“Okay. What size ring does she wear?”
Why did everyone always assume he meant a woman? Girl needed to catch up with the times. “This ishis.” Lucky placed Bo’s high school ring on the counter.
The clerk’s smile faltered, then bloomed into a grin. “Too cool! Do you want a matching band?”
Did he? Decisions, decisions. He’d not worn rings in years. But if making a leap, might as well go whole hog. “Yeah.”
The clerk dropped Bo’s ring on some kind of measuring stick. “Do you know your size or need me to measure?”
“Do what?”
“Do you know your size?” She held up a bunch of rings, tied to another stick by tiny chains.
His what? Oh. His ring size. He must be tired. For a moment there… He stuck out his left hand and tried to hold still while being fitted.
The girl dropped to her knees on the other side of the counter, leaving Lucky to study the cotton candy colored streaks on the top of her head until she stood up again. Why was everyone in the whole damned world taller than him?
The traditional-looking bands she offered weren’t eye catching, but they’d do the trick.
While Lucky whipped out his credit card, the woman rang up his purchases, smiling so hard her face had to ache. And not the phony “let my sell you something” smile he expected. Once or twice, she even did a little wriggling thing. He’d backed away from the counter, gearing up to fight back against some kind of homophobic slur. He was still in Georgia, right?
She handed him the tiny bag holding two boxed rings. “If you need a cake or anything and don’t want to deal with the ‘we don’t serve your kind here’ bullshit, go to the Sugar is Sweet but Our Cakes Are Sweeter bakery on Peach Tree Street. They’ll hook you right up.”
Cake? Oh, crap. Weddings. Cake. Guests. Churches. Someone willing to marry two men. Thank God the laws had changed, making his cockamamie scheme even somewhat doable.
He paid for a pack of Oreos at the front of the store on his way out the door. When the going got tough, the tough resorted to junk food.
Since they’d moved in together, Bo’d learned all of Lucky’s hiding places for cookies and potato chips. And what he didn’t find, Moose did. Big furry snack stealer. But if Lucky bought goodies at the store and wolfed them down in the car…
He drove the long way home, taking deep breaths to calm his nerves, and munching cookies. “Look, Bo,” he told the dashboard, “I’ve been thinking…” No, wouldn’t work. Bo might say, “I hope you didn’t sprain anything.” Oh, wait. He’d say that, not Bo.
At the next red light, he tried again. “Bo, you know how you always talked about forever?”
And he sure wasn’t going to say, “You should marry me to keep my piece of shit brother from trying to pick your pockets after I take my last breath.”
The sky had begun to pink around the edges when Lucky pulled his Camaro into the driveway. He sat for a few minutes, breathing in and out.
No one in their right mind would call him a good catch. Not with his past, total lack of couth, and fly-by-the-seat-of-his-pants method of planning for the future.
Hey, if it wasn’t broke, why fix it?
But it was broke if Lucky’s actions slopped over on the best man he’d ever met. He didn’t deserve Bo, pure and simple. But the guy hadn’t run screaming yet.
The kitchen, Bo’s domain, quite frankly baffled the hell out of Lucky most days. This morning he managed not make too much of a mess stirring batter from a boxed mix and making pancakes, even if he did have to banish the dog and cat the third time they tried to double-team him and steal a few of the finished product.
The coffee burbling in the coffeemaker might not come close to Bo’s, but hey. No such thing as bad coffee unless he counted the horrible shit Keith made at work.
“Oh, something smells good!” Bo strode into the coffee-and-pancake scented kitchen in a pair of nylon running shorts, scratching his belly.
Damn! Lucky hoped to serve him breakfast in bed. But he sure looked fine in next to nothing. Lucky popped a decaf green tea K-cup into Bo’s one cup machine.
One quick fall to the floor, a grab and a pull of the waistband, and Lucky’d wrap his mouth around something a whole lot more interesting than the misshapen pancakes he placed on a plate.
Bo did a double take. “You’re cooking?”
“You think I can’t cook?” It’s not like Bo didallthe cooking.
“Yes, but your idea of cooking usually involves a grill and animal parts drowned in barbeque sauce.”
