Page 143 of Spiced!

I walked out of the back room, down the hallway, and into the heat and light and noise of a bar that was fuller than I had ever seen it. When I stepped up onto the counter, the room turned toward me. I found Brendan’s booth in my very first scan without meaning to.

It was empty.

He was sitting on a stool at the bar only a few feet away.

Before I could process that, the music began.

Chapter 40

Brendan

The moment Adrian stepped onto the bar, the whole room shifted.

I’d watched that change happen on enough Saturdays to understand that it wasn’t magic or a trick. It was what happened when a person who was completely himself did the thing he was completely built to do.

People stopped talking mid-sentence.

Heads turned, and the bar, which had been a room full of strangers a second earlier, became a room with a single center to it.

That center was Adrian.

I picked up my whiskey and took a long sip.

The crowd had grown past anything I had seen before. The Saturday regulars were folded in among the neighborhood people Dante had invited. Faces I had never seen stood shoulder to shoulder with faces I knew on sight. The combination produced an energy that felt less like a bar crowd and more like a community discovering itself in real time.

Tyler was somewhere to my left. I could locate him by sound alone. He’d been pre-approved for loudness earlier in the week, and he was honoring that agreement in full, cheering at a volume he normally reserved for playoff hockey. Beside him, Skyler was cheering, too. His was the genuine kind, flowing out of a man who loved both the bar and the person dancing on it—and he had no intention of hiding either fact in front of strangers.

Erik stood near the wall with a drink in one hand and his arms crossed. He studied Adrian’s performance the way he studied game tape. At one point, he tilted his head slightly, and at another, he nodded once, slowly, as though he had just confirmed something for himself.

Benji appeared and set a cocktail down in front of me. It was orange with a charred rosemary garnish. A thin thread of smoke was still rising off the tip of the herb.

“The Spiced Catalyst,” he said. “First official pour off the new permanent menu.” He glanced toward the bar, toward Adrian. “It seemed right that you should be the one to have it first.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. It’s Adrian’s drink. I only named it.” He straightened his apron.

“Brilliantly,” I said, setting my whiskey down and lifting the orange concoction in salute.

Only after I took a sip and smiled did Benji return to the well.

I held the glass while watching Adrian on the bar, and I thought about how many unrepeatable things had needed to fall into exactly the right order to put me in this booth with this drink in my hand. There had been a flea-and-tick luncheon, and a bar Peter had mentioned only once and only in passing, and an eight-week-old beagle who had tried to eat a stethoscope. If any of those things hadn’t happened, I might never have been there.

Adrian moved through the first song and into the second.

The room swayed along with him.

The set really was different tonight. It was a story told from beginning to end. While I did not have the vocabulary to describe what he was doing on a technical level, I could feel the difference. The room felt it, too. The new faces felt it most of all. I watched a woman near the door grab her friend’s arm and point. I smiled as the friend stopped arguing about whatever they had been arguing about and gape. After that, neither of them looked away until Adrian was done.

Partway through the third song, Adrian’s gaze landed on me.

It didn’t hold long, only a beat or two, no different from the room-check he ran throughout every song. Even so, it landed on me and held. His shoulders eased as he moved on, and that small easing told me everything I needed to know.

And I let myself, for the first time, watch him the way the strangers by the door were watching him. Without the clipboard in my head. Without the reflex to sort and label and manage, the one I ran on everything, the one I’d finally learned to switch off when what was in front of me deserved to be met instead of filed.

Because here is what I had refused to see, back when it was easier to call it concern: This was not a man taking his clothes off for money. This was a man doing the single most articulate thing I had ever watched a human being do. He was telling a story with the one instrument nobody could confiscate, and the whole room—the neighborhood, the strangers, the woman by the door who had come in arguing and forgotten why—was following the sentence to its end because he was making it impossible not to. I had spent my life being good at fixing. He was up there being good at the opposite of fixing. He was being good at being wholly, unapologetically alive, in front of everyone, on purpose, and asking the room to be alive with him. And the room said yes. The room always said yes. A more guarded man—a version of me I’d mostly retired—might have called that cheap. Standing there with a smoking rosemary garnish and my whole chest aching, I understood it was the least cheap thing I had ever seen.

I had told him I would watch the whole thing and know exactly what I was looking at. I was keeping the promise. I was looking at the bravest person I knew, and I finally had the eyes for it.