Gotta Have Fate (Winslow Brothers)

Damn, she looks good standing in front of my building.

Soon-to-be our building that houses our apartment.

Once we get back from our honeymoon, my Charlotte will officially move in with me, and we’ll be husband and wife for the rest of our glorious days.

Oh yeah, the future is bright and beautiful, my friends.

Reaching forward, I rotate the knob to turn up the volume on AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” and slap my hand against the top of the door to the beat of the music.

Flynn smiles from the driver’s seat, balancing one casual wrist at the top of the wheel as he drives through the busy Manhattan streets.

I don’t know where we’re going, or why Flynn insisted on getting his old Bronco out of storage rather than taking the subway, but I can’t help but admit I’m enjoying it.

If it weren’t for the sounds of horns and crowded sidewalks, I could almost convince myself we’d found a backroad to cruise.

Jude and Ty slap fight in the back seat like a couple of kids, and it’s far from the first time I realize what they say about the differences between a boy’s and a girl’s timeline to maturity really is true.

Charlotte is a year younger than Jude and three years younger than Ty, but she has more adulthood in the tip of one pinkie finger than the two of them combined.

Frankly, on several occasions, she’s the more level-headed of the two of us, and I’m seven years her senior.

It isn’t until we make the turn to take the Holland Tunnel out of New York that I start to get nervous about what my stupid brothers have up their sleeves for tonight.

“Where are we going?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jude says from the relative safety of his spot directly behind me. He’s a smartass all the time, but I can guarantee he wouldn’t be saying it with so much attitude if I didn’t have to be a goddamn contortionist to hit him in the balls.

“Flynn,” I say instead of giving Jude the attention he so desperately craves. “Tell me where we’re going.”

“A strip club,” Flynn answers matter-of-factly.

I groan and sink my head into my hands. “You’re kidding me, right?”

Flynn looks over, and in the lights of the tunnel, I can see his response written plainly on his face. Do I look like I’m kidding?

Jude and Ty snicker in the back. I don’t bother trying to convince them not to go, and I don’t bother asking why. Both would be nothing more than a fool’s effort.

What I do ask, however, is logistical in nature. “Okay, then. Can someone tell me why the fuck we’re not just going to one in New York?”

“Because I have it on good authority that the talent at this club is the best, Remington,” Jude insists. “And I’m not going to be known as some titty-licker who’ll go just anywhere, especially not on the special occasion that is your bachelor party.”

I roll my eyes. “Good authority, huh? Don’t tell me, it’s your friend Kyle.”

“I don’t know why you’re saying his name like that, bro,” Jude protests. “He is nothing if not a strip club connoisseur.”

“He should make sure he puts that on his resume,” Ty says with a snort, and at the ungodly noise, all four of us laugh.

Jude has known Kyle since high school, and let’s just say, he’s the kind of guy the FBI comes looking for. Literally. He was out with his friends—not Jude, thank God—one night in Central Park, and he stabbed himself in the leg with a seven-inch K bar knife he was carrying around just for fun at seventeen years old. The FBI closed their investigation on everything after they realized he and his friends had been playing some weird version of “Commando Games” that led to a real-life freak accident when he tripped and fell, but his dad shipped him off to military school after that.

That helped a little, but he’s still not the kind of guy I’d go to for any kind of advice.

“When you get through the tunnel, turn around,” I tell Flynn seriously, sending the occupants of the back seat into an all-out uproar.

I talk over them as they complain. “We can go to a strip club. I’ll give you that much, but I’m not setting foot in any place that kid recommended.”

“Fine,” Jude says with a pout in his voice. I know he wants to say more, but he’s also smart enough to know that I’m already compromising by going to a strip club in the first place. This isn’t a battle he wants to pick.

Needless to say, it takes a little bit of time for Flynn to find a place to turn around and even more to fight our way back through Manhattan traffic, so by the time we park on a side street just a couple blocks away from the new club, I’m more than happy to go inside, just to get something to fucking drink.