by TJ Klune
Kori turned her head to glare at me. “This is all your fault.”
I rolled my eyes. “I notice how you’re not exactly fighting him off.”
“He’s warm.”
“That’s because I’m like sunshine,” Vince said cheerfully. “That’s also what Paul tells me.”
“Jesus, you guys are so gross,” Kori moaned. “I didn’t ask for any of this, just so you—I didn’t say you could move.” She reached up and pulled Vince back down when he tried to sit up.
“People like it when I lay on them,” Vince told me.
“Usually, it’s for another reason entirely,” I said. “So you better not be lying on other people.”
“Hey,” Kori said. “What about me? Aren’t you just seething with jealousy right now? Your man is all up in my business.”
“I like you like I would if I had a little sister,” Vince said seriously. “Except when you’re boy Corey, and then it’s like you’re my little brother.”
Kori gaped up at him before looking at me. “You’re lucky you’re locking this shit down when you are. How has he not been eaten alive?”
I shrugged. “A combination of mitigating circumstances, dumb luck, and the fact that he’s oblivious to most things.”
“I often don’t know what’s going on,” Vince announced. “It’s cool. I’m used to it. This one time, I was at a frat party and everyone wanted to go skinny-dipping, so I took off my pants and jumped in the pool. For some reason, everyone else didn’t get naked but just watched me swim instead.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Kori asked.
“Dunno,” Vince said. “I just like swimming naked, I guess.”
“Okay,” Kori said. “You need to get off me now. Paul’s getting that look on his face he gets when he’s thinking about doing the nasty with you. I do not want him to come over here and sit on me too and eat on your face. There is only so much of your bullshit I can take today, and between you two and the dicks in the kitchen, my limit is about to be reached.”
I scowled at Kori. “I am not getting that look.”
“Sex face,” Vince said smugly. “I make him make that face.”
“Off,” Kori grunted, shoving at Vince. “Off, off, off.”
“Are you bitches just lying here?” Sandy demanded as he walked into the living room, Darren trailing behind him looking cool and aloof like a Homo Jock King should. But I wasn’t fooled by him anymore, not with the way his hair was mussed like he’d had someone running their fingers through it. Nor by the way there were these little cracks in his façade of douchedom when he looked at my best friend, his expression soft and sweet. It was really rather disconcerting to see it, but I was getting used to it. “We have so much work to do!”
Vince hoisted himself off Kori and stood next to the couch. “When I left the kitchen, Darren’s hands were on your ass and you were talking about his chin.”
Sandy blinked. Then, “Oh. Well. I have a nice ass and he has a nice chin.”
“Gross,” Kori groaned again.
“We should get moving,” Darren said, sounding bored. “It’s not like I have all day.”
Sandy snorted. “Yeah, because you have so much else going on, bae. Stop acting like an ass because we all know you want nothing more than to take your brother out to get fitted for his suit for the wedding.”
“I don’t see why you get to go,” Darren said. “I’m his best man. You didn’t let me go when Paul got his suit.”
“I’m going,” Sandy said, voice sticky-sweet, “because you two dude-bros cannot be trusted to pick out something that I would consider appropriate. This isn’t your ten-year frat reunion, Dare. You’re not allowed to show up in cargo shorts, a backward baseball cap, a soul patch on your chin, and an undeserved sense of accomplishment. This wedding will be perfect, it will go off without a hitch, and everyone will look as good as they possibly can because I dressed them. Do we understand each other?”
“Is it possible to be a bridezilla when you’re not the bride?” Kori whispered to me.
I shrugged, because I’d learned rather quickly to not interrupt Sandy when he got like this. It made life easier.
“I never had a soul patch,” Darren said, sounding annoyed.
“Did you at any point in your life have blond highlights in your hair?”
“Well, there was that one summer in undergrad that—”
“And did you ever own a braided belt and wear it without being ironic?”
“I liked that belt. I got it on spring break in Tijuana when we—”
“Thank you for proving my point,” Sandy said, then kissed Darren on the cheek.
