by Eden Winters
The moment he’d met the guy he should have shocked Walter, got down on one knee, and begged Bo to be a part of his life forever.
Well, better late than never.
Instead of slipping into the bedroom and risking disturbing Bo, Lucky showered and shaved in the guest bath and padded through the kitchen to the laundry room. Those jeans weren’t too dirty. Nope, not reusing underwear. Commando, then.
His faded black Pink Floyd T-shirt passed the sniff test, and he shoved his feet into the amazingly unchewed boots he’d left by the back door. Moose must be slipping to miss accidental leather chew toys.
The better stores weren’t open, but one shining beacon of whatever he wanted whenever he wanted stayed open twenty-four seven. Maybe he’d luck out and find something decent and act fast before nerves or self-doubt talked him out of his chosen course of action.
Only having to drive four miles helped him keep his resolve.
Except for the occasional earrings or necklace for his sister, he’d never approached the jewelry counter in this store, and he damned well couldn’t afford the place he’d shopped back when he’d used someone else’s credit card.
Something not too tacky. Somewhat tasteful. Should he buy two alike or contrasting ones? Did Bo like white gold or yellow? What if he preferred silver?
Lucky circled the jewelry counter a few times. Maybe if he prowled around enough times, other choices might miraculously appear. It never worked when he stalked the fridge but, hey, who knew? After a few minutes, a clerk strolled down the aisle and behind the counter, in time to catch Lucky on his knees with his nose pressed to the glass display case. A man on a mission didn’t have time for embarrassment.
The clerk bent over the counter. “Oh, sorry! I was on my break. Can I help you?”
Lucky owned socks older than this girl. In fact, most of his socks were older than this girl. “I’m looking for wedding bands.”
The kid grinned, showing a full set of braces. “Aww… isn’t that sweet?” She unlocked the case from the inside and pulled out a tray of diamond engagement rings.
“Um… Nothing like that. I need bands.”
“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 is his.” 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 did all the cooking.
“Yes, but your idea of cooking usually involves a grill and animal parts drowned in barbeque sauce.”
“I’ll have you know Southerners make barbeque an art form!” The only art form Lucky practiced. He dropped a dishtowel over the department store bag to hide the evidence and let out a deep breath.
Now wasn’t the right moment. Soon. Real soon.
Bo sidled up behind Lucky. “Anything I can do to help?”
Step away from me before I spring wood, haul you off to the bedroom, and say “Screw breakfast?” Lucky managed to keep the words from escaping his mouth. Practice made perfect, and he’d gotten a lot of practice lately in not blurting out the first thing to cross his mind. Kept things more peaceful at home.
“You can get the syrup out and set the table,” Lucky finally answered before he lost control and took Bo right on the kitchen floor—again. Good thing he’d put Moose in the back yard. Getting a cold nose on the backside while preoccupied with other things tended to make even the hardest cock wilt in shock.
“Sure.” Bo kissed the back of Lucky’s neck and ambled off, the slams of cabinet doors and rattle of silverware marking his progress.
Lucky flipped the last pancake onto a plate with the others, dumped a pack of stevia into Bo’s cup of tea, and hauled breakfast to the table.
Bo helped himself to a few pancakes and a modest pool of syrup. Lucky, on the other hand, liked a
little pancake with his syrup.
Bo patted his middle. “You know we’ll have to run at least three miles to work these off, right?”
“I got better ways to burn calories.” And Lucky did too. Creative ways. Exhausting ways. Ways to leave them both in a sticky, sweaty, panting mess.
Lucky watched Bo eat and lick his lips clean of syrup, squirming in his chair to adjust his rising stiffie.
Bo moaned. “Oh, this is good. To what do I owe the honor of waking up to breakfast?”
“Hey! You act like it’s the first time I’ve ever gotten up early to fix you breakfast.”
One of Bo’s brows went upward, the other down. How did he do that?
He made a good point, even with only facial expressions. “Well, okay. So it doesn’t happen much. Do I have to have some special reason?”
Bo leaned back in his chair, folded his arms across his chest, and lifted his already gravity-defying brow higher.
