Page 90 of Bounced!

And Tyler loved every wet second of it.

Grant caught me again near the stage, as the band kicked into something brassy. The stage lights blinked from gold to blue and back. “One real question,” he said, and his grin went a notch more serious, the advocate under the party boy. “For the piece. The developer’s line is that this is just business, that it’s a building, that people are being sentimental about a bar, but that will pass when they see the beautiful condos in the works. Some of my readers are going to half agree with them. So tell me, what makes this worth the fight? Why does a bar matter this much? There are plenty of other bars right there, down Seventh, dozens of them.”

I looked down Seventh Avenue before I answered, down the whole length of it, then I took in our event, our block, with the band and the birds and the dogs and the terrified chihuahua and Rod’s Toasties and Tyler’s dripping pecs on his throne. I looked at the families and the old men and every stranger who’d come to stand in a road for us.

“Barbacks isn’t just a bar,” I said. “That’s the thing they get wrong on purpose, because a bar’s easy to knock down and feel fine about. Look around, Grant. Every person on this street found somebody in that place. They found a friend or a husband or a whole family. Every person here found a special place to not be alone on a Tuesday or to not feel lonely on another day.”

I blinked away moisture in my eyes.

Damn allergies.

Grant, kind Grant, pretended not to notice.

“That man over there met the love of his life doing lease paperwork. Those two got married. This whole neighborhood has been quietly saving each other’s lives in that building for seven years, and nobody wrote it down. None of that shows up on the developer’s spreadsheet. All of that’s worth the fight. It’s not the walls or the sign that makes the place special. It’s what the walls have been holding, what they’ve witnessed.” I looked at him. “You want to know why some random bar matters so much? It doesn’t—but this one does. Print that.”

Grant stopped writing and stared at me for a second.

“Oh, that’s the headline,” he said quietly. “That’s the whole headline.”

I’ve always hated secrets. I could keep them, sure. My lips could close tighter than a new gay’s pucker. Still, the idea of keeping things from others, especially Mark, felt wrong on every level. And yet, there was one thing I did that night that I didn’t tell Mark about. I’m not proud of the sneaking, but I’m not sorry either.

I’d taken his drawings.

Two days before, while Mark was in the shower, I’d slid his mixed-use plans out of the folder on his shelf, the beautiful ones Meridian had killed, and I’d made a copy of every page, along with the community numbers I’d been keeping, the foot traffic, the petition names, the whole case for why this corner was worth more alive than dead. I hadn’t known yet what I meant to do with them. I only knew that a thing that good shouldn’t die in a folder on a shelf. I’d learned the hard way, thanks largely to the people laughing and drinking around me, that you don’t let valuable things go just because someone told you, “No,” once.

So, when I spotted Skyler alone at the edge of the lot, watching the party with his still, assessing quiet, I went straight to him. I don’t fully know why.

“Got a minute?” I asked.

He looked at me, then he looked at the manila envelope under my arm. Something in his face sharpened. “Yeah, I’ve got a minute.”

I handed him the envelope, still sealed. “That’s Mark’s plan, the one the fund killed. It’s got all the numbers behind why they’re wrong, too. I’m not asking you for anything. I don’t even know what I’m asking for. I just—” I glanced back toward the party, toward the big, gray shape of Mark laughing with a cluster of regulars, oblivious and happy. Something in my chest pulled tight. “He can’t know I gave you this. He’s decided it’s dead, and he’ll fight me if he thinks I’m keeping it alive behind his back, but I thought you should have it, just in case . . . hell . . . I don’t even know.”

Skyler held the envelope a moment, then he tucked it inside his jacket, out of sight, and gave me a small nod, one guarded man to another, a nod that said he understood exactly what it was to work a thing quietly for someone you loved.

“Just in case,” he agreed.

And that was all either of us said about it.

I slipped back into the light before Mark could wonder where I’d gone.

There was a moment, late, when the sun had set and the band’s music had turned soft, that belonged only to Mark and me. The party was still roaring, but Mark caught my hand and pulled me into the dark slot between the bar and the building next door, the narrow alley where the light didn’t quite reach. For a second, it was just the two of us with the whole beautiful noise of it on the other side of that wall, the band and the crowd and our entire world going off twenty feet away.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I needed a second, just one second of being yours before I go back to being everyone’s.” He put his forehead against mine, and his hand found the back of my neck. “You did this, Dante. You know that? You did all of this, the street, the people, the damn birds. You built this out of a notebook and forty pages and not sleeping and your foolish, beautiful, stubborn mind.”

“We built it,” I rasped, because my throat had suddenly become tight.

Damn allergies.

“We built it.” He said the next word the way he’d been saying it for weeks now, still a little careful, still a little amazed he was allowed. “Ours.”

“Ours,” I barely managed.

“I love you so damn much, Dante Pierce.”