Page 47 of Bounced!

We staggered.

He caught the counter with one hand and me with the other. We came up hard against Reina, all six-hundred-plus pounds of her. She took our combined weight with the unbothered solidity of a queen enduring her subjects. Something inside her clunked, and then, I swear before God, she began to make ice.

Mark broke off, breathing hard, and looked over my shoulder at the machine.

“We’re—” He started laughing again. “Dante, we’re making out on Rod’s baby.”

“I’m aware.”

“He courted her. He let her get to know him.”

“He puts his hand on her every morning so she’d know his touch,” I said gravely.

Mark lost it, forehead down on my shoulder, his whole frame shaking.

“We’re defiling the queen,” he wheezed. “There’s a . . . there’s a hierarchy here, Dante. We can’t just—this is Reina. She’s royalty—”

“Then she should be honored,” I said, pulling him back up by the front of his shirt. He came, still laughing. The laughing turned back into kissing. Reina dropped another perfect measure of ice into her bin like polite applause.

I stopped thinking about the machine. I stopped thinking about the door. I stopped, for the first time in longer than I could name, thinking at all.

Which was, of course, exactly when the door opened.

“So Reina’s making good—”

I have never in my life seen a human being freeze the way Benji halted in that kitchen doorway. He stepped through reading something off his phone, mid-sentence, and then the sentence died. His phone lowered. Benji stood in the doorway and took in the scene. Mark and I were tangled against six hundred pounds of appliance. Mark’s shirt was rucked up. My hands pressed against his exposed skin. Both of us stood frozen mid-crime like two raccoons caught in a trash can.

Benji’s whole face went through a sequence of events.

First, blank. The buffering face.

Then recognition.

Then a joy so total, so incandescent, so completely without mercy, that I knew we might not survive the next several minutes with any dignity intact.

“OH . . . MY . . . GOD!”

“Benji—” Mark tried to interrupt.

“OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD! OH MY GOD!”

Benji clapped both hands over his mouth.

He took them off.

He put them back.

He pointed at us, at the whole tangled situation of us.

His voice climbed into a register I’d previously only heard from locomotives. “I KNEW IT! I’ve known it. I said it. I said it to Finn. I said, ‘Those two,’ and Finn said, ‘Leave it alone, Benji,’ so I didn’t say anything. Do you understand what that cost me? Do you understand how long I’ve been sitting on this? Since the booth, Mark. Since you drank your little hangover coffee, and Dante sat with you like a Rottweiler guarding a baby—”

Mark tried again, “Um . . . okay, but—”

“—and NOW—sweet baby Jesus—now I walk in and you’re—you’re—” He gestured at all of us, unable to find the word, then finding it. “You’re canoodling on Reina!”

A day before, I would have peeled myself off Mark so fast I might’ve left scorch marks. I would’ve straightened my shirt and rebuilt my wall brick by brick and said something flat and final to make Benji’s grin scamper away.

But on that day, a day later, a day after a kiss in a leather bar I still couldn’t stop feeling throughout the whole of me, I didn’t move.