Page 89 of Spiced!

“You turned toward me twice and turned back without saying anything. That’s a physical tell.”

“I don’t have physical tells.”

“Everyone has physical tells.” A pause. “Yours usually involves your shoulders.”

My brow furrowed. “My shoulders?”

“When you’re working through something, your left shoulder drops slightly. It comes back up when you’ve finished.”

“You’ve been cataloguing my shoulder?”

“I’m a vet,” he said simply. “My profession is reading signals from patients who can’t speak.”

I faced the windshield so he wouldn’t see my face doing the thing it was doing. My shoulder drooped on its own.

“Tarpon Springs,” I guessed as we passed a sign showing the distance to the town.

He drew in a long breath, then let it out. “Yes.”

“It’s your hometown, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You’re taking me to your hometown on a date you’ve been planning for how long?”

“That’s an accurate summary. Eight days. The planning started eight days ago.”

“Brendan.”

“Yeah?”

“This is a grand gesture.”

“It’s dinner,” he said. “And a walk.”

“It’s a grand gesture disguised as dinner and a walk.”

The corner of his mouth surrendered to a smile. “It’s a very simple, enjoyable evening with a man I may or may not like a little.”

“Nothing about you is simple.”

He glanced at me then, briefly, the steadiest sideways look from a man who was constitutionally incapable of being unsteady. Something in his eyes said he was glad I understood that. Then he looked back at the road.

I shifted again and faced forward.

Dios mío, I thought. I’m in so much trouble.

We drove into Tarpon Springs from the south. That’s when Brendan started talking. He wasn’t announcing or performing, simply offering the quiet narration of a man moving through a place built into him somewhere deep.

“That building over there was my school.

“That was where the hardware store used to be before it became a smoothie place, which I still find personally offensive.

“You see that fence? That was the fence my dad built in 2003, the one a car backed into two years later. That’s the better fence that replaced it because the second time my father measured differently.

“That spot near the water over there is where Alan, at fourteen, discovered that throwing things off the dock made little Brendan jump in regardless of the temperature. He deployed that tactic eleven times over two summers until our father found out and put a stop to it.”

“Eleven times?” I asked.