Page 70 of Tied Over

He shook his head, looking everywhere but at me.

“Tell me.”

His gaze refocused on me. “You’ve never seen so many people so very horrified to learn that Hayden is marrying a guy with a blue-collar job.”

“But you don’t care,” I reminded him.

“No, it’s true, but I don’t want to have to go to their parties either.”

He had a point.

“Besides, I found a place we can go and get Mexican, and the reviews are all really good. I figured we’d try it out, take everyone with us not going to the fancy party.”

Authentic Mexican like what we’d had off the strip in Vegas was what he’d been pining for. “And you’ve been missing it in Chicago.”

He whimpered.

I chuckled, and he took Margo so he could lean into me and I could put an arm around him. “Don’t worry, we’ll get ya fed.”

He stayed right there beside me.

Once we got back, I was wrung out and needed a nap just like all the kids. I felt old, and seeing Hayden there, waiting for Bodhi, looking all hale and hearty—and who even said that besides old people—I felt absolutely decrepit. I needed a reality check about why Bodhi was spending time with me and not Hayden, and really, there was only one answer. I was hurt. If I wasn’t, he would be with his fiancé. I was being stupid, and so was everyone else, especially Angie. She didn’t really know Bodhi, knew me even less, and to think any different was insane.

Two, almost three hours later, my door was knocked on, and without me giving whoever was on the other side permission to come in, it opened.

There, standing in my doorway, was Bodhi, in a suit I’d never seen in my life. Honestly, I owned three suits total, two black, one navy, and definitely not one in the color he was wearing at the moment.

“So many questions,” I mumbled, squinting at him.

Closing the door, he turned on the light, nearly blinding me, and I sat up and looked at him again.

“What, um, do you call that color?”

He flipped me off.

It was sort of tan with a bit of mustard thrown in. Or orange. Like a blended-vomit color. “Are you being punished?”

“It’s clearly a summer suit.”

“Sure. Yeah.”

“It’s linen.”

“Okay.”

“This is what you wear to a summer social.”

With the suit he was wearing, he had on a crisp white cotton shirt, no tie, a floral pocket square, and brown suede loafers with tassels. I’d never seen him in anything with tassels. Eli, yes; him, no.

“You look nice,” I assured him, because really, Bodhi could wear anything, with his shoulders and the whole V shape of him. It was just that he looked uncomfortable.

“I look ridiculous.”

“No, no. It’s just not your normal, but that’s not bad. Eli always says that it wouldn’t kill us all to look better when we’re out on the job.”

Eli Kohn, our director of Public Relations, always looked like he should have been walking a runway in Milan. The man was never anything but metrosexual perfection, and often, he looked at me and Bodhi like seeing us, in old jeans, lots of flannel in winter, and sweaters with the necks stretched out, was physically painful for him. But I didn’t sit at a desk, and neither did my partner.

“I think he meant for you not to wear your cargo pants and for me to put on something other than a hoodie under my leather jacket.”