Chapter 23 #2
“He told me he’s been thinking about kissing me for two months,” I continued, because the dam was breached now and the water was going wherever it wanted.
“Since the night I sat with Hiro. Two months, Jacks. He’s been sitting across from me at that island every morning for two months drinking his coffee and reading his newspaper and thinking about kissing me, and he didn’t say a single word about it until last night.
I need you to understand the level of restraint that implies because I can’t go forty-five seconds without telling you about it. ”
“Different operating systems.” Jacks shrugged.
“He has a completely different relationship with time and information than any human I’ve ever met. He processes things the way a glacier processes a landscape, slowly and thoroughly and by the time you notice something’s changed, the entire geography is different.”
“And you process things—”
“Like a fire alarm. On crack. And it has to pee. Really badly.” I blew out a dramatic sigh. “Yes. I’m aware of the contrast.”
From the kitchen pass-through, came Rod’s voice. “What’s happening out there?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“He got kissed,” Jacks shouted, because Jacks was apparently done protecting my dignity.
A pause from the kitchen.
Then Rod appeared in the pass-through window, his face wearing the expression of a man who has been given information he considers both unsurprising and significant.
“Peter?” Rod said.
“Why does everyone immediately know it’s Peter?”
Jacks crossed his arms and huffed a laugh. “Because you’ve been talking about him for two and a half months and you bought him a forty-five-dollar moisturizer and you know his shower takes twelve minutes. The variable was when, not who.”
“The shower timing is acoustic—”
“Who kissed whom?” Rod asked.
“He kissed me. He came to my door, said he was done saying, ‘Not yet,’ and that he wanted whatever came after. Then he put his hands on my face and kissed me. His hands were shaking, and I am currently not okay.”
Rod nodded once, slowly, the way Rod nodded when a brisket had reached the correct internal temperature. “Good,” he said, and disappeared back into the kitchen.
“That’s it?” I called after him. “Just good?”
“What else is there?” his voice came back. “A man kissed you. That’s good. Everything else is details.”
Mia arrived at noon, three hours before her shift, because Mia had the same sixth sense for my emotional crises that migratory birds have for magnetic north.
She walked through the door, assessed my face from across the room, and was on the bar stool in front of me before I could even begin constructing the fiction that everything was normal.
“Tell me everything,” she said.
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“You just poured tonic water into a glass that already had tonic water in it. Stop quibbling and tell me everything.”
I rolled my eyes and shoved the double tonic aside, then told her everything.
Mia listened with the intensity of a woman receiving intelligence critical to national security.
“He said his hands were shaking?” she said.
“I could feel them . . . against my face. He said he hadn’t done any of it in years, the kissing, the wanting, or the showing up at someone’s door. He said he was out of practice.”
“And then what?”
“And then I said for someone out of practice it was a pretty definitive kiss, and he said he’d had time to prepare, and I asked how long, and he said since the night I sat on his floor with Hiro, which was two months ago, Mia.”
“Two months?”
“Two months of Post-it notes and French press arguments and blanket folding while internally wanting to kiss me. The man has a poker face that should be studied by scientists.”
“Or by the CIA.”
“The CIA would recruit him. He’d be their best operative. He’s been running a covert emotional operation in his own apartment for two months and I had no idea. None. Zero. Nada.”
“You had some idea. You bought him conditioner.”
“The conditioner was a humanitarian intervention—”
“The conditioner was exfoliating foreplay and we both know it.”
I opened my mouth to argue, closed it, and conceded the point with a silence that Mia accepted with the gracious restraint of a woman who had been right about something for weeks and was choosing not to be insufferable about it.
Finn arrived at 2 p.m. for his pre-shift walk-through.
He found me reorganizing the garnish station for the third time, which was not a task that required three iterations but which was keeping my hands busy in a way that prevented them from doing the thing they wanted to do, which was press against my own face in the spots where Peter’s fingers had been.
“You okay?” Finn asked.
“Great. Fucking wonderful. Having a very fucking normal and most fucking productive day.”
Finn looked at Jacks.
Jacks made a small gesture that communicated, in the shorthand they’d developed over months of working together, the essential facts of the situation.
“Ah,” Finn said. “Peter.”
“Why does everyone—”
“About time,” Finn said, and blew past me to check the beer lines.
