The One Month Boyfriend (Wildwood Society)

Kat

I cannot believeI agreed to karaoke. I must be high, or drunk, or both high and drunk even though all I’ve had since lunch was an iced coffee, an apple, and some string cheese.

Maybe the drugs were in the coffee. I left it on my desk a couple of times, as one does, and how hard can it be to sneak into an office and lace an iced coffee with LSD, or peyote, or magic mushrooms, or whatever drug makes someone who hates crowds and watching people make fools of themselves agree to attend karaoke with her coworkers?

“We don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” Silas drawls from the driver’s seat as he eases his truck into a parking spot, the lot close to full with people out on Friday night.

“Where was that attitude fifteen minutes ago?” I ask, a little sharper than I intend, but Silas grins.

It’s a nice grin and I don’t like it.

“Fifteen minutes ago you didn’t look like I was leading you to the hangman,” he says. “And like it or not, this is more strategic than dinner at La Dolce Vita.”

“It’s all lethal injection now,” I point out. “Though I think you can still request a firing squad in Utah, or Wyoming, or somewhere else that the laws are more like guidelines.”

“Should I be worried about you knowing that?”

“Don’t you? You’re the lawyer.”

I’m delaying the inevitable—that is, getting out of the truck and going into the karaoke bar—and I know it.

“I practice land use and property law,” he points out, twisting the key and turning off the headlights. “It’s not the sort of thing that sees a lot of people put to death.”

“Maybe it should be.”

That earns a look, and I scrunch my face up in response, adjusting my glasses.

“Not really. Sorry. I’m just saying words out loud because they’re there. I actually have a lot of issues with capital punishment,” I ramble, my heart thudding faster by the second.

Step one: make idiot of self.

Step two: karaoke?

Karaoke wasn’t the plan tonight. The plan was a dinner date at La Dolce Vita, where we’d be seen wining and dining, but mostly we’d sit and eat and chat and drink wine, and it would have been tolerable enough. Maybe even pleasant.

But then Lucas came in when Silas did, and it turned out that he and Evan and “a few other people” were going to karaoke tonight, and then it turned out that “a few other people” was “pretty much everyone else in the office,” and of course our plans changed. For our purposes, karaoke makes way more sense, and only has the slight drawback of making me feel like I might sweat myself into a coma.

My eyes are still closed when Silas takes my hand in his, and I jump.

“Easy,” he says, and I open my mouth so I can give some devastating retort, but he talks right over it. “Don’t sing if you don’t want to.”

“I know, I know,” I confess, leaning my head back against the headrest. “That’s not—I mean, of course, obviously, but there’s also—people never let it go, you know?”

He squeezes my hand, and I look down at my lap. At his hand on mine, all that’s left of last weekend’s disaster is a bandaid on the heel of my hand even though the cut’s nearly closed.

It’s… nice?

It’s… comforting?

“I say hey, I don’t want to sing, and they say okay great so how about you sing as part of a group and I say no and they say okay you can stand in the back and I say no, that is still very much singing on a stage and they say oh come on it’s karaoke have a few more drinks and I say there are not enough drinks in this entire state and then they finally leave and someone else comes over and we do it all again.” I finally take a breath. “And God, I hate it.”

I know, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I should be grateful people want to include me at all. I should be praising the Friendly Coworker Gods above that they like me enough to want me drunkenly on stage behind them while they slur their way through Wagon Wheel or Call Me Maybe, but I’m not.

From the driver’s side, Silas makes a noise that I can only call a grunt of understanding. He’s still got his hand on mine, and it’s long enough that it’s starting to feel normal.

“We can still go to dinner,” he says with a shrug.

“That’s suboptimal,” I point out.