Chapter 25
Benji
I had absolutely no intention of telling anyone about any of it.
“I’m not glowing. I’m flushed. It’s warm outside. It’s Florida.”
“You’re glowing like a bonfire and carrying a stuffed animal.”
I looked down at the manatee, which I had brought into the bar because I’d forgotten it was in my hand. That was a testament to my current mental state, because the manatee was approximately twelve inches long and bright gray and not the kind of thing a person carried into his workplace.
“His name is Biscuit, like a cookie, not a scone. The distinction matters,” I said as I set him on the back bar beside the speed gun.
“You named a stuffed animal?”
“He’s named after a real manatee, a real manatee I touched, Jacks, with my hands.
He was swimming around in a private rehabilitation room that the public doesn’t have access to because Peter called his veterinary surgeon colleague at the zoo and arranged a personal backstage tour as our first date. ”
So much for not telling anyone.
Verbal diarrhea is real, people. Thoughts and prayers for a cure.
Jacks set down the glass he was polishing and gave me his full attention. It was the quiet, steady focus that meant he’d cleared his internal schedule for however long this was going to take.
“Peter took you to the zoo?” he asked.
“Peter took me to the back end of the zoo. He has a guy there, a Dr. Broadhurst. He’s head of veterinary services or something.
They’ve worked together for years. Did you know that Peter once spent fourteen hours operating on a baby giraffe in their surgical suite?
He did. The mother giraffe recognized him today, Jacks.
She walked past the food and came straight to him and put her face against his chest because she remembered him from when he fixed her daughter. ”
“That’s . . . remarkable.”
“Remarkable doesn’t begin to cover it. Peter had an itinerary written on a Post-it note.
He’d timed everything, including my lateness, which he’s apparently been tracking.
He referred to it as a ‘planning input.’ He even built an eleven-minute buffer into the schedule because he knows I’m never ready on time. ”
Jacks crossed his arms and leaned against the counter by the cash register. “Were you on time?”
“I was eight minutes late, which he informed me was three minutes ahead of my historical average. Then he drove us to a staff parking lot and used an access card and walked me into the back end of a zoo like it was a completely normal Saturday morning activity.”
Finn emerged from the office, caught the tail end of this, and leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed, exactly mirroring Jacks. He wore the expression of a man who knew he was about to hear something he’d been expecting.
“Zoo date?” Finn said.
“How did you know?”
“Peter texted me this morning asking if you had any animal allergies he might not know about. I told him you were allergic to cats when you were twelve but grew out of it. He said, ‘Noted,’ and nothing else. It was a very Peter exchange.”
Without thinking, I began a recitation of the incredible things that had happened that day.
“He texted Finn about my allergies. He did recon on my medical history for a zoo date. He planned our first date with the operational rigor of a military campaign. The result was the most romantic morning of my entire life. I need both of you to understand that when I say romantic, I mean he explained potassium supplementation in elephant diets, and I found it attractive, hot even. That’s where I am.
Mammal metabolism excites me. That’s my situation. Please send help.”
“Your situation sounds good,” Jacks said through a smothered laugh.
Finn covered his own mouth with a hand, though his fucking Irish eyes glittered in the light of the neon sign hanging next to where he stood.
“My situation is incredible, Jacks.” I beamed.
“My situation involves a man who drove me to a zoo and introduced me to his colleague and held a giraffe’s face and then held my hand at a café table in front of families and a man in a flamingo costume.
It was the first time he’d touched someone in public since David, and he did it like it was nothing.
“Except . . . it wasn’t nothing. It was everything. I’m telling you this at work because I physically can’t contain it.”
Finn and Jacks exchanged a look. The look contained an entire conversation I wasn’t privy to.
The conclusion was apparently mutual satisfaction, because Finn nodded once and Jacks smiled his real smile and neither of them said anything else about it, which was the Barbacks way of saying, “We’re happy for you and we’re done talking about it until you need us again. ”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m done. I’m professional now. I’m behind the bar making drinks.”
“There’s no one here to make drinks for,” Finn said, glancing at the empty room.
He was right. The bar was quiet, but not the slow-Tuesday quiet, which was expected and manageable, but a painfully slow-Saturday quiet, which was unusual and slightly concerning.
By 4 p.m. on a Saturday, we typically had at least a dozen people scattered across the bar stools and booths.
They were the early crowd that built the foundation for the evening rush.
Today we had three customers, one of whom was already closing out his tab.
“Boat show,” Rod said from the kitchen pass-through. “Down in Sarasota. Runs all weekend and pulls half the bay area south.”
“The boat show steals our Saturday crowd?” I said.
“The boat show steals everyone’s Saturday crowd,” Finn said. “It’s the biggest marine event on the Gulf Coast. Every bar and restaurant between here and St. Pete is going to feel it.”
By 6 p.m., the situation had not improved.
We had seven customers, which was approximately forty fewer than a normal Saturday at that hour.
Dante was at the door reading what appeared to be Dostoyevsky (the author, not the dog).
The lack of foot traffic had given him an uninterrupted reading experience that he seemed to be enjoying thoroughly, which was good for Dante’s literary progress and bad for Barbacks’s bank account.
