Chapter 8
Was it necessary for Sabrina to stick with him in the first minutes after they landed? No. Did Luke appreciate it?
He really did. Because while he liked people and generally got along with them, the vibe of 'separate the boys and girls to grill you' was strong, and he didn't feel entirely ready for that. And either Sabrina didn't either, or she was protecting him, which…
You don't need protection! his rabbit said. You're a big strong tough guy! Super smart! Extremely handsome! Funny! Nice to animals! You can handle this!
Yeah, Luke said with a brief smile, but it's nice to not have to. It's nice to feel like somebody's watching out for me.
Of course she is! She's our FATED! MATE! She's got our back! We've got hers! Together, nothing can stop us! But you gotta tell her about FATE! She'll be into it! Tell her now!
In front of all these true humans? Luke asked, amused.
The rabbit, reminded of that little detail, subsided with a harumph that made Luke smile again. "Sorry," he said to Craig, who was in the front passenger's seat and had turned to ask him something. "I was thinking about Sabrina and fully didn't hear what you said."
Craig chuckled. He was a tallish guy with sandy hair and a warm tan, and at the moment wore khakis and a polo shirt. "I said, what was it you said you do?"
"Oh, personal training."
"Yeah?" Mindy asked from the driver's seat. "Is Sabrina a client now? She's always complaining about how the bridesmaids dresses we all choose never suit her, but maybe hitting the gym will help that."
The implication was clearly that the fault lay in Sabrina, not the clothes.
Luke's ears went hot with anger. "We've barely seen each other at the gym at all," he said, perfectly truthfully.
"But I know exactly what kind of physical shape she's in, and I know she knows how to dress to flatter her figure. "
With effort, he left it there, because he figured they were smart enough to pick up on his implication that the fault was not with Sabrina.
She squeezed his fingers and smiled up at him, brown eyes unexpectedly grateful, and he heard a little hiss through somebody's teeth in the seats behind them, because Mindy was in fact driving a minivan through Vegas just then.
With ten-plus people, a couple of minivans made sense for easy transport, but if Sabrina's college friends were all trying to put on a show of being the sexiest, coolest people around, they weren't doing a very good job of it.
With even more effort, he moved on, adding, "Sabrina said it was black tie? I hope a regular ol' tux will do the trick. It's all I brought."
Craig's gaze came back to him. "You own a tux?"
Luke smiled and tried not to make it toothy. "I'm six five. It's hard to rent something in my size."
This time he heard the words behind him clearly: "Six five?
" That was, he thought, Gina, though it could have been Jan, as at first glance they were almost indistinguishable.
One was taller, and the other, oranger, but he didn't know which was which yet, and only one of them was in the car, so if he said a name out loud and got it wrong everybody would know it.
At least Mindy, being a redhead, was easy to remember, and both Keana and her boyfriend Cole were brown-skinned and dark-haired, which made them identifiable in the crowd of mostly-blond white people.
In fact, everybody else, including Sabrina, was one shade of blond or another.
Luke was another odd man out, with his brown hair and eyes.
"He can reach all the tall shelves," Sabrina said lightly. "I had no idea what I was missing until I started dating somebody with fifteen inches on me."
The silence after she dropped that was absolutely deafening, until Gina-Jan behind them broke it with a shrill giggle.
Sabrina met Luke's gaze just long enough for her sparkling eyes to say she knew exactly what she'd done there as she turned toward the back seats.
Her expression was miraculously innocent, then shocked as she pretended to process what had made her friend laugh.
"Oh my God, Gina, what do you think I meant! "
So that one was Gina. Luke also twisted, trying to look as innocent and confused as Sabrina had, to see that Gina was the one with the bad fake tan, which was currently a truly unusual shade as she blushed beneath it.
Her—husband, Luke concluded with a quick look at their wedding-banded fingers.
Her husband Tom was a slim guy with great hair, one of those styles Luke thought was called a wolf cut, with ragged edges and possibly genuine, sun-made, almost-white highlights in the gold shag.
He looked like he couldn't decide which was more powerful: the alluded-to fifteen-inch threat to his masculine dignity, or his amusement at the entire exchange.
