Page 144 of Spiced!

I raised the Spiced Catalyst toward him, even though he had already looked away.

Benji caught the gesture from behind the bar.

He said nothing at all.

He simply went back to his bottles like a man whose books had finally balanced.

The music built, and the room rose along with it.

Rod appeared in the pass-through window and stayed there, watching, wiping the same clean pan for the length of two full songs.

Finn stood against the back wall with his clipboard hanging forgotten at his side.

Mark actually closed his laptop, leaned back in his booth, and stared.

When the final song began, Adrian found my gaze one more time. This time, the look was longer and entirely deliberate. I looked back at him while the room roared around us like thunder made life.

Then the song ended.

And the whole place erupted.

Adrian stepped down from the bar and walked straight to me.

He didn’t work the crowd.

He didn’t acknowledge anyone else.

He simply walked toward the thing he had decided to walk toward, while half of Ybor cheered him on.

He slid onto the stool next to me and saw the cocktail. “Benji?”

“First pour of the permanent menu, so he said.”

He picked it up, took a sip, and set it down on the table between us. All around us, the bar was celebrating. Tyler’s voice sailed over the top of the noise. Erik’s glass remained raised, probably in remembrance of cattle somewhere. Jacks and Skyler were lost in the crush of it all.

And Rod—our understated, mysterious Rod—was still in his window pretending that he wasn’t smiling.

The hall stood.

We sat in it together.

“You had a really good set,” I said. “I’ve never seen you dance contemporary. I don’t think half the people here knew what to think at first, but they couldn’t look away.”

“I dedicated it to someone,” he said, his eyes locked onto mine.

My mouth opened, then closed. All I could do was stare back at this beautiful man and try not to lose myself in his gaze.

“He probably doesn’t know,” Adrian said.

“He might know,” I said, a tiny grin forming.

His left-side dimple appeared, and my heart melted completely.

“Yeah,” he said. “He might.”

He was still catching his breath, and the light caught the ink along his left ribs—the line of script I’d kissed a hundred times in the dark without ever asking him to translate, because some part of me had understood it was load-bearing and hadn’t wanted to be clumsy with it.

“What does it say?” I asked. “The tattoo. You never told me, and I never asked.”