This wasn’t the way things were supposed to go. Things were supposed to be—Lucky shuddered—romantic. Seemed he’d found another thing he sucked at.
“I’m waiting.” Bo added a bit of foot tapping to his body language.
Okay. Now or never. Should Lucky drop to one knee? Ask the question he’d never thought he’d ask and then hand over the ring? Or should he distract Bo with the bling first? He should have asked Charlotte. The way she used to plow through romance novels, she’d likely know eight hundred ways to commit.
So, two knees? One knee? Standing? No, not standing. Lucky’s wobbly legs wouldn’t hold him. And if he went down to the floor now, Bo would fear he’d passed out and try to resuscitate his unromantic ass.
Blunt. Lucky always came across blunt. Bo either liked him blunt or put up with blunt. But he hadn’t bailed yet.
When had the tile gotten unlevel? He stumbled twice on his way to the counter for his bag, and once more on the trip back to the kitchen table.
There, in their own home, a few days after his birthday, with sun streaming in from outside and a dog standing on his hind legs, pressing his face and paws to the glass, Lucky mumbled, “Iwantyoutomarryme.”
“What?”
Damned words. They’d never been Lucky’s friends. He upended the bag and dislodged the two ring boxes. One hit the floor and skittered beneath the dishwasher.
On hands and knees, butt in the air, Lucky fished under the appliance in bad need of a kick plate. Bo turned his chair to face the action. He sat close enough to crawl to. With Lucky crouched on both knees.
And a ring box in his hand.
Heh. Even a blind squirrel found an acorn every now and then.
Words. Who needed ‘em? He smacked the box onto Bo’s palm, and with both hands curled Bo’s fingers around the sides.
“What’s this?” Bo unfurled his fingers.
“Open it.” The other box lay on the table, untouched. Would be Lucky’s luck to have given the wrong ring. He swallowed his nerves and forced himself to watch his partner snap the box open. After a million years, or maybe the longest minute in history, Bo rolled his eyes upward.
Even with all they’d been through, the misery in Bo’s eyes set a new record. He stroked the ring with one fingertip, cut his gaze to the other box, and swallowed loudly enough for Lucky to hear. “Why?”
“Why what?” Lucky’s heart hammered double-time.
“Why are you giving this to me now?”
Lucky ran his fingers through his hair. Still no perfect words came to mind. “You read the same stuff from the doctor’s office I did. You know what could happen.”
“Death is a rarity in these kinds of operations.”
“But it could happen.”
Bo hopped up and paced the room. “It could happen with any operation. Hell, I could walk out in front of a car. Either one of us might catch a bullet one day.”
Okay. Not going as planned. “That’s why we should make things official. So if anything happens to me you’re taken care of.”
“I’m on the mortgage. That’s what you worried about when we moved in together, right? That if something happened someone would try to take the house.”
“It’s more than that.” How had Lucky managed to screw this up so badly? “What if I’m incapa… incapatitate… whatever!” He threw both hands in the air.
“Incapacitated?”
“Yeah. What if I’m inca… incapate… Oh, hell. What you said. And can’t make my own decisions.” Bo could be trusted. Bristol? Not a snowball’s chance in Hell.
“We don’t have to get married. You can give me power of attorney.”
“I can?” Gee, why hadn’t someone clued Lucky in before? But… Legal mumbo-jumbo without the words “I do” fell short of his plans. He’d bought into Bo’s vision of the future. House. Car. Kids. Damn it, he wanted the whole white picket fence thing too. More than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.
With Bo.
It took every ounce of Lucky’s courage to throw himself on the sinking ship of dreams. “I still want to marry you. Will you?”
Bo closed his eyes and shut the box. “I’m sorry, Lucky, but I can’t.”
Chapter Seven
Somebody catch the motherfucking mule that just kicked the crap out of Lucky’s chest. No? Bo said no? “What do you mean you can’t? It’s legal now, even if some bigoted shitheads don’t like it.” His hands stopped listening to his commands and shook so hard he gripped the counter by his head to keep from toppling off his knees.
“Being legal’s got nothing to do with this.” Oh, for an appearance of The Dimple now.
