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“There’s always a man, Mark. That’s the whole premise of gayness.” He gasped, an actual, audible, theatrical gasp, one hand flying to his chest. “Was it an app? Mark, did you meet somebody from your phone?”

“I’m going to fire you.”

“You’ve never fired anyone. You kept Trevor on payroll for six weeks after he moved to Georgia.”

“He was going through something.”

“He was in Georgia.”

Finn drifted past with a case of limes and said, without slowing down, without so much as turning his head, “He was somewhere last night with a towel.”

I stopped wiping. My rag, about the size of said towel, went still.

Benji’s head swiveled so fast I heard something crack in his neck. “A towel?”

“He’s guessing,” I said.

“I’m not guessing,” Finn called from the walk-in. “I’m a witness to a man’s suffering. I said the word napkin at seven o’clock this morning and he dropped a wrench on his own face.”

“You said what?” Benji whispered to Finn, as though I couldn’t hear him, and I don’t think I’d ever seen a human being so purely, completely happy.

“It’s not what you think.”

“It’s a bathhouse.” Benji flew off the counter, both hands pointed at me like he’d cracked a murder. “Mark Delgado went to a bathhouse.”

“Keep your voice down. We’re a business.”

“We’re a closed business. There’s nobody here but us and one guy outside, and he’s a pelican.”

I looked. He was right. There was a pelican.

“I’m allowed to go places,” I said, a sulking ten-year-old.

“You’re so allowed. That’s the beautiful part.” Benji put his face in his hands, then took it back out to keep talking, because Benji couldn’t store joy. It had to gush out immediately or he’d rupture. “You went to a bathhouse like a normal, healthy, deeply repressed gay adult, and then you came in here and told me, ‘Nope.’ You can’t ‘nope’ a bathhouse, Mark. The bathhouse is the whole story.”

“There’s no story.”

That’s when Benji went still.

He examined my face for about two seconds. Whatever crossed it I didn’t authorize, but he read it anyway, because that was the trouble with Benji Kwon. He played the fool with such commitment you forgot he was the fastest read in the building.

“Oh,” he said, softer. “You didn’t—”

“Didn’t what?”

“Nothing happened. You went, and nothing happened.”

“The towel was very small,” I said, and my voice came out smaller than the towel.

“Mark.”

“There was applause.”

“Mark.”

“Somebody clapped . . . and a man called out a number. I think he was scoring me.”

That did it.