Benji turns his face toward me. His eyes are open, lips parted and swollen. He leans down and kisses me — deep and lingering.
After a long moment, he pulls back with a soft smile. He climbs off me and pads toward the bathroom, giving me a view of his lean, naked body. The bathroom faucet runs for a minute before he returns with a warm, damp washcloth.
Without a word, he climbs back onto the bed and cleans me up. The cloth is soothing against my skin as he wipes away the cum from my chest and stomach with careful, tender strokes. His touch is gentle, almost reverent. “There,”he murmurs, pressing one last soft kiss to my shoulder. “All clean.”
“Stay with me,” I say.
“Of course.”
“No. I don’t mean tonight. I mean stay. Here in this town with me. Tex said there’s room and he’s right. There’s room. I want to be the place you come home to.”
He goes still against me. His breathing stops for one beat, then two. Then he lifts his head and looks at me in the dark.
“Are you asking me to move here?”
“I’m asking you to think about it. Maybe not tonight or tomorrow. But think about it. Because I’m lying in this bed and your head is on my chest. I feel your heartbeat against my ribs and I don’t want this to be a weekend. I want this to be every night.”
He doesn’t answer right away. He puts his head back on my chest and his hand moves from my stomach to my hip and rests there, his thumb tracing a slow circle on the bone.
“I’ll think about it,” he says. “But for the record, I started thinking about it the day Tex showed me the blueprint and said there’s room for you here too.”
“Tex told you that? When?”
“The day I came to see you in Jacksonville. I was standing on the unfinished floor of this room with the sawdust in the air and the blueprint on the wall. And he said that if I decided to give you a chance, there’s room for me here too.Words that rewired my entire life. And now I’m lying here and you’re asking me to stay. So yes, Mickey. I’ll think about it. But you should know that my thinking about it started a long time ago.”
I press my lips to the top of his head. His hair smells like coconut shampoo and salt air. The combination shouldn’t work but it does, the way everything about Benji shouldn’t work but does.
Downstairs, the jukebox finally goes quiet. The bar is closing. I hear Tex’s heavy footsteps moving across the floor below us, the scrape of barstools being pushed in, the clatter of Sheila doing final wipe-down. The sounds of a building settling into the end of its night.
Benji’s weight is against my side. He falls asleep first. His breathing deepens and his hand goes slack on my hip. The weight of him gets heavier, sinking into me, trusting me.
One day, I’m going to walk again.
It might not be soon.
But it’ll happen.
Chapter 33: Benji
Tex cooks lunch like a man preparing for a natural disaster. There are five adults, and the amount of food coming off the grill and out of the kitchen could feed a football team and their families and possibly the referees.
Brisket sliced thick from the morning smoke. Pulled pork from yesterday’s batch, reheated with a splash of vinegar. Smoked sausage links that split and hiss on the flat top. Coleslaw in a bowl the size of a birdbath. Baked beans with burnt ends stirred in because Tex believes beans without meat are “a side dish in crisis.” Cornbread in a cast iron skillet. Sweet tea in a gallon jug. And a plate of sliced tomatoes from a garden he grows beside the parking lot and has never once mentioned to me until this morning when he said, casually, “I grow tomatoes out back” as if every biker bar owner in Florida tends a vegetable patch between smoke sessions.
“Tex,” I say, staring at the spread being assembled on the deck table. “There are five of us.”
“Correct.”
“This is enough food for thirty.”
“This is lunch. Lunch at my bar is not a suggestion. Lunch at my bar is an event. My daddy always said if you’re going to feed people, feed them like you mean it. Don’t put out a little plate of this and a little bowl of that and call it a meal. Put out the whole spread. Let people see what you’ve got. Food is how you tell people you love them without having to say the words, and I am a man with a lot of love and a very large smoker.”
The deck is beautiful in the afternoon. The second-floor view puts the Gulf right at eye level, and the breeze carries salt and a trace of hickory from Big Bertha below. Tex has set up a folding table that’s too big for the deck but fits because Tex believes all furniture should be slightly too big for its space. The chairs are mismatched — two wooden ones from the bar, a plastic lawn chair, and a padded deck chair that was brought up specifically for Sheila because it has a cushion.
Mickey’s wheelchair fits at the end of the table where Tex has left a gap instead of a chair. No adjustment. No announcement. Just a space the right width in the right place, the way this whole building has been quietly rearranged around the dimensions of Mickey’s chair.
I take the seat next to Mickey. My knee touches the side of his wheelchair and I don’t move it. His hand finds mine under the table, casually, constantly.
Sheila comes up the stairs carrying a plate of cornbread and a look of general disapproval directed at everything.