“But you said you loved me. Wanted us to be together. To have a… family. For us to be a family. Together.” Family. More than Lucky deserved. He should have known his dreams were too good to be true. He didn’t deserve happy. Not after the shit ton of crap he’d done in his life.
Bo placed the ring box on the counter and took his time letting go. He dropped down onto his knees and took Lucky’s face between his palms. “Loving you has nothing to do with this.” A kiss took a bit of the sting out of rejection, but not much.
“Then what does?”
“Look at me.” He pulled Lucky’s head up until their eyes met. “If and when we decide to stand in front of our family and friends and pledge our lives to each other, I want it to be because we both want to. Not because one of us feels honor bound or afraid or anything else. Those aren’t good enough reasons.”
“But—”
“But nothing. When all this is over, if you still feel the same way, then we’ll talk. But no ring on my finger can make me love you any more than I already do. And if I have to say words for you to know I’ll always, always be here for you, then I’m not doing something right.” The next kiss lingered, Bo rubbing his lips against Lucky’s without trying to go farther.
For some reason, the simple contact of skin to skin felt more intimate than sex, cutting Lucky open and letting Bo get to the places inside he usually kept hidden behind a wall of bluster and bad temper.
The kiss gradually deepened. Lucky parted his lips and welcomed his partner’s tongue into his mouth, the taste of green tea and syrup. His partner. Not his husband.
One day. One day when Lucky didn’t have to search for words or wonder how to say them. When he wanted to marry Bo so badly he could get past his own self-doubts.
Bo loved him. Said he did. Showed he did. Lucky would show the commitment he once ran from. “I want to give you power of attorney. And if something goes wrong, do the right thing. I don’t want Charlotte to have to make the decision.”
“Why me?”
“She’s so softhearted and never gives up. She’d have me on life support for the next fifty years.” Lucky shuddered. “I’d like to think you love me enough to let me go.” And he trusted Bo to do right by him.
Bo blinked a few times, eyes glimmering. “I do. But we’re not going to have to go there. Everything will turn out fine. You’ll donate a part of you and come back home. To our hom
e. In two months, you’ll be good as new, and your dad will recover.”
God, are you listening? “Yeah.”
“Sure you don’t want to let your parents know you’re alive? That it’s you doing the donating?”
Oh hell no. “And risk them telling me to fuck off again?”
Bo snorted. “They didn’t tell you to fuck off.”
Steel bands tightened around Lucky’s chest. He wouldn’t cry. He wouldn’t. “They told me not to call back. If that’s not ‘fuck off,’ I don’t know what is.”
“One of these days, I want us all to sit down and talk. The man they turned their backs on isn’t the man you are today.” The world became a better place when Lucky had Bo’s lips against his forehead.
“Maybe one day.” When Hell froze over.
“Lucky, I mean it. You talk a good talk, but I know it bothers you not to have your folks in your life. What if we have kids one day? Would it be fair to keep Grandma and Grandpa away from the kiddies?”
“You don’t understand…”
“No, I don’t. I’ll never understand what it’s like to have a living mother I can call and talk to. Or a father who taught me to hunt and fish. Gave me useful advice instead of a smack across the mouth. Who smelled of sweat from an honest day’s work instead of booze.” Bo shook his head. “Sorry. I shouldn’t say such things. Sometimes, though, I’m jealous of you. You had a wonderful, close relationship, and I want you to have that again.”
Maybe not the words Lucky wanted right now, but the words he needed. Bo still wanted a family with him.
Good enough for now.
And if and when Lucky survived, they’d talk about trying one more time to reach out to his parents. Hadn’t he and Bo promised while waiting to die in a tunnel in Mexico? But when he did reconnect, he wanted to introduce the family to his husband.
If he used his original name again and they hyphenated, any kids might be in junior high by the time they learned to spell Schollenberger-Lucklighter. Or maybe Schollenberger-Lucklighter-Harrison?
Something else to worry about. Maybe they should throw out all previously used names and pick something simple for a change. Then maybe signing checks wouldn’t take so long. Smith. Nah. Walter got there first. Something short, one syllable. Were there any last names with three letters? Two? Or maybe he’d do like famous people who went by one name.