“How is that proving your point?” Darren asked. He was trying to scowl, but I could see the way his lips quirked, the way his hands settled on Sandy’s waist.
“You’re a dude-bro,” Sandy said slowly. “And therefore cannot be trusted. I’m getting the final say on Vince’s suit because I have better taste than you.”
“You do not.”
“Foot-long Subway sandwich models,” Sandy said, deadpan.
“That was one time. And I’ve never even talked to him since. It’s not like my one-night stand is going to be a groomsman in my brother’s wedding. Oh wait, right. That’s your one-night stand.”
“It’s not my fault Vince is friends with Brian. That’s all on you homo jocks. You guys are like the worst high school clique. Like Mean Girls, except with your big ol’ manly bitties.”
“I told you not to call them that,” Darren grumbled, blushing slightly. Which, if you didn’t know the Homo Jock King like we did, you would have thought impossible.
“Your chesticles?”
“Sandy,” he warned.
“Leave,” Kori said. “Seriously. All of you. Get out.”
“This is my house?” I asked, confused.
“And mine,” Vince said proudly. “Because I live here too. In sin.” He waggled his eyebrows.
“Fine,” Kori said. “Sandy, Darren, and Vince need to get the hell out. Paul, you can stay, but you need to keep your mouth shut.”
“I don’t know if that’s—”
“Paul.”
“The only reason I’ll do it is because of my white guilt,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if my ancestors once owned your ancestors. It would be just my luck if I descended from assholes.”
“I’ll allow it,” Kori said with a sniff, tucking a lock of her hair behind her ear. “Lord knows being blaxican is hard enough, what with my preternaturally smooth skin, beautiful hair, and ability to make white people feel responsibility for something that happened a long time ago.”
“I don’t feel responsible,” Darren said, just because he was still an asshole sometimes.
“Your shirt made of cotton?”
“Aaaand there’s the guilt,” Darren said. “Okay, time to go.”
Sandy came over and kissed my cheek. “Don’t worry,” he said in a low voice. “You know I’ll make him look good.”
I rolled my eyes. “Not worried. No feathers or bedazzled anything.”
“I am a queen. There has to be something—”
“Sandy.”
“Fine. Be boring. See if I care.”
“When it’s your turn, you can do whatever you want.”
“Damn right I will. It’s going to be the wedding of the century. You’ll see. Darren will look—why do you keep making me do that? I am not thinking about marrying Darren!”
“Still standing right here,” Darren said.
Sandy scowled at everyone in the room. “Whatever. Darren, pull the car around.”
“I’m not your—”
“Say good-bye, Vince.”
“Good-bye, Vince.”
“No, I meant say good-bye to every—you know what, I’ll go with Darren to get the car. Paul and Kori, I will see you at the club tonight. Vince, you have one minute to get in the car before I come back in and shove my foot so far up your ass, you’ll taste my pedicure.”
&n
bsp; And then he stormed out in the way only a drag queen could: in a cloud of glitter, sass, and an air of completely deserved superiority.
“I’m not into foot play, though,” Vince said with a frown. “At least, I don’t think I am. Paul, am I into feet?”
“I honestly have no idea.”
“Huh. Well. Something else to add to the list to try.”
“So gross,” Kori whispered.
Vince kissed me soundly, patted Kori on the head, picked up his wallet and phone, and moved toward the door. “Also, Paul?”
“Yeah?”
“I saw what you were working on. I’m already done with mine. You’re going down, motherfucker. Prepare to drown in an ocean of your tears.”
And then he slammed the door behind him.
Which, of course, caused a two-legged dog with a cart attached to his butt to lose his shit and start yipping wildly as he ran down the hallway from the bedroom, trying to tell me that the door closed, daddy, that fucking door closed and who is here and let me bark at them even though I could be easily picked up and punted like a football.
“Wheels!” I bellowed. “Shut it!”
Wheels did, in fact, shut it, and decided he was better off rolling over to me and snorting at my feet until I picked him up and held him in my lap. Not a hardship by any stretch of the imagination. Two-legged dogs usually weren’t. I detached the cart from his butt, and his tongue lolled out of his mouth as he lay on his back, reveling in the belly scratches I gave him.
