Chapter 29 #2
He was mid-twenties, maybe twenty-six, and Puerto Rican, if my read on his accent was accurate. His skin bore the deep, rich brown of the islands. His thick black hair was longer on top and shaved close on the sides.
And his face . . .
Damn, his face belonged on a romance novel cover.
He wore a plain white T-shirt, jeans, and work boots, and moved through the bar with the easy, unhurried confidence of a person who was comfortable in his body and didn’t need to prove it.
He was also carrying a bakery box.
“I brought pastelillos,” he said, setting the box on the nearest booth. “From my abuela. She makes them on Tuesdays. If you’re going to watch me dance, you should at least eat while you do it.”
Finn looked at the bakery box, looked at the man, then looked at his clipboard.
“Adrian Voss?” Finn said.
“That’s me.”
“You’re late.”
“I’m late because my abuela called to tell me she made pastelillos.
She told me I needed to pick them up before I came here, because she saw the listing online and she wanted the people who are hiring me to try her food.
She said she believes that feeding people is a form of negotiation. She’s not wrong.”
Finn opened his mouth, and I watched competing impulses play across his face. It was comical to see his usual operational rigidity war with the pragmatic recognition that a man who brought his grandmother’s pastries to a job audition was, at minimum, intriguing.
“The audition is on the bar,” Finn said. “Three minutes. Show us what you’d bring to a Saturday night.”
Adrian nodded, reached for the hem of his T-shirt, then paused.
“Music?” he asked.
Finn blinked.
None of the other candidates that I’d seen had asked for music.
They’d all danced in silence, performing to the ambient quiet of an empty bar. In retrospect, that was an absurd audition condition that Finn had not thought to address, because Finn sometimes forgot that entertainment involved atmosphere.
“Jacks,” Finn said. “Can you put something on?”
Jacks, who’d been watching Adrian with the same dazed expression he’d worn for every audition, pulled out his phone and connected to the bar’s Bluetooth. “Any preference?”
“Something with a beat. Not EDM. Something you can feel in your chest.”
Jacks scrolled, then selected. A low, bass-heavy R&B track filled the bar, somewhere between slow and fast that required a listener’s body to make a decision about how it wanted to respond.
Adrian pulled off his shirt.
I dropped a lime.
Then I dropped my paring knife.
The man was built in a way that defied the usual categories.
He wasn’t gym-built, with the inflated, oversculpted proportions that looked impressive coated in baby oil or in mirrors.
His was built from use rather than vanity, the kind of body that came from physical labor.
Dancing, and the particular genetic generosity that distributed muscle evenly and without excess, had made his shoulders broad and his waist narrow.
His skin was smooth and deep and marked with exactly one tattoo, a line of script along his left rib cage in a font too small to read from where I was standing but that I was suddenly very motivated to get closer to.
He stepped onto the bar stool.
Then onto the bar.
And the bar changed.
I’d seen good dancers. I’d been a good dancer, before the knee, before Tampa, and before the half second that Peter had named. I knew what technical skill looked like and what performance looked like. I also knew what the rare combination of both looked like when it showed up in a single body.
Adrian Voss didn’t dance with that rare combination.
He was that rare combination.
He didn’t dance on the bar.
He danced with it, using the surface and the edges and the limited space as elements of the performance rather than constraints on it.
His hips found the beat with the kind of locked-in precision that you can’t teach, the instinctive connection between music and muscle that separates people who dance from people who are dancers.
His body rolled and isolated and articulated with a control and a looseness that made the control invisible.
What you saw wasn’t a man executing choreography, but a man who had become the music and was letting his body be the instrument it played through.
He smiled while he danced.
But it didn’t look like a performance smile or the look-at-me grin that most go-go dancers deployed as part of their toolkit.
It looked like a real smile, warm and unhurried, the smile of a person who was doing something he loved and who wanted you to enjoy watching him do it.
His smile said, “I’m having fun. Come have fun with me. ”
It was an invitation, not a display.
Jacks had stopped pretending to polish glasses.
Jacks had stopped pretending to do anything.
He was standing behind the bar with his hands at his sides, mouth slightly open, watching Adrian Voss dance three feet above him with an expression that I’d never seen on Jacks’s face before. It was an expression of pure, unmediated attention that had nothing professional in it whatsoever.
