Page 39 of Bounced!

Mark stopped, wallet open, brow furrowed. “Pick?”

“Leather or skin.” The doorman looked him up and down, unbothered, the way you’d assess a sofa you were deciding whether to reupholster. “It’s the theme every Tuesday. You’re wearing—” He squinted at Mark’s shirt like it was a curiosity in a museum. “—a shirt. That’s a problem. You can strap into something from the box.” He nodded at a milk crate by the door that appeared to hold a tangle of used harnesses. “Or you can lose the shirt. House rule. No civilians allowed on Tuesdays. It’s why we’re popular.”

I watched Mark’s soul briefly leave his body.

“The—” Mark’s voice climbed. “The theme?”

Benji, I understood in that moment, had told Mark it was The Anchor’s busy night. Benji had not told Mark why it was their busy night. Benji was going to answer for this, and Benji was going to enjoy answering for it.

I stepped up beside him, out of the dark and into the light over the door. Mark turned and saw me in my black shirt and my leather band, and the relief that had gotten him into the truck curdled into pure betrayal.

“There’s a theme,” he said to me, like I might contradict it or produce a loophole or might do anything other than what I did, which was look at the doorman’s crate and then at Mark and fail to keep the smirk off my lips.

“There’s a theme.” I nodded in agreement.

“You knew?”

“I suspected.”

“You suspected and you let me drive over here in a—” He gestured down at himself, at the shirt he’d changed twice. His face was that of a man realizing the water was much deeper than the sign said, and the sign, additionally, was in a language he didn’t read. “Dante, I can’t take my shirt off in a bar. I’m forty-eight years old. I’m not—these people are—” He dropped to a stricken whisper, as if the doorman might not have noticed. “Everyone in here is going to see me.”

I should have been kind. I knew it then, and I know it now. I really, really meant to be kind, but the whole drive over had been me rehearsing ways to survive standing next to this man for the rest of the night, and something in me had already worn down to the wire. What came out instead, low and dry, before I could stop it, was, “Take it off, baby.”

Mark’s head snapped around like he’d been possessed.

I hadn’t meant to say, “Baby.”

Or, I had.

God help me, I’d meant it more than I’d meant anything in years, but I hadn’t meant to say it out loud. It hung there in the air between us, small and warm and impossible to take back. For one suspended second, the whole loud doorway narrowed to the two of us and the word I’d used to slap him across the cheek.

Then I did what I always did. I let my wall carry the day. I cocked an eyebrow, kept my face flat and amused, made it a joke, a wingman’s ribbing, and I watched Mark decide, gratefully, to hear it that way, because the other way was unthinkable.

“You’re enjoying this,” he accused.

“Immensely.”

“You’ve got a bracelet, and I have to get naked.”

“It’s called an armband, and you’re going shirtless. Naked might get you more attention, though.”

“I hate you. I want it on the record that I hate you.” And then Mark Delgado, forty-eight years old and mortified to the roots of his graying hair, blew out a breath, reached back over his shoulders with both hands in that maneuver every large man knows, and hauled the shirt off over his head. He then handed his ten-dollar bill to the doorman with the last shred of dignity he possessed.

“Welcome to The Anchor,” the doorman said, delighted. “Have a real good night.”

I didn’t remain composed. It wasn’t possible. I remained upright, which under the circumstances, I counted as a win. Mark stuffed the shirt into his back pocket, where it hung like a little white flag of surrender, and crossed his arms over his bare chest, which helped nothing. He looked at me with such undiluted misery that I nearly confessed everything on the spot just to wipe it all off his face.

“After you,” I said instead, motioning with one palm.

I’d stood in a great many bars. It was my job. I’d worked doors, cleared floors, read the temperature of a thousand crowds. I would have told you, before walking in, that there was nothing in Tampa that could surprise me, but The Anchor’s Tuesday-night crowd managed that Herculean feat. It was an ocean of skin and leather. That’s the only way I know to put it, a menagerie, a bestiary, a full working farm of men in configurations of hide and hardware I couldn’t, in several cases, identify or explain. There were the shirtless, of course, ranks of them, but the shirtless were the amateurs, the tourists, the Marks.

The professionals had committed in ways that made religious fanatics jealous.

There were chaps, and I don’t mean “chaps” as a figure of speech, but genuine assless leather pant-things, worn by men who’d clearly done leg day with that exact evening in mind. They moved through the crowd with the unbothered confidence of men whose entire back halves were simply a matter of public record. There were harnesses in every configuration: the simple X and the complicated web that looked like a man had lost a fight with a hardware store. One gent near the pool table wore a rig so elaborate it probably required a diagram and possibly a spotter. I called it “The IKEA Harness” in my head.

There was a great deal of studded leather. And there were caps. And there were boots that went to the thigh. And there was a man at the bar in a full leather hood with the eyes and mouth cut out, calmly sipping a ruby-red concoction through a straw. I watched Mark clock him and then very deliberately un-clock him, tucking the hooded man somewhere he’d never have to think about him again.

“Dante,” Mark said faintly.