“What are you working on?” Kori asked me.
“Hmm?”
“Vince threatened you.”
“Oh. Right. Yeah, he does that sometimes.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We have a bet going,” I said, frowning down at the paper before me.
“Another one? I thought you said that you wouldn’t do that with him anymore, seeing as how your last bet turned him, and I quote, into a power hungry monster I no longer recognized as my one true love.”
“I don’t know that I said anything like that at all.”
She waved her hand at me dismissively. “Maybe not out loud, but said it with your eyebrows.”
I covered my eyebrows with my hand, suddenly self-conscious that they were giving everything away. “This bet is different. I only made it because I know I’m going to win.”
Kori snorted. “Because that’s fair.”
“It is.”
“What’s the bet?”
“We would each write our own wedding vows, and whoever cries first when we’re reciting them loses.”
There was silence at that. I looked up from Wheels to find Kori staring at me.
“What?”
“You bet that you could make the other cry because of your wedding vows.”
“Damn right we did. And I am going to emotionally devastate that asshole. Like full-on snot and tears. You know when you cry so hard, you can’t really catch your breath and you feel like you’re going to throw up? Yeah. That’s what I’m going for.”
“You’re trying to make it so he vomits at the altar because he’s crying so hard?”
“Exactly.”
“Your relationship is so weird. I have to know more. What have you got so far?”
“Oh. Um.” I looked down at the paper on the desk.
My heart has a soul, and that belongs to you in addition to my other soul
You are my world, and I want to travel in you for the rest of my days
My loneliness was killing me, and I must confess, I still believe (still believe) that I love you a whole lot
You are my moon and my stars and I want to be a comet in your universe
“It’s still a work in progress,” I said.
“You have no idea, do you?”
“None at all,” I agreed. “But I’ll get there. Trust me, it’ll be worth it when Vince throws up on whatever shoes Sandy picks out.” I glanced at the clock on the wall. “Need to meet Daddy for lunch. Wanna go with?”
Kori looked down at her homework and sighed. “I really need to get started on this paper.”
“There will be alcohol.”
She didn’t even hesitate. “Fuck my future. I’m in.”
CHARLIE WAS already waiting for us outside Molly’s, a little café on 4th Avenue a few blocks down from Jack It. We probably would have gone to Poco’s, but they’d closed temporarily due to a health department violation. Turned out that a waiter there—who only went by the name Santiago—was found getting gangbanged in the kitchen next to open containers of food, which was apparently frowned upon. It would supposedly be reopened in the summer, and even though there was a chance I had accidentally eaten some of his bodily fluids, I couldn’t help but be somewhat gleeful at the prospect of him getting fired. If anyone deserved to be fired (and then made the poster child for why we should bring back the firing squad), it was Santiago.
Charlie wore a leather jacket that stretched across his broad shoulders and steel-toed boots that I was sure had been licked at some point in their existence. He was old and maybe he didn’t move as fast as he once did, but Charlie was a leather daddy through and through, and he was intimidating as all fuck if you didn’t know him.
But if you did, you knew he was the biggest softie in the world, as evidenced by the smile on his wrinkled face when he saw us.
“Boy,” he said as we approached him. He leaned in and gave me a rough kiss on the cheek.
“Hi, Daddy,” I said. “Sorry we’re late.”
“My lady,” he said to Kori, bringing her hand to his lips. “You look as lovely as usual.”
Kori giggled. “Thank you, Charlie. You look like you’re going to strap someone to a sawhorse and make them count out loud while you spank them.”
“Eh,” he said. “Probably use a paddle. Arthritis doesn’t let me do a whole lot of spankings these days.”
“Who are you paddling?” I asked, narrowing my eyes.
“Table’s ready and waiting for us,” Charlie said easily. “Just waiting on you two to go sit.”
“I’m onto you, old man,” I told him as he held the door to Molly’s open. “Don’t you think I’ll forget this.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said dryly. “Between you and Sandy, I doubt anything has ever been forgotten. Not that there’s anything to be known.”
