That really had been a pleasant surprise. We’d done two more shoots over the last week, and my Instagram had pretty much exploded after I posted the photos. But I told him, “You’re so much more important to me than any of that.”
He kissed me again, then grinned and ran a fingertip over my lips. “You really are the sweetest boy in the world, and this discussion’s not over. But Phoenix is going to be here any minute, so we should go downstairs.”
We both went inside, and while I locked the door to the balcony, Gabriel picked up his phone from the coffee table and tapped the screen. Then he said, “Well, it looks like we won’t have the apartment to ourselves after all. I got a message from Sawyer, and he and his husband will be getting home in a few hours. They spent the last two days in New York, but Alastair got a touch of food poisoning so they decided to cut their east coast visit short.”
“Why would anyone choose to board a plane with food poisoning?”
“That’d be awful on a commercial flight, but they’re on a private jet, so it’s probably not so bad.”
I muttered, “Good lord, they have their own plane?”
Gabriel shrugged and said, “Well, they travel all the time for business,” as if that justified it somehow.
When he returned his phone to the table, I asked, “Aren’t you bringing that?”
He flashed me a smile and said, “I must be losing my touch if you haven’t noticed how tight these pants are. The phone will never fit in my pocket. In fact, it was all I could do to wedge my I.D., some cash, and the keys in there.”
“Want me to carry it for you?”
“Nah. We have yours if we need to call someone.”
When we got downstairs, Phoenix’s dark blue Bronco was parked at the curb. As I climbed into the backseat, I grinned at my friend in the rearview mirror and told him, “You smell purdy.”
He muttered, “That means I used too much cologne, right?”
“Nope, it’s perfect. You look nice, too,” I said. He’d exchanged his usual flannel shirt for a dark gray button-down, trimmed his beard, and made an effort to style his slightly overgrown hair. I just had to ask, because I couldn’t help myself. “Are you hoping to capture the attention of your new employer?”
“Fuck no. It’s bad enough that I agreed to go to work for Harper Royce. I’m sure as hell not trying to get in his pants.”
“But since you said yes to being his assistant, that must mean you don’t totally hate his guts.”
“I said yes because he kept offering me more and more money until it became ridiculous for me to turn it down. Plus, it’s just four months. I can tolerate just about anything that long, even babysitting a man-child and his goddamn chicken.”
“Chickens,” Gabriel corrected with a wicked grin as he settled into the passenger seat. “There are more at home.”
As he pulled away from the curb, Phoenix muttered, “Fuck my life.”
When we arrived at the hotel and I spotted Will and Lorenzo, I said, “Shit, I’m underdressed.”
“No you’re not,” Phoenix insisted. “They’re overdressed.”
I nodded in agreement. “Okay, let’s go with that.”
Will and Lorenzo were both wearing perfectly tailored suits, Will’s in pale gray and his partner’s in charcoal. As they slid into the backseat, I said, “Well, damn. You two look like a million bucks.”
“Will always looks like a million bucks,” Lorenzo said. “That’s why I had to up my game and get this new suit.”
“Great investment,” Gabriel said, as he pivoted in his seat to look at them. “You know, you could get married in a suit like that.”
“Speaking of which,” Lorenzo said with a big smile, “we’ve finally nailed down the date of our wedding, and it’s in two months and two days. You’ll all be receiving official invitations very soon.”
“Yeah, like next week,” Will said. “Is it tacky to just email everyone? We’re not giving people a lot of advance notice, so we want to get on their calendars as soon as possible.”
Phoenix asked, “Why’d you give yourselves such a short window?”
“We really want to get married at Seahorse Ranch, since that’s where we met,” Will said, as he flashed Lorenzo the sweetest smile.
“And we didn’t want to do it on a weekend that’s booked up with a lot of reservations, because we want our friends and family to be able to stay at the resort,” Lorenzo continued.
“The weekend we chose was actually reserved by Beck and Ren’s business partner Dante Dombruso and his family, but they only need half the rooms, and they were nice enough to let us book the other half,” Will explained, as he took over the tag-team conversation. “Every other weekend from April to October is almost totally full, so it was a choice of pulling a wedding together in two months or waiting until the end of the year.”