Page 160 of Coach
“It has a sagging bottom,” Mike said.
“Pot. Kettle—”
“Don’t you dare finish.”
I smirked, then shrugged.
“Your box is offensive to gay culture—all gay culture, everywhere—in every land and throughout every rainbow-blessed people around the world.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “C’mon. One cheeseburger, one piece of furniture that doesn’t look like you stole it from a frat house, and I’ll leaveyou alone for the rest of the weekend. Besides, I’m really shopping for El and me. You’re just a sidekick.”
“Always a bridesmaid,” I grumbled under my breath, but he was already herding me through the doors.
“Fine,” I muttered. “But if I see one macrame wall hanging or a collection of hand-painted spoons, I’m faking a medical emergency.”
Mike laughed. “Deal. But when you inevitably fall in love with a credenza or some weird-ass old mirror, I’m gonna say ‘I told you so’ and squeal loud enough to embarrass us both.”
Chapter 2
Mateo
Mike and I decided to skip the formal dinner plan—which was just a lie we told ourselves so we didn’t feel bad about sprinting toward the smell of deep-fried everything.
The Decatur Arts and Antique Fair sprawled across a huge open-air park, every inch of grass hidden under rows of tents, most of which were a uniformed shade of off-white with a few red and blue ones sprinkled in for patriotic good measure. Handmade signs flapped in the breeze. Fairy lights dangled in a crisscross pattern overhead. The air buzzed with the sound of chatter, laughter, and somewhere, very faintly, the tortured wail of a banjo.
But more importantly?
It smelled like heaven. Angels in chef hats smacked my nose with the scents of grilled meats, cinnamon sugar, fresh kettle corn, and fry oil so potent I was pretty sure my cholesterol spiked justbreathing it in.
“This,” Mike declared with hands on his hips as he surveyed the landscape like a general about to lead a charge, “is the America I signed up for.”
“God bless it,” I said reverently. “And I’m Italian. I know food.”
Mike grunted but knew better than to argue. The ghost of my great-grandmother would’ve haunted his dreams if he’d tried to say anyone’s sense of cooking or culinary delight was stronger than a true-born Italian’s. It simply wasn’t possible, and everyone—including the French, who thought the culinary world revolved around their “Oui, Chef,” needed to just accept it.
We beelined for the food stalls, ignoring wide-eyed families and stroller-wielding suburbanites displaced along the way.
Mike’s first stop: the food truck with corn dogs the size of my forearm.
His second stop: funnel cakes so big they came with their own gravitational field.
He then made a third stop for the most important item of the night: an adults-only lemonade stand run by two octogenarians who poured vodka into plastic cups like seasoned gay bartenders and tried to upcharge us for “organic ice.” Mike paid the ridiculous fee, grinning like a redheaded moron the wholetime.
Loaded down with dripping paper plates and enough napkins to make a small mattress, we wandered through the festival, eating and talking with our mouths full like the classy gentlemen we were.
“Look at that guy,” Mike said around a mouthful of corn dog, nodding toward a man in a fedora and full three-piece suit despite the ninety-degree heat. “Who dresses like that to an outdoor festival?”
“Someone who wants you to know he uses words like ‘bespoke,’” I muttered.
Mike snorted lemonade through his nose. “Bespoke is a fine word, thank you very much.”
“I am Italian. I do not know this word. It means you said something terrible, yes?”
Mike stopped walking and turned, his brows knitted together like one long, really pissed off caterpillar.
I shrugged, careful to keep the grin from my lips. “He bespoke terrible things, and she knew him for the cad he was.”
“That’snotwhat that word means, and you know it.” Mike nearly dropped his powdered dough. “Besides, any man who uses the word ‘cad’ in a sentence is either caught in a time warp from the 1930s or listens to far too much NPR.”
The guy with the fedora turned just in time for usto catch the NPR pin on his lapel.