“Hmm,” I said. “I need to contemplate if you’re lying or not.”
The hostess led us to a table in the corner next to the window out onto 4th Avenue. She handed us the menus before smiling and disappearing.
“Vince at his fitting?” Charlie asked me, sipping on a glass of ice water.
“Yeah. I don’t know why I couldn’t go to his or he couldn’t be at mine, but Sandy said it’s more romantic this way. Bitch has got a boyfriend for like three months and now he knows what romance is. I call bullshit.”
“How’d yours look?”
I pulled out my phone and flipped through a couple of photos before handing it over to Charlie. Kori crowded over his shoulder, not having seen it before either. She’d been in class when we’d gone, much to her consternation.
Charlie whistled low. “Wow, boy. You clean up good.”
“Very good,” Kori said. “I’d hit the crap out of that.”
I rolled my eyes, not trying to show how pleased I was at that. “You don’t think I look too fat?” I asked. “Because I’ve been trying to cut a few pounds for the wedding and I’m not doing a very good job with it. It’s stressful, you know? More stressful than I thought it would be. It’s not—”
“You look wonderful,” Charlie said sternly. “And you don’t need to lose any weight. I don’t know why you think you do. You’re a big guy, Paul, and you carry it well. That’s who you are. Vince fell in love with you for you. You don’t need to change for him or for anyone else. If you want to do it for you, then good. That’s your decision. But you know anything else is bullshit.”
“But the whole double-chin thing, though.”
&
nbsp; “I think pretty much everyone has a double chin if they try hard enough,” Kori said.
I scowled at her. “Says the skinniest thing I know.”
She shrugged. “You wouldn’t want to be my kind of skinny. You’re a big dude, Paul. And Charlie was right. You carry it well. Seriously, Vince isn’t going to know what hit him when he sees you for the first time. I guarantee you’re going to win the bet.”
“Of course there’s a bet,” Charlie sighed.
“Nothing bad,” Kori said. “Just who is going to cry first.”
“Oh. That’s okay, I guess.”
“And they are trying to write vows that will make the other cry.”
“And there it is,” Charlie said. “Because nothing is ever easy, is it?”
“Hey,” I said. “This is normal. I’m pretty sure every couple tries to make the other cry on their wedding day. It’s tradition.”
“I don’t know if that’s quite how it works,” Charlie said slowly.
“It’s the new normal,” I said. “Gay marriage has been legal for less than a year. For all we know, this same thing is happening at every gay wedding.”
“Pretty sure others aren’t making their wedding a competition,” Kori said. “But it wouldn’t be us if something funky wasn’t happening.”
The waitress came by, and I tried to get away with ordering a half a house salad and a skinny margarita, but Charlie and Kori glared at me until I gave in and got a bacon cheeseburger and a Bloody Mary like I wanted. They didn’t have to glare very hard. I felt like a failure. But then the waitress brought mozzarella sticks as an appetizer and I didn’t feel like such a failure because I would rather have melted cheese in my mouth than a smaller waist any day of the week.
“Is there going to be a rehearsal?” Charlie asked, nursing his beer.
“Eh,” I said. “It was just one more thing I didn’t think we needed. How hard can getting married be that we need to rehearse? Mom is going to walk Vince down the aisle and Dad is going to walk with me, though they don’t know it yet, so keep your mouths shut. Biff, Chet, Xerxes, Brian, and Darren will be up on Vince’s side. You, Kori, Sandy, Nana, and Wheels will be up on my side. The official will speak for like two seconds, I’ll unleash the most devastating vows anyone has ever heard and everyone will vomit-cry, Vince will say something that won’t compare, he’ll give me a ring, I’ll give him a ring, and then we kiss and we’re married. And then we can go get drunk and dance with our friends and family. The only thing stupid I agreed to do was to go to that damn dance class next weekend with Vince to learn to waltz. I don’t know why I agreed to it, but he had a Groupon, and you know how that’s my weakness.”