Page 109 of Tied Over

“Make the best of it,” he suggested even as he took a phone call from an FBI agent who wanted us to send a member of our team to find a rodeo clown in Montana.

“No,” Bodhi said, and hung up.

I scoffed. “That call will go over your head to Ian.”

He did not seem concerned.

Two hours later, I heard Ian on his cell as he walked by my desk. “No, you have a field office in Bozeman. We hunt fugitives, not suspects. Let me know if you need me to overnight you a goddamn dictionary.”

“That doesn’t seem helpful,” I told him.

“Rodeo clown my ass.”

That was the end of that.

Bodhi was right. Once his place was on the market, it sold in three days for eighty grand more than he’d paid for it. He was thrilled with the twelve percent increase, especially since, unlike me, he’d done nothing to the townhouse. But it was a much-sought-after, thriving area, so it wasn’t a huge surprise that it went so fast.

As predicted, our friends helped move him into my place. And they did do it for pizza and beer, but there was the whining we had to live through.

“What even is this?” Eli asked, gesturing at Bodhi’s wrought-iron sculpture.

“It’s a heart,” I told him.

“What?”

“See how the rib cage is open and the heart is there?”

“That’s disgusting,” he passed judgment.

“Art is in the eye of the beholder,” Celso, his fiancé, explained to him.

Eli did a slow pan to him.

“It is.” Celso sounded defensive.

“I refuse to move this,” Eli informed me. “It should stay here for the new tenants.”

It ended up going in my backyard, where it became lawn sculpture.

“Vinyl is dead,” Sharpe assured Bodhi as he packed up his extensive record collection.

“That’s sacrilege what you just said,” Ryan assured him. “The imperfections on records are what makes them unique.”

“It’s a whole lot easier to plug in your iPod.”

Eli was horrified.

“Why don’t you have any plants?” Dorsey wanted to know. “Everyone should have some. They’re our little photosynthesizing buddies.”

Ian didn’t understand why Bodhi’s kitchen was so bare. No pots or pans, only assorted silverware, and perhaps three glasses.

“What the hell?”

“You know, living like you’re still in college is a bad look at your age,” Miro told him.

Bodhi gestured at me. “I’ve always had Jed’s stuff.”

“And now you have it again,” Celso said, grinning at him. “How fortuitous that you fell in love with a guy who has plates.”