“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.