18. Adrian
Adrian
Of course, I smiled at exactly the wrong moment.
In my defense, Jacks had just said something about a new beer tap situation.
It wasn’t even funny, but somewhere between “the regulator valve” and “the third time this month” my brain had drifted to a man with bedhead and a very gravely morning voice.
The smile had arrived before I could do anything to stop it.
Jacks stopped talking.
Benji froze.
Even Finn glanced up from his clipboard.
Jacks looked me up and down like a copier scanning paper. He landed on my smile.
“What?” I asked.
It sounded defensive even to my own ears.
“Nothing,” he said, but the way he said it was the way people said “nothing” when they meant something and were deciding how to deploy it.
I went back to my pre-shift stretch and ignored him. This worked for approximately four minutes.
Benji left for the back, returning a moment later with a case of Fanta.
Finn had restocked on Thursday, and Benji always brought it back personally, as though the Fanta required an escort.
Honestly, I appreciated this diligence. He set the case on the bar, looked at me, and stopped. He tilted his head. I kept stretching.
“Adrian,” he said.
“Benji,” I answered.
“You’re glowing.”
“I’m warm. It’s Florida.”
“You’re in an air-conditioned bar with no people for body heat.”
I finished one stretch and began another. “I walked from the car.”
“It’s sixty-eight degrees outside.” He removed a bottle from the case, popped the cap, and leaned against the bar. “You got laid.”
“Benji—”
“You totally got laid.” He said it the way he said things when he wasn’t taking alternate submissions. “I know your face in every configuration, and that is the ‘I got laid’ configuration. It’s been a long time, but I remember it. It’s very . . . expressive.”
“My face is not a configuration.”
“It is. It’s the one where you’re loose in the shoulders, and you keep almost-smiling at nothing, and your whole body has the energy of someone who has recently been—”
“Benji.”
He held up both hands. “I’m just describing what I observe.”
Jacks, who had been listening to all of this from three feet away with the focused attention he usually reserved for sports scores, put down the glass he was polishing and said, in the earnest, considered tone he brought to most things, “I don’t know.
I think he just got a really good kiss, maybe with lots of tongue, and maybe a little third base feel.
Third base is cool. It’s a triple, after all. ”
Benji and I both turned toward him, both of our mouths hanging open.
“What?” he said. “He looks happy, not smug. Smug is ‘got laid.’ Happy is ‘something good happened,’ and he’s still thinking about it.” He picked up his glass again. “That’s a kiss face. Or maybe a hug. A really good hug. Maybe a finger—”
“Jacks!” Benji and I said in unison.
Finn’s laugher bounced around the bar, as though some drunk leprechaun had just found his pot of gold.
Benji gathered himself and said to Jacks, “How are you like this?”
“Like what?” Jacks asked, perplexity marring his adorable face.
“Like a golden retriever who just took a philosophy class.”
Jacks considered this. “Was that a compliment?”
“It was,” I said, silencing whatever Benji might’ve said. “It definitely was.”
“So which is it?” Benji said, turning back to me. “Jacks’s version or my version?”
“Neither,” I said. “Can we not do this?”
“We cannot not do this, Adrian Voss,” Benji said.
“This is what we do. This is our function as a bar family. We notice things, and we interrogate them lovingly and with the vigor of an old British lady in a cozy mystery, you know, the one with a cat who might smoke cigars filled with pot when no one’s looking. ”
“Definitely with cats,” Finn finally contributed.
“Lots of cats,” Jacks agreed, curls bobbing with his head.
I sighed. “There’s nothing to interrogate.”
“You’ve been humming since you walked in. Adrian, you don’t hum. In two years, I have never once heard you hum. You sing—on the bar, for money, when the song earns it. You even sing in the car when you think I can’t hear you. You do not hum.”
I had been humming. I knew I had been humming. I hadn’t realized anyone else knew I had been humming.
