Page 108 of Spiced!

I had kept Brendan out of this on purpose—the one thing I hadn’t been able to hand over—and I had spent the days since telling myself that was wisdom and not fear. And now—

There he was.

Sitting in the back row.

In the far corner.

Away from the others, on the opposite side of the house, in the dark near the tech booth where a man could watch without being seen—because of course that’s where he’d sit, the man who observed everything and inserted himself into nothing, the man who read the room from its edges the same way I did. He wasn’t with my family. He didn’t know them well enough yet, and he was too careful to presume. Plus, he hadn’t been invited. He’d come alone and taken the seat that let him give me his whole attention without asking for any of mine back.

He was already looking at the wing.

At the gap.

At me.

He couldn’t have seen me—it was dark where I stood—but he was looking anyway, at the place he knew I would come from, waiting, the way you waited for something you’ve decided mattered.

The stage manager touched my shoulder. “Two minutes, Adrian.”

I nodded.

My hands had stopped shaking.

There’s a thing nobody tells you about being seen. It doesn’t calm you down because the fear is gone. It calms you down because the fear finally has somewhere to go.

I had six minutes of my mother to dance, joy thinning into a reach that never lands, and for the first time in six years of dancing in the anonymous dark, there was a person in the room I was reaching toward.

I walked to my mark in the blackout.

I found first position in a body that had done this ten thousand times.

Somewhere below me in the dark, a piano found its first note, and a woman began, very quietly, to sing about the presence of an absence.

I closed my eyes, and I gave them my truth.

I danced it to the man in the corner.

Chapter 29

Brendan

Igot there at seven-twenty because I would rather stand in an empty theater for forty minutes than risk missing one minute of Adrian on stage.

The venue, according to a plaque by the freight elevator, had spent the first half of the twentieth century turning tobacco into cigars and the second half turning derelict, before some optimist with a federal grant turned it into exposed brick, folding chairs in raked rows, and a lighting rig that looked like it wanted to be somewhere else.

I found a seat in the back corner, near the tech booth, on the opposite side from where a crowd was starting to gather. I recognized the crowd before I recognized that I recognized it.

It was the bar.

It was Adrian’s bar, transplanted three flights up and dressed slightly better. Benji wore a collar. The big, quiet one, Jacks, held something in his lap. The bouncer sat with the crossed arms. They filled about a row and a half, and they were loud in the way of people who were nervous on someone else’s behalf and were covering it with volume. I sat in my corner and watched them and felt something I didn’t have a clean word for.

Jacks flashed his sign at the empty stage, as if rehearsing. It said, in careful hand-lettering with a great deal of glitter, GET IT, PASTELITO.

I didn’t know what pastelito meant but made a mental note to find out.

I realized, sitting in that corner, that I wanted to know all of it, every inside joke and piece of shared shorthand that this family had built around a man I was falling for and had, until this exact moment, been quietly telling myself I understood.

Sure, I understood a version of him.