He cocked one brow, and I swear, one corner of his mouth twitched. “I’ve assigned it the respect it deserves. It might also require peach pizza.”
“Tonight,” I said. “After my shift. The 3 a.m. kitchen. The pizza will have to wait for a decent dinner hour.”
“Fair enough. I’ll be up.”
“You’re always up.”
“Then I’ll be up with intention.”
I picked up my keys, walked to the door, stopped, then turned around.
“Peter.”
“Benji.”
“Is it good? The chapter, I mean?”
He was quiet for a moment, considering the question with the thoroughness he brought to everything.
“It was true,” he said. “I don’t know if it was good, but it was true. I haven’t been able to write anything true in a long time. So yes. I would say it’s good.”
I nodded, opened the door, and left the apartment. I made it all the way to the elevator before I pressed my back against the wall and closed my eyes and let the full force of everything I’d been containingfor the last twelve minutes hit me.
Peter Loupier had kissed me and then gone back to his room and written the chapter about David that he’d been stuck on for months. This morning, he’d told me about it on a Post-it note. He wanted to talk about us properly. He’d said, “with intention,” and I was going to have to function at a bar for eight hours while carrying all of this inside my body.
There was no version of reality in which I was going to be able to do that without completely falling apart.
I drove to Barbacks with both hands on the wheel and the radio off and my brain running a continuous loop. Over and over, I watched his hands shake. Surgeon’s hands thatnevershook were shaking because of me. The world didn’t contain enough therapy sessions to unpack whatever the hell that meant.
Jacks knew within thirty seconds.
I walked through the back door, hung up my jacket, tied my apron, and started prepping the garnish station with what I believed was a perfectly normal demeanor. I was calm and professional, the standard operating Benji, powered on and ready for deployment.
“What happened?” Jacks said without so much as a “Hey, how ya doin’?”
“Nothing happened. Good morning. How are the limes?”
“The limes are fine. What happened?”
“I just said good morning to you. That’s a normal greeting. That’s how people start conversations. With greetings. Then we discuss limes.”
Jacks set down the bottle he was stocking and turned to face me fully, which was a level of direct engagement that Jacks reserved for situations he’d already diagnosed and was simply waiting for the patient to confirm.
“Your hands are shaking,” he said.
I looked down. My hands were, in fact, shaking. The garnish knife I was holding was producing a visible tremor in the lime I was attempting to cut. The resulting slice was approximately three times thicker than Finn’s regulation wedge and angled at a degree that would have earned a failing grade in any bartending fundamentals course.
“Cold,” I said. “It’s cold in here. Is the AC up? The AC feels aggressive.”
“It’s seventy-four degrees.”
“Seventy-four is cold for me. I run warm . . . I mean cold. I have a high metabolic baseline. This isdocumented.”
Jacks waited.
Jacks was very good at waiting.
Jacks had once waited through an entire shift for Finn to admit he was upset about a vendor dispute, saying nothing, simply existing in patient proximity until Finn cracked at closing time and spent forty minutes talking about wholesale tomato prices. Jacks’s silence was a tactical instrument, deployed with the precision of a man who understood that most people will fill a void if you give them long enough. He understood that was usually more honest than anything you could have extracted through questioning.
