Page 106 of Spiced!

Benji, who had appointed himself the unofficial mayor of everyone’s business precisely because he couldn’t stand the thought of a single person in his orbit being alone with something. This was the same Benji who kept a napkin in his apron for the things people didn’t say, and he was standing at the end of the bar with a crack in his voice asking me why I’d kept the realest thing I did each year in a locked drawer he’d never even known existed.

“It’s not—” I stopped, started over, and told the truth, which was becoming a habit lately. I blamed the veterinarian for that. “I don’t invite people, Benj, not to that one. It’s the—it’s the dancing that isn’t a show. It’s the real one. I guess, somewhere, I decided it was safer if nobody came than if I invited everybody and looked out and saw a bunch of empty seats where my family was supposed to be.”

Benji chewed his lower lip, and I swear his eyes glistened with moisture in the bar light. “Adrian.”

“I know how it sounds—”

“We would fill the seats,” Benji said, with a fierceness that startled us both. “You absolute idiot, you beautiful, damaged, lime-cutting disaster. We would fill every seat. There would never be an empty seat in that building again. I would personally ensure there was not an empty seat in the tri-county area.”

And that—I have to be honest—undid me a little.

Right there behind the bar, Benji, the guy who never dropped the bit, Benji, who lived inside the bit the way other people lived inside a body, stepped outside it and looked at me with his whole unguarded face. I was hurt on his behalf and hurt to have been left out, both at once, and I understood that I had done to Benji the exact thing I was always terrified of having done to me. I had loved him from a curated distance. I had let him have the fun Adrian, the easy Adrian, the Adrian who read his moods and never once handed over his own.

“Of course you’re invited,” I choked out. “All of you. Obviously. Of course.”

“Damn right,” Benji said, already recovering, already reassembling the brass, though his eyes remained bright in a way that had nothing to do with performance. “I’ll handle it.”

“You don’t have to handle anything. It’s just—”

“I’m HANDLING it,” he announced to the whole bar now, because the vulnerability window had closed and the mayor was back in office. “Jacks! Clear your Saturday. Adrian has a secret life, and we’re attending it.”

“I love secret lives,” Jacks called back, with no further information, which was very Jacks.

“What secret life?” said Rod, from the kitchen pass, suspicious on principle. When his head had appeared, I hadn’t a clue.

“Our beautiful idiot is a real dancer,” Benji said. “A trained one. Ballet and everything. He’s been hiding it in a theater like a Phantom for six years, and he’s just now telling us, which we will discuss at a later date, but for now”—he was already typing on his phone, thumbs flying, a man in his absolute element—“I’m making a group chat.”

“Please don’t make a group chat,” I begged, knowing my plea to be useless.

“It’s already made. It’s called ‘Adrian’s Big Night.’ I’ve added everyone, including Finn. Should I add the vet?”

I hesitated.

Benji caught the hesitation the way Benji caught everything. His eyebrows shot up, but for once in his life, he didn’t comment on what he’d seen.

“Not the vet,” came out faster and flatter than I meant it to.

Benji’s eyebrows climbed another degree, because that was the true line, wasn’t it—the one under the deflection. I could let Barbacks family see the real thing. Sure, it was six years late, cracked open by Benji’s hurt face. Fine—they could come. But Brendan? In a dark theater, watching me dance a piece about my mother with nothing between him and the rawest six minutes I owned? That was a different order of exposed, and I wasn’t there yet. I didn’t have language for why, only that the thought of it made something in my chest pull its knees up.

“Okay,” Benji said. No bit, no needling, none of the several-paragraph tone. “Your call. It’s your night.”

And he meant it, which was the only reason I believed it, because Benji not pushing was rare enough to be trustworthy. “Go get changed for your set. Leave the rest of those limes to me.” He was already looking back down at his phone, thumbs unhurried now—and I registered, distantly, the way you register a thing you won’t understand until much later, that a man who’d been in a frenzy of group-chat logistics ten seconds ago had gone suddenly, serenely calm.

It’s a strange thing, to be that loved and to have spent six years hiding from it.

I walked toward the door to the back, and I did not, I noticed, feel the urge to reach for the bag. Instead, I felt the vertigo of a man discovering that the empty seats he’d been protecting himself from had been full the whole time. He’d just never once turned around to look.

The Ybor Contemporary Showcase happened once a year in the black-box theater above an old cigar factory on Seventh. I had danced in it every year for six years, and I had never once told anyone at Barbacks that it existed.

So Brendan didn’t know.

By Saturday, I was a disaster and hiding it beautifully, which is a skill.

The green room above the cigar factory smelled the way it always smelled, of rosin and old brick and someone’s eucalyptus muscle rub. The other dancers moved around me in their pre-show rituals. I did my barre against the exposed-pipe wall and felt my body remember what it was for. This was the part I loved and the part that scared me. On the bar, my body was a tool. On stage, it was a confession.

My piece was six minutes long. I had made it myself over the spring, in stolen hours, to a recording I’d found years ago and never been able to shake. The music was a woman singing in Portuguese, a fado, all ache and salt with a piano, a single guitar, and a voice that sounded like it was remembering something it couldn’t stop remembering. I don’t speak Portuguese. I have never needed to. But the song was about the thing every fado was about, which is saudade, which does not translate well.

It is the presence of an absence, the love that stays after the leaving.