I elbowed him.
He didn’t react.
I elbowed him harder.
“What,” he said, without looking at me.
“You’re gawking.”
“I’m observing the audition.”
“You look like a golden retriever watching a tennis ball.”
“I’m evaluating his tennis balls.”
I snorted. “You’re practically licking his Modelo, Jacks, and we already decided that would not be allowed in Barbacks.”
He closed his mouth, picked up a glass, and resumed polishing.
Adrian finished, the music faded, and he looked down at Finn with the confidence of a man who knew exactly how good he was and didn’t need anyone to confirm it.
“Three minutes,” he said. “Want more?”
Finn was staring at his clipboard. He had not written anything on it. The clipboard was blank, which was unprecedented because Finn documented everything.
Finn wrote notes on notes.
But he had no notes on Adrian or his audition.
“No,” Finn said. “That was sufficient.”
Adrian jumped down from the bar, landed cleanly, then pulled on his shorts and shirt.
“The pastelillos are beef and cheese,” he said, nodding toward the bakery box. “My abuela says if you don’t eat them while they’re warm, you’re disrespecting her, and she will know. Trust me, she always knows.”
He sat down across from Finn in the booth. The audition morphed into a conversation. The conversation revealed the rest of Adrian Voss.
He was twenty-six, born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, but raised in West Tampa by his grandmother after his mother moved back to the island when he was eight.
He studied culinary arts at HCC for two years before realizing he didn’t want to cook in someone else’s kitchen.
Currently, he worked mornings at a panadería owned by his grandmother’s friend, making bread and pastries from 4 a.m. to noon, which left his evenings free for what he actually loved, which was performing.
“I’ve been go-go dancing since I was twenty-one,” he told Finn.
“Mostly in clubs here in Ybor, some places in St. Pete, and a few private events. I’m good because I love it, not because I need it to be something else.
Some guys dance because they’re waiting for a modeling career or an acting break.
I dance because dancing is the thing. Dancing is the point. ”
I felt something move in my chest when he said that.
Dancing is the point.
I’d said something close to this once to my mother, years ago.
Dancing is the point.
It isn’t the applause or the career or the thing it leads to. The movement itself is everything. It’s the body in conversation with music and the brief, beautiful fact of being alive in a way that requires every part of you at once.
Adrian said it the way I’d said it, with the conviction of a guy who’d found the thing he was built for and wasn’t going to apologize for molding his life around it.
“What’s your availability?” Finn asked.
“Evenings and weekends. I’m done at the bakery by noon, so I can be wherever you need me by four.”
“We’re launching themed nights on Saturdays to start, potentially expanding to Fridays.
Lightning games and Horny Rivals watch parties kill for us, but those seasons only last until they end.
The dancer will be a key part of the atmosphere for these new theme nights.
He should help elevate the energy and deepen crowd engagement, but tastefully.
We’re a sports bar, not a club. The vibe here is—”
“Warm,” Adrian said. “I noticed when I walked in. This place has a warmth to it that most bars fake with lighting. You guys have it in the walls.”
Finn cocked his head, and I watched his face do something it rarely did, which was register surprise.
Finn and Mark had built Barbacks from the ground up.
The warmth Adrian had identified was the thing Finn had worked hardest to create.
It was also the thing he was most protective of.
Hearing a stranger name it in his first five minutes in the building was, for Finn, the equivalent of a candidate correctly answering the one interview question that wasn’t on the clipboard.
“When can you start?” Finn asked.
“Saturday?”
“Saturday works.”
They shook hands. Adrian stood, stretched with the physicality of a man whose body was his primary tool, and walked toward the bar where Jacks and I were standing.
“Thanks for the music,” he told Jacks. “Good pick. Most people go EDM for auditions. That R&B was better. I could feel it in my chest.”
“Good luck Saturday,” Jacks said.
Adrian turned to me. Up close, the tattoo on his rib cage was visible where his shirt had ridden up slightly, a line of script in a font that I could now read.
Lo bailado nadie me lo quita.
What I’ve danced, no one can take from me.
I felt the sentence land in the part of me that still reached for the studio on Kennedy Boulevard, the part that still felt the half second between wanting to move and allowing myself to move.