Page 69 of Spiced!

“Adrian?” Finn asked, using his “I’m the boss; you must answer me” tone.

“I had to leave at four,” I said. “For bread.”

The sound Benji made was small and high and completely undignified for a grown man, but so utterly Benji.

“For bread?” Finn repeated.

“The bread doesn’t make itself,” I said weakly.

“You left a—” Benji stopped. He made the squealing sound again. “You left a man to go make bread?”

And then he started laughing again.

Jacks laughed, too, though I wasn’t sure he knew why he was laughing.

Finn just shook his head and smiled.

“I left a man to do my job, which is what professionals do.”

Benji laughed louder, and then—because Benji was a clown the way a surgeon is a person who owns knives, which is to say the clowning was real but it was not the whole toolkit—he stopped laughing, looked at me a second longer than was necessary, allowing something shrewd and fond to move behind his eyes.

“Or,” he said, lightly, “you left before he could watch you want to stay, which is an entirely different loaf of bread.”

The bar got briefly, unhelpfully very quiet.

I opened my mouth to inform him that my leaving was, in fact, entirely about bread, that bread was a serious commercial enterprise with a 4 a.m. start time and nutritional significance to the greater West Tampa community. Benji watched me not say any of it, because Benji had known me for years and had, on more than one closing shift, poured me a Fanta and let me not-talk about my mother until I talked about my mother.

“There he is,” Benji said softly. “Mi amor, you’re allowed to stay for the part after the humpty dumpty. That’s the whole point of the humpty dumpty, to get to snuggle afterward.”

I looked at him. He looked at me. For one honest second, it was not a bit at all. Then he clapped his hands together like a man concluding a very productive meeting. “Anyway. Was there or was there not a tongue?”

“Yes, tongue!” Jacks shouted for no apparent reason.

“Tongue in the ass?” Finn, the fucking leprechaun, added.

“I hate you all,” I said, and meant the opposite, and they knew it, because that was my Barbacks family’s actual superpower. Underneath the asshole-clairvoyance and Benji’s napkins and Jacks’s floppy curls and Finn’s smart-ass smirk, they always knew—and they loved me anyway.

“And how was the vet when you left?” Benji asked through snorts.

I thought about bedhead and a low morning voice and a coffee mug and eyes that were steady at every hour. My face did the thing again.

“I really, really hate all of you,” I said.

“No you don’t,” Jacks said cheerfully.

“No,” I agreed. “I don’t, but I want to.”

Finn’s office door opened, and Mark emerged.

Finally, an adult, I thought.

Mark came out with his laptop folded under one arm and his reading glasses pushed up on his head and the general energy of a man transitioning from numbers to management, which was how he spent most Mondays. He looked at me, then at Benji, then at Jacks. When he looked at Finn, some mental telepathy thing happened, and a smile curled across both of their faces.

“What did I miss?” Mark asked.

“Adrian got laid,” Benji said.

“Adrian got a really good kiss,” Jacks said simultaneously.