“I hear a man making valid observations about penmanship.”
“No. What you hear is a man who just spentnine minutes describing Post-it notes written by his roommate and used the words ‘unreasonably,’ ‘endearing,’ and ‘aggressive’ in the span of sixty seconds. You are down bad, man. Down bad. Man down. Something’s down. Shit, what was in that wine?”
“I amnotdown bad.” I crossed my arms . . . aggressively. “I’m annoyed, Mia. Annoyed and fascinated areverydifferent emotional states, Mia, and the fact that you can’t tell the difference says more about you than it does about me, Mia!”
“Did you just say fascinated while repeating my name three times before catching your breath?”
I replayed my sentence.
I had, in fact, said fascinated.
I had not meant to say fascinated.
Fascinated was a word that implied interest, and interest implied a direction I was not heading in because Peter Loupier was my temporary roommate who communicated through stationery and had quiet hours and a blue mug I wasn’t allowed to touch and a routine so rigid that I could set a clock by his newspaper reading.
“I said fascinated in an anthropological sense. He’s a specimen, nothing more, a case study in introversion. I’m observing him the way a scientist observes a meticulously organized, innately private animal in its natural habitat.”
“You’re observing him?”
“From a distance. Professionally.”
“Professionally,” Mia repeated in a tone that suggested she was filing this conversation away for future use as evidence.
Jacks reappeared, carrying a fresh tub of ice. He set it down behind the bar and looked at Mia’s face. Then he looked at mine. He seemed to instantly understand the entire conversation without having heard a word of it.
“Post-its?” he asked.
“Post-its,” Mia confirmed.
“I’m going to start charging admission to these conversations,” I said, and turned to the bachelorette party with my biggest smile and best pour because I needed to stop talking about Peter Loupier’s handwriting before I said something else I’d have to retroactively reclassify as anthropological.
The bachelorette party kept me busy for the next hour, which was a mercy.
I made drinks. I flirted. I did the bottle trick that always got filmed for Instagram stories.
And I let the noise and rhythm of the bar fill up the part of my brain that had recently been allocated to the subject of Post-it notes and the person who wrote them.
It almost worked.
At 2:30 a.m., I drove home through quiet Tampa streets with Princess Consuela’s carrier on the passenger seat. I’d started bringing her to work with me on busy nights because she seemed calmer at the bar than alone in the foster room, which was both a commentary on her personality and a deeply weird thing to say about a cat. She slept in her carrier behind the bar, unbothered by the noise, curled into a wrinkled ball of naked indifference while the world partied around her.
Finn pretended to disapprove.
But the regulars loved her, and, as Mark said in overriding Finn’s veto, “The customers are always right.”
Someone started a fan account. My princess was an Insta star.
I parked, carried her upstairs, and let myself into Peter’s apartment as quietly as I could manage. I’d gotten better at the quiet entrance over the past week. The trick was to open the door slowly, step over the threshold without letting it bounce on the hinges, and close it with my hand on the latch so it didn’t slam. I could do the whole thing in near silence now, which I considered one of my greatest personal achievements.
Sadly, I would never get credit for it because the whole point was that no one heard me do it, so therewould never be witnesses or applause or rose petals falling from the ceiling.
I really wanted rose petals.
The apartment was dark except for the light above the stove, which Peter always left on. It cast a warm, low glow across the kitchen, enough to navigate by without turning on anything else. I’d asked him about it once, via Post-it, and his response had been:
It’s for the animals. Hiro doesn’t like the dark.
— P
