Page 78 of Spiced!

“You know?”

“Finn told me two weeks ago. He wants to do a whole thing. He’s been waiting for Mark to agree.” He reached past me for a bottle of Aperol. “Mark always takes forever to make a decision, which is why Finn started warming him up weeks before we need a final call.”

“You’ve already been thinking about it, haven’t you? You have some crazy drink planned, with fireworks and naked dancers jumping out of giant bottles or something.”

“I’ve been thinking about it.” He winked. “In the way that a person thinks about things they care about, which is to say constantly and in detail. Naked bottle dancers weren’t part of my thinking, but they are now. Thanks for that.”

He produced a cocktail napkin from his apron pocket. There was writing on it, small and dense and organized in a way that suggested subcategories.

“Benji,” I said.

“It’s preliminary.”

“The napkin has bullet points.”

“Everything worth doing has bullet points.”

“This one has sub-bullets,” I said.

He took the napkin back and returned it to his apron. “When Finn calls a staff meeting, I’ll be ready.”

I blinked at him. He blinked back.

“There’s going to be a staff meeting?” I asked.

“There’s always a staff meeting. You know that,” he said. “Finn believes in the process.”

I shook my head, returned to my pre-shift routine, and tried to focus on the evening ahead. That was my job. It was what mattered in that moment. It was also considerably easier to focus on once I stopped thinking about cocktail napkin sub-bullets.

Hours later, the bar wound down the way it always wound down, the crowd thinning after midnight, the energy dropping from its full volume to the warm, tired, good-night quality I’d come to recognize as one of the better feelings available on a Saturday in Ybor.

I was doing my post-set stretch near the end of the bar when I saw it. Mark had risen from his booth to return his glass. He did this sometimes. It was the small courtesy of a man who remembered that other people cleaned up after him and wanted to make that marginally easier. He set his glass at the bar end and turned back toward his booth.

On the way, he passed Dante at the door. Dante was standing inside, his book in one hand and his phone in the other. He was reading something that required his full attention, but he looked up when Mark passed.

“Good night?” Mark said.

“Quiet night.” Dante shrugged his massive shoulders.

“Good.”

That was it. Five words. Mark kept walking. Dante went back to his book. It might’ve been the most ordinary exchange I had ever witnessed, two people who worked in the same building saying a few words to each other at the end of a shift.

There was nothing in it. There was nothing to notice. As the exchange occurred, Benji was walking past me with a tray. He slowed. Then he looked at the door where Dante resumed his reading. Then looked at the booth where Mark was sitting back down.

He reached into his apron pocket, produced the cocktail napkin, and added something to it, and then kept walking.

I watched him go. I looked at the door. I looked at the booth.

I didn’t know what I’d just seen, or if I’d even seen anything at all, but Benji had added something to the PowerPoint napkin, and Benji’s napkin had sub-bullets, and Benji did not add things to napkins without a reason.

Chapter 21

Adrian

Imoved Mofongo back to the rear seat at the first red light. He was on the console again by the second. We did this four times between my apartment and the clinic, which was a seven-minute drive, which worked out to approximately one repositioning every hundred yards.

“Mofongo,” I said, as gently as my frustration allowed.