Page 31 of Why Cheese?
I gulp at the oversharing of personal information, before realizing the other men aren’t reacting. Maybe they all know about Cheddy’s lance problem.
A half-forgotten dream punctures through my subconscious from the depths of my depraved mind. One where Brie and Cheddy were ‘assisting’ Cam…in bed. Two hands, one lance, and a very happy man.
“Has the wine already flushed your cheeks, my dear?” Cam asks.
I slap a hand to my face to find it blisteringly hot. “Yes. I’m a lightweight.”
Cheddy puts down the bottle. “Just like this knight I knew. Sir…Sir… Ah, I don’t remember. He’d get two cups into his wine and turn red as a beet. We used to roll him in a barrel down the hill. You know, after the lord put out his candle.”
I laugh at the idea. Surely he means he was a knight in a Renaissance Faire, or that Medieval show with horses and turkey legs. He couldn’t possibly have been an actual… “Did you mean a real lance?” I cry out.
“Of course. What else would I mean?” Cheddy innocently asks.
My traitorous eyes go right to his crotch where a presumably healthy lance is bulging against his inner thigh. “I didn’t, I mean, you’re a knight?”
“I was. Or am I still…? I don’t know how it works. Been a few centuries since I lifted a sword to defend the realm, or fight off the other knights the lord’s brother hired to take all of his stuff.” Cheddy hefts up one of the abandoned hammers and swings it around like a weapon.
“That must have been exciting,” I proclaim.
“Why?” His face knots in confusion. “Most knighting involved me either sitting around getting drunk with my boys, or menacing people. Lot of menacing, especially in villages.”
Everything about Cheddy wouldn’t look out of place on a football field or cheering for one on frat row. I try to picture him in armor or with gallant long blond locks flowing behind while he’s in full armor on the back of a horse, but all I can see is the man crushing the bottle of wine.
“Ah-hem,” Cam coughs. “Chedward, you appear to have finished off our refreshment.”
“Oh, sorry. Should I get another? Brie?”
The quiet one lifts a hand and shakes his head.
Cheddy laughs, then leans over toward me. “He’s worried he’ll get drunk and tell you he likes you.”
“I am not,” Brie shouts. As I glance over, he turns pink and his gaze bores a hole into the ground.
Cheddy tips closer to Brie and tries to whisper, “Just tell her, bro. What have you got to lose?” I wouldn’t have heard him if I wasn’t literally between them. With a harried flutter of his hand, Brie dismisses Cheddy then pops a few grapes into his mouth.
Needing to escape this awkwardness, I ask, “Were all of you knights?”
Cam sputters into a full-on laugh. “God no. Only a fool spends his life trapped inside of a tin can.”
“It wasn’t so bad until the sun hit you then, whew, total bog ass all the way back to the castle.”
“Case in point,” Cam says.
I slightly twist toward the silent man. “What about you Brie?”
“No,” he mumbles, shaking his head. “I wasn’t anything like a knight like Ched, or a thief like Cam.”
“A thief?” Cam gasps. “Excuse me, I was a highwayman. That’s far more romantic than some common thief.”
“You…you were?” I stumble, Roq’s warning blaring in my head.
“For five glorious years, I stole from the rich…because the poor don’t have anything worth taking.” He snickers to himself at his joke, before realizing I’m not laughing. “Does my shady past bother you?”
There’s no good reason for me to care what he did hundreds of years ago. Anyone he’d stolen from is long dead, so... “No.”
“Good. A shame I couldn’t know you then. I’d have draped you in rubies and sapphires until you gleamed as bright as your smile.”
A nervous grin stretches my cheeks to the breaking point from his unabashed flirting. I’ve never had anyone give me this much attention. Most men I’ve dated couldn’t muster more than a ‘you up’ text as part of their courtship.
