Page 116 of Messing With My Brother's Best Friends

Chapter 58

Kendall

“So you had one of the dads try to take your boyfriends’ business down.” Barbie ticked off one finger. “Had a heart-warming family reconciliation.” She ticked off another. “You’re now the part owner of their company?”

“About that,” Alan said as he tossed our dinner around in the wok, “we need to make some time to sit down and discuss diversifying your income streams. Investing some money and creating passive income would be an excellent way to future proof the business.”

“Ehhh…” Barbie made a rude noise. “Boring! But, and I leave the best to last, Van asked you to marry him?”

“Um… yeah.” But then her eyes dropped down to my fingers and I was forced to curl them up and put them in my lap. “At least I think so. I thought we’d talk about it more, but every time Van tried to bring it up, the others changed the subject, so I’m not sure what’s going on. Was it all a joke?”

“Nope.” Alan sounded completely confident. “Guys don’t do that.”

“Well, then maybe it upset the other two?”

“Have you tried asking them?” Barbie replied. “I mean, it’s gotta be complicated. The bullshit that happened as the government tried to legalise gay people getting married doesn’t give me hope that there will be any changes that will help you tie the knot with the three of them, but…” She searched my face. “Does it matter?”

“Not really.” I shrugged a little too hard. “I mean I dreamed of wearing a beautiful white dress and having a big party like most little girls, but…” I nodded slowly. “If it’s a choice between a frock and them, I choose them.”

“Nah, fuck that.” Barbie slapped her hands down on the kitchen counter then got up to grab her phone. “There’s gotta be a way around this. You’re not the first quint—”

“Quad,” I corrected.

“Whatever geometry word works,” she said with an airy wave. “There’s gotta be a legal precedent somewhere.”

“I can have a friend take a look at the situation,” Alan said. “I know some people who specialise in family law. Maybe not a marriage, but a commitment ceremony followed by a legal agreement to protect all parties.”

“That sounds so romantic…” I said with a shake of my head, right before my phone buzzed. Gage was ringing me so I tapped on the phone to answer it.

“Hey—”

“Can you meet me somewhere?” he asked. The urgency in his voice had me stopping still.

“Sure, what’s going on? Are you OK? Is everyone OK?”

“Everything’s fine,” he replied.

“Oh, OK, well, I’m having dinner with Barbie and Alan, so can I catch you in about an hour?”

“Two!” Barbie called out. “That’s the bare minimum if we’re going to do some wedding planning.”

“Wedding planning…” I hadn’t heard that kind of pain in his voice before, not when Van babbled on about me becoming Mrs Cooper, nor when I’d put tentative feelers out about it. “Um, yeah, sure—”

“Nope.” I collected my keys and shot Barbie a look and mouthed an apology at her and Alan. “Tell me where you are.”

“It’s OK. I should’ve organised this with you beforehand, but I wanted it to be a surprise,” he said.

“What surprise? Gage, what surprise?”

I jumped into the elevator, but he wouldn’t explain further, instead giving me an address just outside the city. I fired up the van and drove to that address, the reason why no clearer when I arrived.

The inner-city suburbs used to have lots of little corner stores and pubs. The massive supermarkets of today didn’t exist back then and people needed easy access to milk, bread and beer. The retail landscape changed though, with big shopping centres created, centralising people’s shopping behaviours and many of the little shops were converted into housing, or some, like this one, were just left to moulder.

It had been beautiful once. There was something about Federation architecture, with all of the decorative elements, that you just didn’t get now. Shops were glass and steel boxes, little more than gigantic display cases for their goods. But this place, even with the boarded-up windows, would’ve been an inviting place to come and shop, which was perhaps why I walked up to the half-open door.

“Gage?” I felt like one of those dumb girls that always gets killed in the slasher films. “Gage? Hey, are you in…?”

The dust was thick, forming a golden haze inside the place. Many, many years of rubbish had been dragged away from the looks of it, the marks of old boxes and crates left on the floor. It made the shop seem curiously empty as I moved forward, just in time for him to appear.

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