“Because he named a star after me and I’m pretty sure I love him and I hate everything about that because it makes me feel all sticky and sweet and gross, like I just snorted a line of Pixy Stix powder cut with rainbows and bunnies.” I sounded slightly hysterical, which, to be fair, I probably was. I hadn’t slept at all the night before, and when Vince had woken the next morning, a grin forming on his face as he saw me watching him, my heart started thudding like a bongo drum against my chest, and I was sure, absolutely sure, he’d be able to see every single one of my thoughts on my face and he’d know.
I had almost convinced myself not to follow through with my plan until after breakfast when he said he wanted to go into work for a couple of hours to catch up so when he returned on Monday, he wouldn’t be buried under e-mails and paperwork. I’d cursed him mentally, only because he’d given me the perfect opportunity to do what I didn’t want to do. I even went so far as to offer to drive him to work, but he’d waved me off, saying he would call me when he was done and would come over.
So I immediately called Sandy when I got home, babbling about how I was in love, constellations, and how I was pretty sure I was about to lie my way into a hospital so that I could go meet his mother behind his back, just so I could tell her how epically amazing her son was. Sandy immediately dropped whatever (or whoever) he was doing and picked me up, stopping to get a garish bouquet of flowers on the way as part of our cover. I’d almost convinced myself that there was a point to doing this, but it still felt a bit off.
“So you gonna to tell me why?” Sandy asked again, looking back at the hospital entrance.
I looked at myself in the rearview mirror, wondering if I should have worn a mustache as part of my disguise. As it was, I was wearing a newsboy cap, mirrored sunglasses that took up half my face, and the collar of my coat was flipped up around my neck. Either it was the greatest disguise in the history of mankind or the police would be called as soon as we walked in the hospital, given how I looked like I was probably going to be doing something lewd in public.
“Because,” I said to Sandy. “I don’t want the moment to go by where I’ll never get to say a thing to her. She needs to hear from someone how badass her son is before she goes. And I think he’s the most badass out of everyone, so why shouldn’t it be me?”
Sandy snorted. “I think this will be the moment we’ll look back on in the future as the time that Paul went batshit insane for love.”
“Gross,” I moaned. “Do not use that word around me.”
“Batshit?”
“No. The other word. But where do you think that term came from? Did someone eat batshit once and go nuts?”
“Insane?”
“No, but that’s kind of how I feel right now. The other word.”
“Love?”
I groaned again. “I think I’m going to be sick. Clichéd emotional vomiting is definitely in my future.”
“It’s like your parents all over again.”
“There’s got to be something wrong with the way children are raised in my family,” I said, shaking my head. “How can shit like this keep happening?”
“What about Nana Gigi?”
“Well, to hear it her way, she fell in love seven times and she has seven ex-husbands.”
Sandy looked wistful. “That lady knows how to live. I hope when I’m her age, I’ll still be as vivacious as always and talk about my seven ex-husbands.”
“To have seven ex-husbands, you first need to have one,” I reminded him.
He dismissed me with a wave of his hand. “Trust me, no one can handle me and Helena.”
I thought about Darren and the way he’d been watching Helena perform, but I pushed it away. Other things to focus on now. If this didn’t blow up in my face like I certainly expected it to, I’d make sure that Helena knew the Homo Jock King wanted to lick her ball sac. Or whatever Darren wanted to do. “Okay, so let’s go over the plan again.”
He looked baffled. “There was a plan? First I’m hearing about it. I distinctly remember you shrieking into your phone, telling me I needed to get my ass over to your house because you’d made a big mistake and wanted to marry Vince and have his babies forever and ever, but before you could give him your soul, you needed my help in breaking into the hospital to see the dying first lady of Tucson to receive her blessing so that you could live the rest of your life with your future husband and what will most likely be an ethnically diverse rainbow of children from such far-flung countries as Sudan and Iceland.”
I gaped at him in horror. “I never said anything like that!”
“Semantics. And you should really flip down the collar to your coat. It’s not 1987, and even if it was, you’d still look ridiculous. No one is going to recognize you by your neck. And where did you get those sunglasses? They look like a pair of mine that I lost under a suspicious set of circumstances last year and, at the time, you said you had no idea where they went.”
“Yeah, I stole them,” I admitted, not feeling bad in the slightest. “I didn’t have the heart to tell you that when you wore them, it looked like you were trying to do a really awful impression of Tom Cruise from Top Gun.”
“Gayest movie ever,” Sandy declared rightfully. “Anytime you do any kind of slow-motion scene involving men playing volleyball almost naked automatically puts your film in the pantheon of homoeroticism. And poor Val Kilmer. What happened to him? He used to be so attractive! Now he looks like a live-action version of Gollum.”
“He aged, I guess,” I said, putting down my collar because it was not 1987.
“Yeah, but his version of aging was like he got fast-forwarded sixty years. If that ever happens to me, I expect you to tell me and then drive me home after I get extensive plastic surgery.”
“Ew,” I muttered. “You’re not that vapid. For the most part.”