Page 99 of Bounced!

It happened in his spine first, in his shoulders, some knot in him releasing a degree at a time. His arms came up and out like a man discovering he owned arms, and he began to move across the floor like a sea that had suddenly calmed enough to cross.

He danced meeting somebody’s eyes across a crowded bar.

He danced the first time you laugh at something and realize you’ve relaxed without noticing.

He danced belonging, the slow, astonished dawn of it, and I felt my own throat close because he was dancing my two years. He was dancing the exact thing that had happened to me in this room against my will. He danced my every intention, and he’d never once heard me say a word about it. He just knew.

And he danced joy.

Ordinary joy, the stupid daily kind, and it was funny, even, a lightness coming into his feet and to the music. A sound went through the crowd that was half a laugh and half a sob, because we recognized that joy, the good, ordinary joy of a Tuesday at a bar where Benji knows your drink.

And then, without warning, he danced the grief.

The music turned under him, and his body folded. I watched the last three months move through him.

The news.

The fight.

The losing.

It was unbearable, yet no one looked away.

He danced the thing we were all doing right that second, saying goodbye to a place that had taught us all how to be a person, how to open our arms, how to love.

Tears were falling down his own cheeks now. He let them, didn’t wipe them, danced right through them.

I looked around the bar.

Benji had both hands pressed flat over his mouth, tears pouring over his knuckles.

Chase had given up entirely.

Finn, our unshakeable Finn, wept without any attempt to hide it, one hand over his heart like he was holding it in.

Jacks had his face pressed into Skyler’s shoulder, and even the captain wept.

Peter, who never showed one bit of emotion, had gone still and wet-eyed.

Even Grant Harmon, who wrote about this city for a living, had stopped pretending to be a reporter and simply cried.

And Rod.

Rod stood in his kitchen doorway with a dish towel forgotten in one hand. He cried like something had cracked open in the deepest part of him. This proud, clipped, unsentimental man, who measured his love in trays of food and never once said it out loud, stood there and wept at what Adrian had made, because Adrian had reached into all of us and found the thing none of us could say.

He said the entirety of it, without speaking a single word.

Beside me, Mark had gone still as stone, tears trickling into his gray beard. He reached over without looking, took my hand, and held on to it like a man holding on to a railing.

Adrian brought it home slowly.

The music thinned to almost nothing, one note at a time.

He came back to where he’d started, low to the floor, curled, closed, a man alone again, the way we’d all come in, the way, in three weeks, we’d all go back out into a city with no Barbacks in it.

But at the very end, on the last note, he didn’t stay closed.

He reached one hand out along the floor, open, palm up. He reached toward all of us, reaching for the thing even as it ended. Then he laid the flat of his other hand against the floorboards, gently, the way you’d lay a hand on the chest of someone you loved, feeling for a heartbeat you already knew you were about to lose.