They came back because the connection was real.
Adrian fed off them, though not in the extractive way that some performers feed off crowds, draining energy to fuel ego. He did so in a generous way, the way real performers operate, taking the energy and multiplying it and sending it back amplified so theexchange left everyone with more than they’d started with.
Jacks cued the track.
Adrian’s body found the beat.
And then he was moving.
The room reorganized itself around him the way rooms do when someone is doing the thing they were built for. In a gay bar, this was especially true when that guy was nearly naked and built like a magazine cover model.
I watched him from the well, watched the way his body articulated the music with an honest, full-bodied joy I recognized from the best version of myself, the version that had existed on a stage in New York before the knee injury.
Adrian had said something to me last week, during a break between sets. I’d been sorting out the well and my body had been doing the thing it did when Adrian danced, the unconscious tracking, the shoulders adjusting to the beat, the weight shifting.
He’d noticed.
“You should dance again,” he’d said. It wasn’t advice, merely an observation.
“My knee—”
“I’m not talking about the career; I’m talking aboutthe dancing. They’re not the same thing. The career needs the knee. The dancing just needs you.”
I hadn’t answered at the time. I hadn’t known what to say.
I’d filed it in the drawer where I kept things that were too true for the moment.
Tonight, though, watching him from behind the bar, I let the drawer open a crack.
Peter arrived at ten.
I saw him before he saw me, the way I always saw him first. His was the gravitational pull of a person whose presence changed any room simply by entering it.
He was wearing the blue shirt.
It wasn’t the first time he’d worn it. He’d worn it the previous Saturday, too, and the Wednesday before that when we’d gone to dinner at a place that wasn’t a zoo café. We’d gone to a real restaurant with real menus where he’d ordered fish and I’d ordered something with a name I couldn’t pronounce. We’d held hands across the table like two people on a date, which we were, which still amazed me.
But the blue shirt still stopped me every time.
It was the color of a mug on a shelf.
It was also the proof that Peter Loupier, who had owned four identical gray T-shirts and called it a system, had walked into a store and chosen a color because I’d asked him to while sitting in a zoo café eating aFlamingo Wrap.
He found his stool, adjusted his glasses, and looked at me across the bar top with his dark, steady gaze that I felt in the back of my teeth.
“Full house,” he said.
“Adrian’s catalyst effect. That’s what Mark calls it. According to him, our numbers are up forty-three percent.”
Peter’s brows arched. “Forty-three percent is statistically significant.”
“Forty-three percent is Mark’s love language. He almost showed an actual emotion on Monday.”
“Mark shows emotions. They’re just expressed in basis points.”
I made his tea and set it in front of him. Yes, Peter drank tea when he visited the bar. And yes, I had brought a mug from home just to serve him his tea . . . in the bar . . . when everyone else drank beer or wine or alcohol.
It was his thing, and I loved him for it.
