“I guess great minds think alike,” I replied.
“Yeah, they do,” Raleigh said, as he flipped his menu around for the second time.
“Having trouble choosing?” I asked.
“Nope, I’ve decided I want the crab legs,” he declared.
“Me too,” Murry replied.
“Then we’re all in agreement, again,” I said, putting in an order for three bottomless crab leg buckets, that also came with buttery ears of corn, which I knew my pets loved.
The best part about a crab leg feast was all the work you had to do to open them, which left plenty of room for conversation too and for the meal to stretch out, unlike our last indulgence.
“Can we be in agreement about going to the immersive art experience when we’re in Portland?” Raleigh asked. “I checked out the website, and the pictures showed all these glowing spaces and cool lights. I’d really like to see it in person.”
“I think we can be in agreement about that, don’t you, Murry?” I asked as he grumbled at a crab leg that wouldn’t break and give up the meat.
“That sounds cool. I’d love to see the Troll Bridge too and the Wishing Tree,” Murry grit out as he finally ripped the meat free of the shell. “Victory is mine!”
Chuckling, I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture of him waving it around triumphantly. “Thinking of hanging a wish from it?”
“I don’t know yet,” Murry replied. “Everything in my life is kind of perfect right now, so wishing for something more seems kind of selfish, but I think it would be awesome to see other people’s hopes and dreams hanging there.”
“Well, I want to hang a wish,” Raleigh said.
“Really?” I said. “And what is it my pet wishes for?”
“Somebody to love Phoenix, ‘cause he’s awesome, and I know he’s lonely now that he hasn’t been hanging out with us as much as when we worked at the club,” Raleigh said, his innocent wish turning my heart to goo.
For someone to have grown up with so little to only have wishes for someone else, or no wishes at all, was a remarkable thing in this day and age. I’d had pets in the past who truly believed that they deserved to be pampered no matter the cost, and I’d been guilty of indulging them. It’s easy to get caught up in whirlwind moments, especially when the world is at your fingertips. Living beneath the cameras' scrutiny, flashbulbs constantly going off around me, had been such a rush in my younger years. Those last few, though, before I’d stepped away to fully turn my attention to designing rather than modeling the clothes, I’d gone through a period of burnout.
“That’s a wonderful wish,” Murry said.
“It sure is,” I added.
I was on my second bucket of crab legs when it started to feel like there were eyes on me. Maybe it was years of having eyes trained my way that clued me in that I was being watched, but I could feel it and turned, eyes skimming over the faces in the room, until I spotted the offender. It took a moment to place the face and another to make up my mind what to do about it.
My pets hadn’t noticed yet, and I didn’t want their evening spoiled, so I’d have to be subtle and hope the asshole had enough home training not to make a scene in public, or things were about to get ugly.
“Excuse me,” I said as I wiped my lips and set my napkin on the table. “I need to use the restroom.”
I hoped there weren’t napkin bits stuck to my face as I crossed the room, but I wasn’t in the mood to fuck around with a wet wipe. Younger me would have been worried about bad publicity and the wrong kind of photo winding up in a magazine. Daddy me didn’t give two shits if I wound up splashed all over the evening news right now; Sean O’Leary needed to keep his eyes and thoughts off my pets.
He turned away the moment I stood and sat with his head bent over his plate when I reached his table, conversation going on all around us as I leaned to speak in his ear.
“Raleigh and Murry belong to me. If you know what’s good for you, you will never let me catch you staring at them again.”
His hands had gone still, knife and fork suspended over his plate as I straightened up and headed into the men’s room, half hoping he’d follow me in just so I could issue a harsher threat without witnesses. But as expected, he was a coward, who was sitting in his seat, silently pushing a bite of food around on his plate when I stepped out of the bathroom. The fucker actually cringed when I walked behind his chair on my return trip to my table, where Raleigh and Murry sat cheerfully cracking open crab legs and dunking them in butter.
Good, they’d missed the whole exchange, which meant they’d missed Sean being here in the first place.
“Da…err…Dorian,” Murry began as I picked up my crab cracker and prepared to dive back in. “Is it okay to call youDaddyin a place like this?”
He whispered the word, gaze darting about before he leaned closer to me to ask the question. It sucked that we lived in a world where we couldn’t just be ourselves without worryingabout other people’s responses, but I appreciated his caution in the times we lived in.
“When we’re out like this, Dorian is just fine,” I explained. “You know how I feel about ‘Mr.’—it makes me feel ancient, so I appreciate you not adding it. We know what we are to each other, and I know you aren’t being disrespectful when you say my name without adding an honorarium before it. It’s just a show for the vanilla crowd, so don’t worry about it and enjoy your crab legs because I’m about to destroy the rest of this bucket.”
He giggled at that, nodded, and happily dug back in, for half a second, before he realized that he hadn’t asked me the real question he’d had for me.