Mark appeared at 7 p.m., assessed the room in three seconds, opened his laptop, and began running numbers. “We’re down sixty-eight percent from last Saturday,” he said.
“Boat show,” Finn, Rod, Jacks, and I said simultaneously. Dante didn’t look up from his book, but he grunted in agreement.
“I know it’s the boat show. I’m quantifying the impact.” He typed for another minute. “If the trend holds, tonight’s revenue will be our lowest Saturday since the week after Hurricane Milton.”
“We’re comparing tonight’s traffic to a hurricane?” I said to Jacks. “That’s how slow it is.”
By 8 p.m., the bar had achieved a stillness that felt almost “bibliological.” In response to our blank expressions, he explained that the word meant “too much like a damned library.” Finn declared it not a word and therefore irrelevant to a proper examination of the evening’s success.
Jacks and I shrugged and pretended not to listen to our bar parents bicker over made-up words.
Two couples sat at separate booths, nursing drinks with the unhurried pace of people who had nowhere else to be.
A regular named Dale sat at the far end of the bar.
Dale came every Saturday without exception and had apparently not received the memo about the boat show.
Jacks suggested he might have received it and decided that his stool at Barbacks was more important than marine commerce.
Finn concurred.
Mark’s attention remained fixed on his spreadsheets.
I cleaned every surface twice, then I reorganized the garnish station .
. . again. With Jacks’s help, I restocked the well, rotated the beer taps, and wiped down the bottles on the back bar with an attention to detail that would have impressed Peter.
He would have also approved of the label-forward alignment I achieved.
“Benji,” Finn said.
I looked up from the section of bar I’d been wiping for what was probably an unreasonable length of time. Finn was standing at the register with his keys in his hand and the expression of a man who had done the math and arrived at a merciful conclusion.
“Go home,” he said.
“What?”
“You and Jacks, go home. It’s nine o’clock. We’ve got Dale and one couple left. It’s not going to get any busier. Rod and I can close up tonight.”
“You’re sending us home early on a Saturday,” I repeated for clarity—because this had never happened.
“I’m sending you home early on a Saturday that’s operating at the capacity of a slow Tuesday. There’s no reason for two bartenders and a barback to stand behind an empty bar watching Dale drink Maker’s Mark, a drink that doesn’t even involve mixing anything.”
“I’m fine staying. I can restock the—”
“Benji, you’ve restocked the well twice, cleaned the bar four times, and reorganized the garnish station into what I believe is alphabetical order. I didn’t even know that was possible for garnishes. Go home.”
Jacks was already untying his apron.
“You’re sure?” I asked Finn.
“I’m sure. Enjoy your night.” He paused. “Say hi to Peter.”
I untied my apron, hung it on the hook, and retrieved Biscuit the manatee from beside the speed gun, because I was not leaving him overnight in a bar like some kind of abandoned stuffed animal orphan.
“Good night, Dale,” I called to the end of the bar.
Dale raised his glass without turning around, which was Dale’s version of a standing ovation.
The moment my car door slammed shut, I texted Peter.
Me: Finn sent me home. Bar’s dead. Boat show in Sarasota stole everyone. I’m on my way.
His response came in four seconds. Four seconds. Peter, who typically responded to texts with the speed of one drafting the Magna Carta, replied in four seconds.
DrPostIt: Good. Door’s unlocked.
I stared at the message. I’d given him the nickname DrPostIt after our first refrigerator exchange. It seemed to fit, and it made me smile.
Looking past the name, I dissected his message. There were two sentences. Two impossibly short sentences with no elaboration, no “I’m working on the manuscript” or “I’ll put the kettle on” or any of the contextual information that Peter usually provided.
Something about his message made the tiny hairs on my neck leap to attention.
The door was, indeed, unlocked.
Peter had left it unlocked for me, on purpose, in advance of my arrival.
I opened the door, stepped inside, and closed it behind me.
The apartment was dim.
The stove light was on, casting its warm amber glow across the kitchen and into the living room.
Hiro was asleep on his bed in the corner.
General Tso was on the refrigerator, one eye open, his tail motionless for once.
Potato snored softly from his secondary position on the dog bed beside Hiro, which meant someone had moved him off his primary position, the couch, which meant someone had wanted the couch cleared.
My eyes drifted from the dog bed to the couch.
Peter was on the couch.
But that wasn’t what stopped me.
What fixed me in place, what turned my legs to concrete and my brain to static and my breath to something that forgot how to complete its own cycle, was that Peter was stretched across the couch with exactly the amount of clothing he’d popped out of his mama wearing.
No pajamas. No T-shirt. No careful layers between himself and the world.
Just Peter, all of him, sprawled across the couch wearing nothing but stove light and a stillness that was not casual but chosen.
The stove light caught the planes of him, the long lines, the surgeon’s hands resting on his flat stomach, the rise and fall of his breathing, which was controlled but not calm.
I could see the effort in that control, the discipline it was taking to lie there and wait and let me look and not reach for a blanket or a bathrobe or some kind of barrier to hide behind.
I stood in the doorway holding a stuffed manatee and forgot every word in every language I’d ever known.
“Hey,” Peter said.
His voice was low and steady and carried, underneath the steadiness, something electric.
“Hey,” I said, and my voice was not steady at all.