Page 93 of Spiced!

I laughed and reached across the table, putting my hand over his. He turned his hand over and held mine, as I tried, desperately, not to cry.

We ate dinner in that warm, unhurried room while the evening went fully dark outside. Neither of us was in any hurry to be anywhere else. I kept the frame in my lap through all of it. I was aware of doing this. I was also aware that Brendan was aware of it and was choosing not to comment.

When we stood to leave, I tucked the frame carefully under my arm. Brendan held the door, and we walked out into the Tarpon Springs evening. He fell into step beside me, and we walked to the docks, because that was where the evening was always headed.

The water was black and drifting, the dock lights catching it in pieces. The tourist boats were done for the night, so the docks had gone quiet in the way that working places got quiet after hours. They weren’t empty, just settled, doing the private version of what they did all day.

Brendan walked close enough that our arms brushed every few steps.

“Tell me the real version of growing up here,” I said.

“You’ve been getting the real version.”

“You’ve been giving me the highlights. I want the other parts.”

He looked at me sideways. “What other parts?”

“The embarrassing ones, the ones Alan has documented.”

“Alan documented more than I’d like.”

“Start there,” I said.

He chuckled and shook his head, then told me about the summer he was twelve and tried to teach himself to fish off the docks, catching his own jacket three times before catching anything else. Alan had photographed the whole thing on a disposable camera and presented the evidence at Brendan’s high school graduation party in a slideshow.

“A slideshow?” I said.

“With captions,” Brendan confirmed. “Alan titled it Fish: 3, Brendan: 0. My mother laughed for four minutes straight.”

“I think I might love Alan,” I said.

“Alan is a plague,” Brendan said, in the tone of a man who loved his brother completely and found him deeply irritating and would never change either of those facts.

I put my hand on his face and kissed him at the end of the dock in Tarpon Springs with the September evening warm around us and the water moving below and the framed sheet music tucked carefully under one arm. When we pulled back, our eyes locked.

“Thank you,” I said. “For all of this . . . for the planning and Stavros and the church and the song.” I paused. “For noticing it was in my lap.”

“You were holding it like it might get away,” he said.

“It might have.”

“It wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Brendan.”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for paying attention,” I said.

He looked at me with his steady blue eyes, the ones that were the same at every hour and in every light. “You’re easy to pay attention to.”

I laughed, the surprised kind. I was sure my cheeks flushed, which never happened.

“Come on,” he said. “We should head back.”

“Four a.m. comes early,” I said.

“It always does. That’s what makes it 4 a.m.”