Page 61 of Spiced!

“I know.” He raised his mug in salute and gave me another not-quite smile.

The city at four-thirty was mine the way it was always mine. The streets were empty and orange-lit. The whole world was in that pause before it decided what it was going to be on that particular rotation of the Earth.

I loaded Mofongo into the back seat. He shifted, resettled, and went back to snoring.

Puppy secured, I turned on the radio, because the quiet was too full of thoughts, and I was going to be at the panadería in twenty minutes, and I needed my brain to be on bread, not on blue eyes and extraordinary hair. The song that came on was not subtle. It had a snappy drum line and a chorus that came back bigger each time. I turned it up because it matched my feeling, which was large and warm and slightly ridiculous. I realized, in that moment, that I was completely fine with being all of those things simultaneously.

By the second chorus, I was humming.

By the third, I was singing, full voice, because it was four-thirty in the morning, and the streets were empty, and there was nobody to perform for. On top of that, the song was good, and I had just left a man’s apartment where I had woken up feeling like I was supposed to be there.

My right hand found the steering wheel.

The drum line was doing its thing again, so I helped it.

I thought about bedhead. Specifically, I thought about the section that had flopped sideways, and the hand that had gone up to touch it and changed nothing. I heard his words, asking me to come back to bed in that gravely, low morning voice. Then my mind saw the way he had looked at me over his coffee mug with those eyes that were the same at every hour.

The chorus came back.

I cranked it up.

Mofongo made a sound from the back seat.

“Lo siento, papi,” I said in apology.

He went back to sleep.

I drummed on the steering wheel the rest of the way to Ybor, and sang every word I knew, throwing in a few “watermelons” for the words I didn’t. And I grinned at the empty road ahead of me, and let the morning be exactly as good as it was.

Chapter 17

Brendan

Despite my best efforts at going back to sleep following Adrian’s pre-dawn departure, my brain wouldn’t let me rest. Nor would my damn ferret. Puck decided to climb atop my chest and stare at me while I closed my eyes. He didn’t move or dance or jump. He just sat there and stared—which was as effective as if he’d banged a drum. My internal paranoia kicked in because my overactive subconscious knew I was being watched.

So, with little choice in the matter, I decided to get my day started a few hours earlier than usual. I had a complex case to solve, and a hundred other run-the-business tasks to complete. A few hours of peace in the office would do me good. At least, that was my story.

It was six o’clock, an hour I’d never seen in my workspace. I was humming when I unlocked the clinic. Approximately four bars into something with a low, insistent drum line—one of the songs Adrian moved to on Saturdays—I realized I was humming and stopped. Standing there, in the quiet of the empty waiting room with my keys in my hand, I struggled to acknowledge what had just happened.

I had been humming.

Me.

A devout non-hummer or singer or anything musically inclined.

Was humming.

I put my keys in my pocket and went to make coffee and did not hum again.

Here is a thing I would not have said out loud, even standing alone in my own dark waiting room at six in the morning: A small, quiet, badly-raised part of me had been mildly surprised, that first night, that the song stuck, that I’d carried a go-go dancer’s Saturday-night playlist home in my head like it was something of mine, as though the music a man danced to in a Speedo belonged to a different, lesser shelf than the music a person was allowed to simply love.

I really didn’t like that part of me.

I had located it, the way you locate a funny noise in an engine—not yet sure what it is, only sure it shouldn’t be there. I made a mental note to look under the hood later, which was my lifelong strategy for feelings. I had a flawless track record of accomplishing nothing.

Then I made more coffee, because that, at least, I knew how to finish.

Marcus arrived at eight-fifteen, which was his standard time, precise to within two minutes on any given day. I heard him go through his opening routine. He unlocked the door, turned on all the lights, flicked his computer to life, and began his quiet organization of the front desk that he performed every morning like a liturgy.