Gina, still shrill, said, "You know exactly what I thought you meant! You did that on purpose!"
"I'm pretty sure you told me ages ago that I was too dedicated to my job to know a dirty joke if I stepped in one," Sabrina said, cheerfully now.
"So you're probably giving me too much credit, is all I'm saying.
Anyway, Luke's not my physical trainer, no, but if you want he can probably give you a few pointers over the weekend.
" She shuddered, and Luke didn't think it was entirely theatrical.
"Although he likes exercising early, so you might have to hit the gym before we even go to bed, if previous parties are any indication. "
"Oh, God, no," Craig said. "We're too old for those all-nighters anymore. We're going to have a nice sedate bachelor's party tonight and be in bed by midnight."
It was three-thirty in the morning, and Luke was pretty confident the bachelor's party was never going to end.
His rabbit had checked out hours ago, no longer interested in trying to keep up with the humans.
Particularly humans who wanted to be in very loud environments, drinking weird alcoholic concoctions.
Luke could more or less cope with the music, avoided the alcohol, and was mostly relieved they were doing a bar-slash-casino-crawl instead of hitting up any of Vegas's notorious strip clubs.
He'd spent about fifty bucks on slots, ten or so at each place they'd landed at, and had somehow come out about fifteen hundred dollars ahead.
As a result, he was buying all the drinks, which was making him very popular among The Boys, and also making it much easier to disguise the fact that although he was getting the rounds, he wasn't drinking much of anything himself.
They were, as far as he could tell, generally a decent bunch of men.
None of them were ogling other women or behaving like neanderthals, or worse, trolls.
They were having a lot of good laughs over times and experiences they'd shared that Luke obviously hadn't, but he didn't mind that: watching other people have fun was a kind of fun in itself.
And best of all, nobody seemed inclined to grill him on his relationship with Sabrina, although literally as soon as he thought that, Tom leaned over to grin at him.
"The Girls had a bet that you didn't exist, you know that, right? "
"I'd gathered," Luke said wryly. "What about you guys?"
Craig had somehow managed to overhear, and leaned in, too. "I was hedging my bets, but I was way less surprised than Mindy. The thing is, once you're in with that group, there's no escape."
Luke laughed. "Is that a good thing or a bad thing?"
The other four men exchanged glances before Derek, eyebrows lifted, said, "Mostly good. Sometimes overwhelming, though. Jan brought me out to lunch with the whole pack of them, even Sabrina, on our second date. I thought they'd tear me to shreds."
He was about six feet tall and built like a power lifter, with his blond hair shorn short and no-nonsense. Luke, easily, said, "You don't look like you shred easily," and Derek snickered.
"Only when surrounded by women with their claws out. I survived, and afterward asked why she'd done that, and she said 'Spice Girls.'"
Luke blinked, then couldn't help laughing as he figured it out. "Gotta get along with her friends, right? Yeah, that makes sense. But why 'even' Sabrina?"
"She moved farther away than anybody else," Cole said with an easy shrug.
He wasn't as big a man as Luke, but Luke wouldn't want to get into a drinking contest with him, because he'd had a Long Island ice tea at every bar they'd hit, and wasn't the slightest bit unsteady on his feet or in his speech.
"Harder for her to get back to judge the boyfriends.
Harder for her boyfriends to be judged by us.
Or the Girls," he corrected himself. "We don't judge. "
Luke's eyebrows went up. "No?"
"Except that one guy," Tom said into his next beer.
"The one Jan dated a while back. Before Derek.
Obviously. But mostly they've got pretty great taste in dudes.
" He gestured at the table, indicating his friends, and they offered themselves a round of applause for being great. Luke joined in, grinning.
"Keana, on the other hand," Cole said, "didn't introduce me to The Girls for almost a year. But she did talk about me, I guess. Sent pictures. 'Cause I'm too pretty to resist."
He got a series of hoots and staged applause for his confidence before the entire crew of them turned to examine Luke with a critical eye. "I dunno," Derek said after an appraising minute. "Luke might be even prettier than you, Cole, and Sabrina resisted sending pics of him."
"He's not that pretty," Cole said, offended, and the others cackled.