Page 125 of Spiced!

“He knows it’s not real. He’s confused about why it smells like the actual one.”

“Tapirs have a smell?”

“A distinctive one,” I said.

Puck dook’d at the stuffed tapir, backed up two inches, circled it, and dook’d again, louder.

“He’s negotiating with it,” Adrian said.

“He doesn’t negotiate. He assesses and then makes a unilateral decision.”

Puck, as if responding to the challenge, sank his teeth into the stuffed tapir, which was nearly as large as he was, and dragged it toward his hammock, committed and unwilling to entertain further discussion.

“He’s adopting it,” Adrian said, delighted.

“He’s stealing it.”

“It’s a stuffed animal, Brendan. There’s no theft. There’s only acquisition, possibly liberation. Free the tapir!”

I watched Puck wrestle the tapir into his hammock, where it did not fit, but where he kept trying anyway, undeterred by physics or reason.

“I’ll have to take it to Diane eventually,” I said.

“He’ll grieve.”

“He’ll be fine.”

“You don’t know that. You haven’t seen ferret grief.” Adrian cocked a brow, a clear challenge to my veterinary knowledge of my own pet.

“There’s no such thing as ferret grief.”

“There’s absolutely ferret grief,” Adrian said. “I read about it. Just now. In my head.”

I squinted at him.

He stared back, entirely unbothered by the dishonesty of his own sourcing, and went to put the kettle on. Puck continued his losing battle with the hammock. Somewhere across town, a tapir who had spent four months silently managing her own quiet crisis was, for the first time in a long while, simply basking in the sun.

Chapter 36

Adrian

By Wednesday of celebration week, the bar had stopped being a bar and become a logistics operation that happened to serve drinks. I’d been in and out all week coordinating with Doña Carmen about the pastry delivery, finalizing my set list, and fielding texts from Benji about garnishes at hours that suggested he’d lost track of when normal people slept. Wednesday afternoon was the first time I’d walked into the chaos of the entire gang assembled at the same time.

What I witnessed stopped me at the door.

Finn was balanced precariously on the top rung of a ladder adjusting string lights.

Benji stood behind the bar surrounded by forty small glass bottles, none of which appeared to be from our usual suppliers, a few even bearing taped-on labels with hand-scrawled names. Benji looked more like some medieval apothecary than a bartender.

Jacks was doing what Jacks always did, hauling cases from the back with muscles bulging and a goofy grin curling his adorably innocent lips.

Rod’s voice poured through the pass-through window at a volume that resolved itself into the word “guava” three times with increasing reverence, which told me his own pastry situation was proceeding correctly.

Dante sat by the door, facing the street while reading, entirely unbothered by the tornadic weather system brewing behind him.

I’d been there twenty minutes, trying to resolve a rosemary question that had become load-bearing for Benji’s entire creative process, when the front door popped open and Skyler Shaw strode in.

A first-time Barbacks visitor would quickly notice this very tall, very broad man with the physical grace of someone accustomed to being the most athletic person in any room. Regulars, on the other hand, would key in on Jacks dropping an entire case of garnishes the moment said muscular mountain entered the bar.