Page 48 of Spiced!

He smiled and stepped back to let me in.

His condo was both what I’d expected—and nothing like what I’d expected.

It was small, clean, and remarkably well organized in the way of someone who had thought about where things went, put them there, and left them there. The books on his shelves were arranged methodically but appeared well read, not put on display. The kitchen was clean and neat but looked used. A dish rack by the sink held two mugs.

On the windowsill, a pale green succulent appeared self-sufficient and exactly as advertised. I assumed this was Gerald.

His was the kind of apartment where you could tell, instantly, that the person who lived there had never once had a utility shut off, never once done the math on a prescription at the pharmacy counter, and never once counted out rent in cash. It wasn’t anything showy. It was just—settled. It was the apartment of a man whose life had always had a floor under it.

I had a floor under mine, too, these days, at least.

I’d built the floor myself, board by board, during 4 a.m. shifts and Saturday nights. I was proud of it. Still, I noticed, standing in Brendan’s tidy living room with a box of my abuela’s pan dulce sweating in my hands, that I was suddenly very aware of the flour permanently worked into my knuckles.

This was the thing I didn’t advertise about myself: I could read a room in four seconds flat, and every so often, the room I read was the one inside my own head.

That room was a mess with the lights off.

Because there had been a look on Brendan’s face, back in his doorway. It was small, there and gone, the kind of micro-hesitation I’d spent a lifetime learning to catch from a bar top thirty feet away. It was a flicker that told me which table was about to complain about the music. I’d caught it on him before and filed it away. Now, in his spotless apartment, I took it back out and turned it over.

Maybe it was my dog. I’d brought a puppy to a first home visit. That was a lot for some people, but Brendan was a vet. I doubted he cared.

Maybe it was the pastries. Did they say, “Too much, too eager,” or “Too abuela’s boy”?

Maybe it was that I’d said something in Spanish again without noticing. I did that, and not everyone found it charming. Brendan was a precise man who might not love a boyfriend who kept slipping into a language he didn’t—

He’d gone for the dog before he’d gone for me, I reminded myself. He’d done it grinning. That wasn’t a man bracing for too much. That was a man glad the puppy came.

I told myself to knock it off.

Overthinking wasn’t an attractive look on anyone.

That’s when I realized a judgmental ferret, at that very moment, was staring at me like I owed him money. Puck lay sprawled on the back of the couch, looking at me with the bright, unshakable attention of an animal encountering a new variable and running a rapid assessment.

“That’s Puck,” Brendan said with a grin that made me slightly less comfortable than I’d been when I walked in.

“Hi, Puck,” I said, waving at the creature as though hand signals were his native tongue.

Puck dook’d once without moving from his full-length spread.

He did not wave back.

I set the pastry box on the counter, set Mofongo’s carrier on the floor, and crouched down to open it. Mofongo emerged with the innocent confidence of a puppy who had arrived somewhere new and intended to understand it immediately. His head spun, ears flopping, as he took in the apartment. Then he looked at me. Finally, his gaze landed on Puck on the couch.

Puck stared at Mofongo.

Mofongo stared at Puck.

I looked up at Brendan.

Brendan shrugged with his brows, and I swear he was holding his breath.

What happened next happened fast, like “don’t blink or it’s over” fast.

Puck launched off the couch, having decided there was an intruder in our midst. He skidded to a halt in front of Mofongo, who was approximately three times his size but clearly had not expected the velocity of the strange beast headed toward him. Mofongo sat down hard on his haunches and cocked his head as if to say, “What the hell are you?”

Puck sniffed him from one end to the other with the thoroughness of a customs inspector.

Mofongo sat utterly still—except for his nose, which wriggled and twisted every time Puck’s whiskers brushed by—and looked at me over Puck’s head with an expression I could only describe as deeply uncertain about all of his life decisions.