His hand rested on the back of my neck, warm and grounding.
I leaned into it, which was new, the opposite of the flinch.
When he pulled back, the stuffed manatee waswedged between us, and we both looked down at it.
Benji said, “He’s chaperoning,” and I laughed, the real one, and the sound filled the cab and settled into the quiet that followed.
“Go get ready for work,” I said.
“I’m going.”
“You have two hours and thirty-seven minutes.”
“You timed it?”
I smiled. “I always time it.”
He grabbed his manatee, his giraffe keychain, the remnants of his dignity, and climbed out. At the door, he turned and waved the manatee’s flipper at me.
I shook my head.
He grinned and went inside.
I don’t know why I sat in the truck, but the photo of David caught the light.
“I went to the zoo,” I told his photo. “I called Bill and arranged the whole thing on a Post-it note. You would have made fun of me.”
David smiled from the photo the way he’d always smiled, with his whole face.
“I think you’d like Benji,” I said. “I think you’d like him a lot.”
I reached up and took the photo from the visor and went inside. I fed the animals, made tea, sat at my desk, and opened my laptop.
The cursor blinked from a new page, blank and waiting.
My fingers flew across the keyboard.
Chapter 25
Benji
Iwalked into Barbacks at 3:45 p.m. carrying a stuffed manatee, a giraffe keychain, and the lingering sensation of Peter Loupier’s mouth on mine.
I had absolutely no intention of telling anyone about any of it.
This resolution lasted until approximately 3:47 p.m., when Jacks looked at me from behind the bar and said, “You’re glowing.”
“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 manateeI 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.”