“Maybe I’m branching out,” I said. “Call it professional growth. Make it a new revenue stream for the bar. Humming for dollars. Mark will love it.”
“A humming revenue stream,” Jacks repeated, delighted, and slipped one glass in a slot and began polishing another. “I’d subscribe.”
“Professional growth,” Benji spat. “You don’t hum during warmup like a man whose brain is somewhere very pleasant. And yet—here we are.”
“Or whose ass is recovering from a solid pounding,” Finn contributed again.
“My brain is here,” I said. “And my ass has nothing to recover from, thank you very much.”
“Your brain is with the vet,” Benji said. “Which is where your ass likely was.”
My face did a thing. I felt it do the thing, and couldn’t stop it fast enough, which was the most embarrassing thing that had happened to me in recent memory—and I once had my backside grabbed by a bride in front of her entire bridal party.
“There it is,” Benji said.
“There what is?” I said to the floor, because looking at Benji directly was no longer an option.
“The blush.”
“I’m not blushing.”
“Adrian, mi amor, you are deeply, magnificently, brighter than the island sun, blushing.”
“I’m warm. I’m warming up. It’s a warmth thing, not a blush thing.”
“It’s sixty-eight degrees—”
“I heard you the first time.”
Jacks set down his second glass and watched this with the bright, invested attention of someone watching a very good game. “So it was the vet.”
“Fine! I went to the vet’s place,” I said. “He grilled. We had lunch. It was very normal.”
“A lunch that has you glowing and humming and blushing?” Benji asked rhetorically.
“People have lunches. I work out; therefore, I eat. Lunch is a meal. It’s a very important meal, right up there with breakfast.”
“Oh, so you had breakfast with him, too?” He crossed his arms. “Did Mofongo like him?”
This was a tactical shift. I recognized it for what it was and answered anyway, because I was apparently incapable of not answering Benji’s questions. “Puck sat on Mofongo.”
Benji’s face transformed completely, then he burst out laughing. “Puck sat on the dog.”
“He decided Mofongo was his. He just mounted him like a horse.”
“That’s probably Puck’s highest compliment,” Benji said. “If Puck sat on Mofongo—” He stopped, then started again. “Adrian, Puck approved of your dog. That’s it. That’s the whole story. You’re done. You’re gone. It’s over for you.”
“It’s not—”
“Done. Gone. Over.”
Jacks nodded sagely.
I looked to Finn for support.
He merely shrugged, the fucking leprechaun.
Then Jacks and Benji began chanting, “Done. Gone. Over. Done. Gone. Over. Done. Gone. Over.”
I looked at the two of them, Benji triumphant, Jacks exuberant, both of them chanting at me with the warm, invested, completely invasive attention of people who considered my romantic life a team sport.
“Can we please talk about something else? And not chant?”
“Absolutely,” Benji said. “After you tell me one thing.”
“What?”
“Did you stay?”
I looked at the bar surface. Then I looked at my Fanta. Then I looked at the ceiling.
“Adrian?” Finn asked, using his “I’m the boss; you must answer me” tone.
“I had to leave at four,” I said. “For bread.”
The sound Benji made was small and high and completely undignified for a grown man, but so utterly Benji.
“For bread?” Finn repeated.
“The bread doesn’t make itself,” I said weakly.
“You left a—” Benji stopped. He made the squealing sound again. “You left a man to go make bread?”
And then he started laughing again.
Jacks laughed, too, though I wasn’t sure he knew why he was laughing.
Finn just shook his head and smiled.
“I left a man to do my job, which is what professionals do.”
Benji laughed louder, and then—because Benji was a clown the way a surgeon is a person who owns knives, which is to say the clowning was real but it was not the whole toolkit—he stopped laughing, looked at me a second longer than was necessary, allowing something shrewd and fond to move behind his eyes.
“Or,” he said, lightly, “you left before he could watch you want to stay, which is an entirely different loaf of bread.”
The bar got briefly, unhelpfully very quiet.
