Luke smiled and tried not to make it toothy. "I'm six five. It's hard to rent something in my size."
This time he heard the words behind him clearly: "Sixfive?" That was, he thought, Gina, though it could have been Jan, as atfirst glance they were almost indistinguishable. One was taller, and the other, oranger, but he didn't know which was which yet, and only one of them was in the car, so if he said a name out loud and got it wrong everybody would know it. At least Mindy, being a redhead, was easy to remember, and both Keana and her boyfriend Cole were brown-skinned and dark-haired, which made them identifiable in the crowd of mostly-blond white people. In fact, everybody else, including Sabrina, was one shade of blond or another. Luke was another odd man out, with his brown hair and eyes.
"He can reach all the tall shelves," Sabrina said lightly. "I had no idea what I was missing until I started dating somebody with fifteen inches on me."
The silence after she dropped that was absolutelydeafening, until Gina-Jan behind them broke it with a shrill giggle. Sabrina met Luke's gaze just long enough for her sparkling eyes to say she knewexactlywhat she'd done there as she turned toward the back seats. Her expression was miraculously innocent, then shocked as she pretended to process what had made her friend laugh. "Oh myGod, Gina, what do you think Imeant!"
So that one was Gina. Luke also twisted, trying to look as innocent and confused as Sabrina had, to see that Gina was the one with the bad fake tan, which was currently a truly unusual shade as she blushed beneath it. Her—husband, Luke concluded with a quick look at their wedding-banded fingers. Her husband Tom was a slim guy with great hair, one of those styles Luke thought was called a wolf cut, with ragged edges and possibly genuine, sun-made, almost-white highlights in the gold shag. He looked like he couldn't decide which was more powerful: the alluded-to fifteen-inch threat to his masculine dignity, or his amusement at the entire exchange.
Gina, still shrill, said, "You know exactly what I thought you meant! You did that on purpose!"
"I'm pretty sure you told me ages ago that I was too dedicated to my job to know a dirty joke if I stepped in one," Sabrina said, cheerfully now. "So you're probably giving me too much credit, is all I'm saying. Anyway, Luke's not my physical trainer, no, but if you want he can probably give you a few pointers over the weekend." She shuddered, and Luke didn't think it was entirely theatrical. "Although he likes exercising early, so you might have to hit the gym before we even go to bed, if previous parties are any indication."
"Oh, God, no," Craig said. "We're too old for those all-nighters anymore. We're going to have a nice sedate bachelor's party tonight and be in bed by midnight."
It was three-thirty in the morning, and Luke was pretty confident the bachelor's party was never going to end. His rabbit had checked out hours ago, no longer interested in trying to keep up with the humans. Particularly humans who wanted to be in very loud environments, drinking weird alcoholic concoctions.
Luke could more or less cope with the music, avoided the alcohol, and was mostly relieved they were doing a bar-slash-casino-crawl instead of hitting up any of Vegas's notorious strip clubs. He'd spent about fifty bucks on slots, ten or so at each place they'd landed at, and had somehow come out about fifteen hundred dollars ahead. As a result, he was buying all the drinks, which was making him very popular among The Boys, and also making it much easier to disguise the fact that although he was getting the rounds, he wasn't drinking much of anything himself.
They were, as far as he could tell, generally a decent bunch of men. None of them were ogling other women or behavinglike neanderthals, or worse, trolls. Theywerehaving a lot of good laughs over times and experiences they'd shared that Luke obviously hadn't, but he didn't mind that: watching other people have fun was a kind of fun in itself. And best of all, nobody seemed inclined to grill him on his relationship with Sabrina, although literally as soon as he thought that, Tom leaned over to grin at him. "The Girls had a bet that you didn't exist, you know that, right?"
"I'd gathered," Luke said wryly. "What about you guys?"
Craig had somehow managed to overhear, and leaned in, too. "I was hedging my bets, but I was way less surprised than Mindy. The thing is, once you'reinwith that group, there's no escape."
Luke laughed. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"
The other four men exchanged glances before Derek, eyebrows lifted, said, "Mostly good. Sometimes overwhelming, though. Jan brought me out to lunch with the whole pack of them, even Sabrina, on ourseconddate. I thought they'd tear me to shreds."
He was about six feet tall and built like a power lifter, with his blond hair shorn short and no-nonsense. Luke, easily, said, "You don't look like you shred easily," and Derek snickered.
"Only when surrounded by women with their claws out. I survived, and afterward asked why she'd done that, and she said 'Spice Girls.'"
Luke blinked, then couldn't help laughing as he figured it out. "Gotta get along with her friends, right? Yeah, that makes sense. But why 'even' Sabrina?"
"She moved farther away than anybody else," Cole said with an easy shrug. He wasn't as big a man as Luke, but Luke wouldn't want to get into a drinking contest with him, because he'd had a Long Island ice tea at every bar they'd hit, and wasn't the slightest bit unsteady on his feet or in his speech. "Harder for her to get back to judge the boyfriends. Harder forher boyfriends to be judged by us. Or the Girls," he corrected himself. "Wedon't judge."
Luke's eyebrows went up. "No?"
"Except that one guy," Tom said into his next beer. "The one Jan dated a while back. Before Derek. Obviously. But mostly they've got pretty great taste in dudes." He gestured at the table, indicating his friends, and they offered themselves a round of applause for being great. Luke joined in, grinning.
"Keana, on the other hand," Cole said, "didn't introduce me to The Girls for almost ayear. But she did talk about me, I guess. Sent pictures. 'Cause I'm too pretty to resist."
He got a series of hoots and staged applause for his confidence before the entire crew of them turned to examine Luke with a critical eye. "I dunno," Derek said after an appraising minute. "Luke might be even prettier than you, Cole, and Sabrina resisted sending pics ofhim."
"He's notthatpretty," Cole said, offended, and the others cackled.
"We haven't been dating very long," Luke pointed out. "Give her another three months to start sending random pictures of me to the group chat. Although maybe sooner, now that you've actually met me, I guess." He didn't want to think about the fact that he was very much supposed to be out of the picture three months from now, at least by the rules of fake dating. Even knowing fate had its hand in the situation wasn't enough of a reassurance.
"Yeah." Craig leaned forward again, dangling his drink from his fingertips as he met Luke's eyes. "This is the part where we put the fear of God into you, okay? The whole 'don't break her heart' speech and all."
"It's the farthest thing from my mind," Luke said absolutely honestly. "She's just phenomenal."
"And she's got high standards," Craig said. "Unlike, say, Gina."
"Hey!" Tom mimed throwing his beer at Craig, who grinned unrepentantly
"Am I wrong, though?"
