d received something valuable and was keeping it somewhere careful.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay,” I replied.
Mofongo was still curled into himself in his carrier, still completely unbothered by the hour, a dog of simple needs and excellent sleep hygiene. I picked up my jacket, the carrier, and my keys.
At the door, I turned around. Brendan was leaning in the kitchen doorway with his coffee and his extraordinary hair, which was the kind of thing that made me want to stay—and was exactly why I needed to leave before I did.
“I’ll text you,” I said.
“I know.” He raised his mug in salute and gave me another not-quite smile.
The city at four-thirty was mine the way it was always mine. The streets were empty and orange-lit. The whole world was in that pause before it decided what it was going to be on that particular rotation of the Earth.
I loaded Mofongo into the back seat. He shifted, resettled, and went back to snoring.
Puppy secured, I turned on the radio, because the quiet was too full of thoughts, and I was going to be at the panadería in twenty minutes, and I needed my brain to be on bread, not on blue eyes and extraordinary hair.
The song that came on was not subtle. It had a snappy drum line and a chorus that came back bigger each time.
I turned it up because it matched my feeling, which was large and warm and slightly ridiculous.
I realized, in that moment, that I was completely fine with being all of those things simultaneously.
By the second chorus, I was humming.
By the third, I was singing, full voice, because it was four-thirty in the morning, and the streets were empty, and there was nobody to perform for. On top of that, the song was good, and I had just left a man’s apartment where I had woken up feeling like I was supposed to be there.
My right hand found the steering wheel.
The drum line was doing its thing again, so I helped it.
I thought about bedhead. Specifically, I thought about the section that had flopped sideways, and the hand that had gone up to touch it and changed nothing.
I heard his words, asking me to come back to bed in that gravely, low morning voice.
Then my mind saw the way he had looked at me over his coffee mug with those eyes that were the same at every hour.
The chorus came back.
I cranked it up.
Mofongo made a sound from the back seat.
“Lo siento, papi,” I said in apology.
He went back to sleep.
I drummed on the steering wheel the rest of the way to Ybor, and sang every word I knew, throwing in a few “watermelons” for the words I didn’t. And I grinned at the empty road ahead of me, and let the morning be exactly as good as it was.