A moment later I was kissing him too, his strong, masculine tongue delving in and out of my mouth. They were so different… but so very much the same. And they both cared for me. Were both looking out for me, to the point where they were willing to drop everything and come.
“I know you have a million things going on,” I said. “More work, more hiring. All the events at your club. You’ve got three live bands performing this week alone, and you still came here. You still—”
“Shit, you’re keeping track,” Corey smiled. “You’re more on top of things than we are.”
“Well I am still your social media bitch,” I laughed. “Sort of.”
“I thought we hired someone?” Corey asked Brody.
“You did,” I replied. “But whoever it is, he or she sucks. And they never changed the passwords, so I’ve been co-running your Twitter, your Instagram, your—”
A pop and a sizzle had me leaping to my feet, scrambling for the egg pan. Brody’s hands were slow to let go. They lingered on my hips as I pulled away.
“I’m serious though,” I said, working the spatula as I plated. “No one’s ever done anything like this for me before. Not even Rob, not in ten years of marriage.”
“Well Rob’s an idiot,” Brody pointed out.
“True, but—”
“And besides,” Corey added. “We weren’t about to wait much longer. We’d been looking into taking a weekend, coming up here anyway. Breaking our little promise to wait until you had a week’s v
acation, because two or three days would be nothing but a tease.”
Brody nodded as I passed out the plates. “He’s right, we were ready to burst. As we’ve both been, waiting absolutely sucks.”
As I sat down between them, a lump formed in my throat. There was a question in the back of my mind, one that had been lingering there for weeks and months. I’d been hesitant to ask it. At times I wondered if I even could ask it, or if it were really none of my business.
“So you waited, huh?” I joked, elbowing Corey. “Yeah yeah, sure sure.”
They both dropped their forks. They hit their plates simultaneously, clattering in stereo.
“Of course we waited,” said Brody. His tone was serious, almost even offended.
The lump in my throat grew three times its size. My heart was pounding away in my chest.
“As in… waited waited?”
They were both staring back at me incredulously. Like they couldn’t believe what I was saying.
“I’m sorry,” I said quickly. “I—I didn’t mean to pry. You don’t even have to answer that, obviously. I figured it was a don’t ask, don’t tell sort of thing. And of course it always made me feel better not thinking about—”
My sentence was interrupted as Brody removed something from his pocket. He clapped his hand down hard on the kitchen table, then slid something toward me beneath his big palm.
When he took his arm away I could see what it was: the little grey phone.
“We’ve been wanting to give you this for a while,” he said calmly. “Ever since you left.”
It wasn’t just a phone. It was the phone. The flyer phone.
The very reason we were all together.
“It’s off, obviously,” said Corey, nonchalantly. “Actually it’s been turned off since the day after we met you.”
My eyes glassed up with tears. Suddenly I was choking back a thousand emotions, all of them incredible. Wonderful. Overwhelming…
“We came here to support you,” said Brody, “but also to let you in on a little secret.” His expression, which was uncharacteristically serious, broke into a slow smile. “We don’t want anyone else, Lauren. Not from the flyers, not from the strip.”
“Not from the club either,” said Corey. “Although there are plenty of women there, too.”