Page 71 of Spiced!

Tasha called because she had given me exactly one day, which was, by her standards, extraordinary restraint. “Talk,” she said when I picked up. Not “Hello” or “Hi, puddin’,” as she sometimes did. Just “Talk.” It was a command. Woe be unto those who refused a Tasha missive.

“Good morning,” I said, toying with fire.

“It’s seven-fifteen. I’ve been patient since Sunday. Talk or I will drive to the clinic and enlist recruits.”

Dear God, that couldn’t happen. My clinic team was already up my ass about everything. I’d arrived at the clinic early that morning. The building was quiet in the way it always was before Hurricane Marcus arrived and started aligning things. I had been looking at the tapir imaging and possibly thinking about other things, which was new. Complicated cases usually had my full attention. This particular case was sharing my mental capacity with a man, which was also new.

“We had lunch,” I said. “On Sunday.”

“I know. Alan told me.”

“How does Alan have your number? Jesus, is he a walking phone book now?”

“Alan has had my number for two years, but that’s beside the point. You’re not going to distract me, Dr. Evil. I’m focused.” A brief pause. “He said you invited someone over and grilled out. He said he found out from Marcus, who found out from your credit card statement because you bought a significant amount of groceries on Saturday afternoon.”

I groaned into the ceiling. “Marcus is monitoring my credit card statements now?”

“Marcus monitors everything. He runs your office, practically your life, which is your office, by the way. You know this. It’s incredibly sad.” I heard her moving around her kitchen, the familiar background sounds of a typical Tasha morning. “How was it?”

“Good.”

“Brendan.”

“It was good, Tash. We talked. We ate. Mofongo and Puck sorted out their diplomatic situation.”

“And after lunch?”

I said nothing.

“Brendan.”

“It was a good afternoon.”

She made a clucking sound I hadn’t heard from her before. It was small and satisfied and completely undentist-like.

“Okay,” she said. “And now?”

“Now it’s Tuesday, and I’m looking at the insides of a medium-sized mammal.”

“Are you going to see him again?”

“Saturday. He works Saturdays.”

“Seeing him at his place of work no longer counts, not after a first date that was likely followed, well, by dessert you have yet to describe in sufficient detail. Are you seeing him again before Saturday?”

“We’re texting.”

“How often?”

I looked at my phone on my desk. There were already four messages from Adrian, the most recent one a photo of something that had gone wrong with the sourdough starter with a caption in Spanish that I hadn’t yet run through the translation software I downloaded for Adrian’s random Spanish messages, most of which he didn’t even realize were in Spanish until after hitting send.

“Fairly often,” I said.

“Do you want to see him before Saturday?”

This was the question beneath all the other questions, and Tasha knew it, which was why she’d taken twenty minutes to arrive at it. I thought about Sunday, about standing in my kitchen at four twenty-three in the morning on Monday with my hair doing whatever it wanted, and I thought about him holding a mug with both hands like it was the only thing keeping him upright.

Adrian had been fully dressed and already thinking about bread. He had looked at me with the particular warmth of someone who found what they were seeing genuinely worth looking at, which was either very good or the kind of thing you told yourself that turned out to mean nothing. It was far too early to know which.