Chapter 6 #2
I sat, and Finn brought me a whiskey, neat, without asking what I wanted. Either Benji had shared my drink preference or Finn was the kind of bartender who could read a person’s order from their posture. I suspected the latter.
From the introvert seat, I could see the whole bar.
I saw a young man behind the counter, mixed race with an athletic build and a wide, easy smile. He was hauling crates of clean glasses from the back with ease. Jacks, I catalogued from Benji’s eternal banter.
Near the kitchen window, the tattooed cook was arguing cheerfully with someone about a sauce. A woman with natural hair and a septum piercing was photographing a plate of food with the focused intensity of a professional, which I assumed meant she was the Mia I’d heard so much about.
The cook had to be Rod.
And then there was Benji, always Benji, moving through the bar like he was the current and everyone else was the water, shaping the flow of the room without anyone realizing. He hadn’t seen me yet. He was too deep in it to notice a quiet man in the corner nursing a whiskey and watching.
I didn’t read the book I’d brought (yes, I brought a book because, fuck it, I always brought a book). It stayed in my jacket pocket, untouched, for two hours.
Instead, I watched.
At some point, the cook appeared beside me with two plates and a plastic basket. He was older and solid, with kind eyes.
“Rod,” he said, setting the plate down. He’d brought brisket sliders with some kind of sauce that smelled like it had been developed over years of careful experimentation. “You’re Peter?”
“I am.”
He sat on the stool next to mine, and we ate in silence for a while. I appreciated that more than he probably knew. Rod didn’t seem to need conversation to be comfortable in someone’s company. He just sat there, steady and present, watching the bar with the same quiet attention I was giving it.
“He’s better since you,” Rod said eventually.
I looked at him. “What? Who? What do you mean?”
“You let him be quiet.” Rod took a bite of his own slider and chewed thoughtfully.
His accent was Colombian or Brazilian—no, Argentinian.
I was close. I could feel it. “People don’t do that for him.
They want the show. They expect the show.
He gives them the show because he thinks that’s all he is, but you don’t seem like a man who wants a show. ”
“I’m really not.”
“I know.” Rod stood and collected the plates. “Enjoy the whiskey.”
He went back to the kitchen without another word.
I sat with what he’d said and tried to figure out what to do with it.
His observation implied things about my relationship with Benji that didn’t apply.
There was no relationship. No friendship.
No nothing but two men and a thousand animals sharing a roof.
I wasn’t letting Benji be anything.
I was simply existing in my own apartment, maintaining my own routine, and if Benji got quieter when I was around, that was his business and not something I’d caused or intended or wanted to think about.
I thought about it anyway.
For the rest of the night.
At closing time, the crowd thinned, the music lowered, and the bar took on the intimate, exhausted warmth of a place that had done its job and was winding down.
Benji was wiping the counter with slow, methodical strokes.
Jacks was stacking chairs.
Finn was doing something with the register.
The whole scene had the quality of a family cleaning up after a holiday dinner.
Then Benji looked up and saw me. It was a miracle he hadn’t noticed me in the hours since I’d arrived, but the crowd had kept him busy.
His hands stopped on the counter.
Then his face went through a rapid sequence of expressions. I was fairly sure one was surprise, followed by confusion and something that might have been embarrassment.
Then a smile.
But this wasn’t his performance smile, not the one I’d been watching him deploy all night, bright and calibrated and aimed like a spotlight.
This was smaller and less certain.
It involved his eyes more than his mouth, and it changed the geometry of his face in a way that I noticed and immediately wished I hadn’t.
“Peter?” He came around the bar, still holding the rag. “How long have you been here?”
“A while.” I reached into my pocket and held out his phone. “You left this on the counter.”
He took it and looked at the phone and then looked at me.
“You drove all the way here to bring me my phone?”
“It’s fifteen minutes.”
“You’ve been sitting here for hours . . . to return a phone?”
“Finn gave me whiskey, and Rod gave me sliders. Then Finn gave me more whiskey. It seemed rude to leave.”
He stared at me with that expression I was beginning to associate specifically with moments when I said something he didn’t expect.
“Thank you,” he said.
“It’s just a phone.”
“Yeah.” He was still holding the rag, still standing in the middle of the bar, still looking at me like I was a sentence he hadn’t finished parsing. “It’s just a phone.”
I stood, put on my jacket, and nodded at Finn. He nodded back with that knowing smile that I was starting to find mildly irritating.
“See you at home,” I said.
It was a normal thing to say to someone you live with, a practical statement about shared geography, nothing more.
Benji’s smile shifted again, going smaller and even more real.
“See you at home,” he said.
I drove back to my apartment in silence, replaying Rod’s words like a song I couldn’t get out of my head.
He’s better since you.
I parked, climbed the stairs, and unlocked the door. General Tso greeted me with a yowl of imperial displeasure at my tardiness. Hiro limped over and pressed his head against my knee. Potato, naturally, had not moved.
I hung up my jacket, made tea, and sat at my desk.
When I opened my laptop, the cursor blinked at me from the middle of a paragraph I hadn’t been able to finish for weeks.
The chapter was about David’s last good day, the one where we’d driven to the coast and eaten fish tacos and David had said something about the light on the water that I’d been trying and failing to get right on the page for a month.
I needed to finish the chapter, but finishing it felt like—
I swallowed hard.
It was too much. I just . . . I couldn’t.
My face found my palms. They came away wet when I lifted my gaze to stare at the screen again. Why was this so hard? It was just a chapter. I’d written hundreds, if not thousands, of them.
My heart felt like someone with a merciless grip tried to wring it dry.
I stared at the cursor.
Reluctantly, my hands found the keys.
I typed a word, then deleted it.
I knew what to write, knew how the story went. It was etched into my soul like the lines of some ancient master’s work. Why was it so hard to type? Why did drafting this tale for the world to see feel like a betrayal?
My fingers found my mouse.
I closed the document so it couldn’t mock me further.
Then, for absolutely no discernable reason, I hit “new” in the menu bar.
A blank page appeared.
And for the first time in a very long time, I didn’t write about David.
I wrote a single paragraph about a bar full of noise and a man at its center who moved through it like music, and about a quiet corner where someone had sat and watched and understood, without meaning to, that the performance and the person were not the same thing.
I read it back, saved it, and closed the laptop.
David’s chapter was incomplete.
Still, I’d written.