Dante arrived at 4 p.m. for the evening shift, book in hand, and took his position by the door with the calm, observational focus that made him excellent at his job.
He watched me work for a quarter hour, during which I dropped a shaker, overpoured two drinks, and had to remake a Rescue Sour because I’d forgotten the honey, which was an ingredient I’d been making this drink with for weeks.
“You’re off tonight,” Dante said during a lull, the time he wandered to the bar for a Coke or ice water because he never drank while on duty.
“I’m fine.”
“You put simple syrup in that man’s beer.”
I looked down.
I had, in fact, added simple syrup to a pint of lager. The customer hadn’t noticed yet, but he would.
“I’m having an unusual day,” I said.
Dante nodded. “Something good, though.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because you keep smiling when you think no one’s looking. The smile isn’t the one you use for customers. It’s the other one.”
“I don’t have two smiles.”
“You have about seven. The one you’ve been doing today is the one I’ve only seen once before, at the adoption event, when Peter told that family they could take the mutt home.”
I stared at him.
Dante returned my stare with the implacable calm of a man who read Tolstoy for fun.
“You’re very observant for someone who’s been here three weeks,” I said.
“I read a lot. Reading teaches you to pay attention to what’s on the page and what’s between the lines.” He paused. “The stuff between the lines is usually more interesting.”
Mark came in at 5 p.m., settled into his corner booth with his laptop, and didn’t look up for forty-five minutes.
When he finally surfaced to check on the floor, he glanced at me, glanced at the garnish station (reorganized for the fourth time), glanced at the pint glass I’d just overfilled, and said, “What’s wrong with you tonight? ”
“Nothing. Seasonal allergies.”
“It’s not allergy season.”
“I have unusual allergies. They’re anti-seasonal. They’re triggered by global warming and alterations in airplane navigation patterns and . . . other environmental factors.”
“You’re distracted.”
“I’m focused. I’m extremely focused. I’m focused on multiple things simultaneously, which might create the appearance of distraction but is actually a higher-order cognitive state.”
Mark looked at Jacks.
“Peter kissed him,” Jacks said, because apparently my personal life was now a matter of public record, and Jacks had been appointed the official spokesperson.
Mark blinked.
His face did the calculation thing it did when new data entered his field, the rapid internal sorting of information into relevant categories and probable outcomes.
“That explains the simple syrup in the lager,” he said, and went back to his laptop.
How the hell did he know about that? I did that before he’d even come in.
The shift continued.
I made drinks.
I smiled at customers.
I performed the version of myself that the bar required, and the version held together, mostly, except for the moments between moments, the quiet seconds when no one was ordering and no one was watching and my brain, freed of its professional obligations, catapulted me back to the foster room and Peter’s face in the lamplight and the sound he’d made when he pulled back, that quiet “oh” that contained more than any word I’d ever heard him say.
At 9 p.m., Jacks intercepted me during a lull.
“You’re going to wear a hole in that counter,” he said.
I looked down. I’d been wiping the same section of bar for seven minutes, my hand moving in slow circles while my brain operated somewhere near apartment 4B.
“I’m cleaning.”
“You’re processing.”
“I’m cleaning while processing. It’s called multitasking.”
Jacks leaned against the back bar and crossed his arms. “What time are you talking to him?”
“After the shift. The 3 a.m. kitchen thing we do.”
“You know what you want to say?”
“I know what I want to say. I just don’t know how to say it without it sounding like either too much or not enough.”
“Say it the way it sounds in your head.”
“In my head, it sounds like, ‘Please don’t stop. Please keep going. Please be real. Please don’t be something I imagined on the floor of the foster room while a hairless cat judged me.’ That’s what it sounds like in my head, Jacks.”
“Then say that.”
“I can’t say that. That’s unhinged. That’s emotionally feral.”
“Peter came to your door and told you his brain was in the kitchen holding a blanket. That’s not exactly measured and composed.”
“That’s different. That’s Peter unhinged, which looks like a man standing in a doorway speaking in complete sentences about his writing process. Benji unhinged looks like a cartoon version of a roadrunner being chased by an angry, anvil-wielding coyote.”
“Taz never chased Buggs. You’re mixing up your cartoons.”
“Did you just . . . correct my Saturday morning childhood recollection?”