“Why are you calling me at this hour, Mickey?” Dante’s voice is cool.
“Where is he?”
“I’m in Miami right now. How would I know?”
“Dante, you always know what’s going on with Benji. You’re his emergency contact on everything. Please tell me where he is.”
“Why? So you can drive to wherever he is and say the right words? You’re good with words when it’s just the two of you. It’s the rooms full of people where you go silent.”
“Dante, please.”
“Do you remember when I came to your loft? With the donuts? Do you remember the conversation we had?”
“Yes.”
“I asked you to do one thing,” Dante says. “One thing, Mickey. Don’t make him feel small. That’s all I asked. And youdid it. You introduced him to your colleagues as the help. No. I’m not telling you where he is tonight.”
“Is he okay? At least tell me that, Dante.”
“No, but he will be. Tomorrow morning I’m flying up there. I’m getting Benji and I’m bringing him back home to Miami. Where he can be who he is without someone cutting him down to fit in a closet.”
Dante chose that word on purpose.
“I thought I liked who Benji is when he’s with you,” Dante says. “But it turns out I hate it.”
The line goes dead.
I sit in the bar holding the phone with a dark screen. Tex hasn’t moved. He’s still behind the bar with his arms crossed.
“You heard all that?”
“I heard enough,” he says.
“He said he’s coming tomorrow to take Benji back to Miami.”
“Then you’d better get your ass in gear and fix this before he arrives.”
“I can’t fix it tonight. I don’t know where Benji is and Dante won’t tell me.”
Tex pours a second bourbon. He pushes it across the bar to me. I don’t drink bourbon. I take it anyway.
“Mickey,” Tex says. “I’m going to say a thing and you’re going to listen.”
“Say it.”
“I know why you did it. I heard what you said about those bikers and the chair. I know you think you were keeping him safe. But Mickey — I put my arm around Stormy on this deck every night in front of everyone. Truckers, bikers, college kids. I don’t know who’s safe and who isn’t. I just know that Stormy deserves to be next to me where people can see it. And the room adjusts. The room always adjusts. The people who can’t adjust can fucking leave. And the people who stay are the ones worth having here.”
I drink the bourbon. It burns going down.
“You love him,” Tex says. “I know you do. I’ve seen how you look at him when you think nobody’s watching. You look at Benji how I look at Stormy. This isn’t about being ashamed of him or not wanting to be seen with him. It never was. The problem is you think loving someone means standing between them and everything that could hurt them. You did it in the hallway. You did it again tonight. The bullet and what you did tonight were the same instinct. The bullet cost you your legs. Tonight cost you Benji.”
“What do I do?”
“You find him. Tomorrow, if you can’t tonight. And you don’t apologize with words. You apologize with action. You put him next to you and you say his name and you say what he is to you. Not up here with the door locked. Out there. In front of the people who make your hands grip that chair. You stop deciding who’s safe enough to know about him and you let people see what they see.”
I nod back at him. He’s right.
“Get some sleep,” Tex says. “You’ve got a big day tomorrow.”
