Page 48 of Bounced!

Mark didn’t move either. If anything, he settled. He got an arm more solidly around me and tucked me in against his side like a man staking a claim in front of a witness. And I let him. I leaned into it. The two of us stood there, caught red-handed, and made absolutely no attempt to be caught less.

“We’re a little busy here, Benji,” Mark said.

“You’re on the ice machine.”

“We noticed. Reina is very supportive,” I said.

Mark buried a laugh into my shoulder.

“He speaks!” Benji wheeled on me, delighted past all reason. “The wall speaks! Two years, two years of ‘hmm’ and ‘happens’ and standing in the corner like a very handsome floor lamp, and now I catch you making out with the boss on a piece of catering equipment and—” He gasped, a new horror arriving. “Rod! Oh my God. Rod can’t know. Rod will have to have her blessed. He’ll bring a priest. He’ll hold a seance. He’ll want an exorcism. Dear God, he’ll bring his grandmother!”

“Benji,” Mark said, and I heard him fighting the laugh—and losing, “buddy. You want to maybe give us—”

“I’ll give you nothing, fuck you very much! I’ve given you weeks of cocktail-napkin-level restraint. I gave you the funeral and the booth. I saw this coming a lifetime ago, and I held my tongue. That might’ve been the hardest thing I’ve ever—” He stopped. His eyes filled, actually filled, the little menace, going from scandalized to weepy in the space of a breath in the way only Benji could. “You two beautiful knuckleheads. Look at you. You found each other. You absolute idiots. It took you two years and a Grindr pyramid scheme, but you did it. Now Finn owes me forty dollars—”

“You bet on us?” Mark said.

“Of course we bet on you. We’ve been betting on you for a year.” And then he was crying and laughing at the same time. He crossed the kitchen with his arms out like he meant to embrace the whole tangled disaster of us, Reina included. Mark put out his free hand to fend him off, and I put out mine. We did not, either of us, let go of each other to do it. So what Benji got was a sort of group huddle, the three of us and an ice machine, Benji burrowing in, all three of us laughing, none of us willing to be the one who let go first.

“You can’t tell the others yet,” Mark said into the top of Benji’s head. “Benji, look at me. We just . . . this is twelve hours old. We haven’t even figured out what this is. You can’t—”

Benji pulled back and looked at us, tears streaking his face, absolutely radiant. I watched my request land. I watched him understand it. I watched, in real time, the dawning of the single greatest crisis of Benji’s life.

“You need me,” he said slowly, “to keep a secret?”

“Yeah.”

“This secret.” He gestured between Mark and me with his eyes.

“Just for a little while, until we figure it out. Yeah.”

“The best secret that has ever existed in the history of secrets, and you want to muzzle me?”

“Benj—”

He staggered back and gripped the prep counter, a man informed of a terminal diagnosis. “I’m going to die. You understand that? You’ve killed me. I’m going to walk out there, and in ten minutes Finn’s going to look at me, and I’ll have a face. Dante, I have never once successfully—” He turned to me, pleading, as though I might grant him mercy. “How do you do it? Teach me the wall. Teach me the floor-lamp thing. Right now. I need it.”

“You can’t learn the wall in ten minutes,” I said. “It took me thirty years and a distant father.”

“That’s not funny, Dante,” Benji wailed, and then laughed, and then wiped his face on his own sleeve.

And that was when the back door swung open and Finn walked in with a case of limes on his shoulder. Why was it always limes?

He froze.

He looked at us, the two of us still tangled against Reina. His eyes darted to Mark’s shirt, still rucked, then to Benji standing there, his face streaked with tears, like a man who’d witnessed the making of a saint. He looked for a long, unhurried moment, the case of limes still on his shoulder, then he set it down on the counter with great care, the way you set something down when you want your hands free for what’s coming next.

“Well,” Finn said.

That was all? Just, “Well.”

Where Benji had needed four hundred words, Finn needed one. Somehow the one was worse.

“Finn,” Mark started.

“No, no. Don’t let me interrupt.” He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms, settling in, a man arriving at exactly the show he’d bought tickets for months before. “Carry on. I’ll wait. I’ve only been waiting two years. What’s another minute?”

“You knew, too?” Mark said.