I opened my mouth to inform him that my leaving was, in fact, entirely about bread, that bread was a serious commercial enterprise with a 4 a.m. start time and nutritional significance to the greater West Tampa community.
Benji watched me not say any of it, because Benji had known me for years and had, on more than one closing shift, poured me a Fanta and let me not-talk about my mother until I talked about my mother.
“There he is,” Benji said softly. “Mi amor, you’re allowed to stay for the part after the humpty dumpty. That’s the whole point of the humpty dumpty, to get to snuggle afterward.”
I looked at him. He looked at me. For one honest second, it was not a bit at all. Then he clapped his hands together like a man concluding a very productive meeting. “Anyway. Was there or was there not a tongue?”
“Yes, tongue!” Jacks shouted for no apparent reason.
“Tongue in the ass?” Finn, the fucking leprechaun, added.
“I hate you all,” I said, and meant the opposite, and they knew it, because that was my Barbacks family’s actual superpower. Underneath the asshole-clairvoyance and Benji’s napkins and Jacks’s floppy curls and Finn’s smart-ass smirk, they always knew—and they loved me anyway.
“And how was the vet when you left?” Benji asked through snorts.
I thought about bedhead and a low morning voice and a coffee mug and eyes that were steady at every hour. My face did the thing again.
“I really, really hate all of you,” I said.
“No you don’t,” Jacks said cheerfully.
“No,” I agreed. “I don’t, but I want to.”
Finn’s office door opened, and Mark emerged.
Finally, an adult, I thought.
Mark came out with his laptop folded under one arm and his reading glasses pushed up on his head and the general energy of a man transitioning from numbers to management, which was how he spent most Mondays.
He looked at me, then at Benji, then at Jacks.
When he looked at Finn, some mental telepathy thing happened, and a smile curled across both of their faces.
“What did I miss?” Mark asked.
“Adrian got laid,” Benji said.
“Adrian got a really good kiss,” Jacks said simultaneously.
“Possibly a finger,” Finn added.
“It was more than a kiss,” Benji said.
“Less than a finger,” Jacks said.
“At least to the knuckle,” Finn said.
“Both of those things are true,” I said in total surrender, then immediately looked at the ceiling because I had not intended to admit anything.
“The vet?” Mark asked after everyone recovered from the sudden admission.
“How does everyone know about the vet?” I asked, exasperated.
“Benji,” Finn said.
“Benji tells everyone everything,” Jacks confirmed with a floppy-headed nod.
“I relay relevant information,” Benji said. “It’s a public service.”
Mark looked at me for another moment with the assessing calm of a man who ran a business and also, underneath that, genuinely cared about the people who ran it with him.
“Good,” he said simply. Then he checked his watch and went back to being a boss. “Jacks, the new tap needs looking at before the crowd comes in.”
“Already on it,” Jacks said.
“Benji, the well inventory from last week is still—”
“Done this morning,” Benji said.
“Adrian.” His expression softened. “Have a good set tonight.”
“Always,” I said.
Orders issued, he turned and went back to the office.
I stood behind the bar, looked at my orange Fanta, and thought about how there were people in the world—the ones who showed up and stayed—who could embarrass you completely and love you genuinely in the same breath, and how that was one of the better things about being alive.
“For the record,” Benji said, appearing at my elbow with his ever-present cocktail napkin, “I’m naming a drink after this.”
“You are not naming a drink after this.”
“The Mofongo Sunrise,” he said. “Or possibly The Vet’s Orders.”
“Benji.”
“The Spiced Catalyst is already taken. I need options.”
“Benji.” My protest came out as more of a plea.
“I’m workshopping,” he said as he went back to his bottles.
I picked up my Fanta, took a long sip, and stood in the bar that was home in the way few places ever were. I let the warmth of it sit in my chest alongside everything else that had recently taken up residence, which was, at the moment, quite a lot.
It was, all things considered, a very good Monday.