Page 5 of Coach
I stared at him.
Blinked.
Then, I crossed my arms.
“You want me to spend my Friday night . . . antiquing?”
“It’s not antiquing,” Mike said, fighting a smile. “It’s—treasure hunting.”
“That sounds gay,” I deadpanned. “Aggressivelygay, like chiffon tossing, pageant queen waving, glitterati dodging, at some molecularhomosexual level.”
“Molecular? You teach world history, and I do English. Neither of us knows the first thing about molecular anything.” Mike grinned, a slow, evil stretch of his mouth that meant nothing good for me. “How’s that TV doing? Still sitting on a cardboard box in your den?”
I opened my mouth to argue.
Closed it.
Opened it again.
Nothing.
Because he wasn’t wrong.
It was a heavy-duty moving box. The sturdy kind, technically rated to hold up to sixty-five pounds. But still, it was a cardboard box, not a proper TV stand or curio or whatever the fuck televisions sat on in adult homes.
“That box,” I said defensively, “has character.”
“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.”
