Page 82 of Bounced!

“Another bottle,” I agreed.

While Finn ordered another, Chase told a story about a client that made Dante actually laugh, the real one, the rare one, the whole-face one. I sat at that table with its cloth napkins, between the man I loved and my best friend and his person. For one Monday night in the middle of the worst autumn of my life, I did the thing Dante told me I was allowed to do.

I just had fun.

I didn’t think about December once more the rest of the night. I didn’t worry about the future or banks or condo conversions.

And that was Dante’s gift.

He’d learned it from watching me give it to everybody else, and he’d turned around and handed it back. That, right there, was the thing I was fighting for. Not the building. Never the building. This. The whole table. These people.

There’s no number large enough for that. There’s no bank in the world that could tell me what it was worth, and no fund big enough to buy it. I’d have signed away every dollar I ever made to sit at that table for the rest of my life.

I just had to figure out how.

But not that night.

That night, I ordered dessert and let my best friend roast me. I held my boyfriend’s hand on top of the table where everyone could see.

And I was, against all odds, stupidly happy.

Chapter 27

Dante

I’d stopped sleeping, but for the first time in my life, it wasn’t the bad kind.

The bad kind I knew. I’d lived with it for years, running the reel of every way a thing could go wrong. This was different. This was my mind going the other direction, forward instead of back, building instead of bracing.

I’d wake at three and reach for the notebook I’d started keeping on the nightstand. By the end of the week, my little notebook had forty pages.

Mark thought money was the problem. Finn thought money was the problem. And they weren’t wrong, exactly. Two million dollars was a ridiculous sum, and we were just six people with a jar, but they were looking at the one thing we didn’t have and forgetting to count what we did.

People.

For seven years, this bar had been open. That was seven years of weddings announced at the taps and breakups cried through at the end of the counter, seven Thanksgivings for the ones who couldn’t go home and seven Christmases for those who realized they were already home. We’d accumulated seven years of drag brunches and hockey nights and the memorial we held for a regular named Tomás who didn’t have anybody else to hold one.

Barbacks wasn’t a building or a place or just a bar.

It was a congregation.

I’d spent two years standing at the door of it, watching every single person who walked through. I knew this place was loved by hundreds, maybe thousands, of people—and people who loved a thing would fight for it if somebody gave them a way.

There was something else nobody at that bar knew about me, not even Mark.

Twenty years ago, I was going to be somebody. I attended Florida State on a full ride as a linebacker. I was a good one, good enough that men in suits started showing up at my games with their cards out. I was fast, and I was mean on the field, and I could read an offense the way I’d later learn to read a room. I could see a play before it happened and know where everyone was going before they went.

Everybody told me I’d go pro.

Everybody.

My father, for the one stretch of my life he was proud of me, told the whole church I would do it.

Still, I walked away. Not because I got hurt. That’s the story I let people assume. The truth was, I stood in a stadium with sixty thousand people screaming my name and understood, deep down, that I didn’t want the life at the end of that road. I didn’t want all those eyes on me, the being known. I wanted quiet. I wanted books and a door and a life nobody could get their hands around. So, I took the thing I was best at—leading, being the one the others followed—and I put it in a box. I closed that box, and I became a man who stood in doorways and let the world walk past.

I told myself that was strength. It took a bar full of people I wasn’t supposed to love—and a man who made my tea—to show me it was just another kind of hiding.

Lying there at three in the morning with my notebook, I felt the old Dante wake up. I felt the captain, the guy who could look at a field full of chaos and see the pattern, the pressure point, the place to push. I’d spent twenty years making sure that man never got out again, but he was exactly the man this fight needed.