Page 36 of Flirting with Forever

They finished their round, said goodbye to Beth and left the bar as a trio. “Jeez,” Richie said glumly, once they were out on the sidewalk and headed toward the trains. “Next time I’ll have you meet me at a gay bar, Mary. That way you won’t cockblock me so hard.”

Mary burst into that sparkly laugh of hers. “Who was I cockblocking you from? Oh, not Hogan?!”

“The very same,” Richie said with a sigh.

“He reads as very straight to me,” Mary said in a careful tone.

“Straight as an arrow,” Richie agreed with an even bigger sigh. “Hence the need for a gay bar. I spend too much time with this guy—” he tossed a thumb toward John “—and not enough time with my own people.”

John bristled. “Hey! I go to gay bars with you.” He’d always been very conscious of making sure his best friend felt supported. John had no desire to stifle Richie’s identity.

“Yeah, and thenyou’rethe one cockblocking me,” Richie griped. “They eat up the tall, dark and grumpy thing he has going on,” he informed Mary.

“Well, you should know better than to go cruising for guys with your hot friend in tow,” Mary scolded Richie. She cocked her head to one side. “Either way, I can’t imagine you have much trouble finding interested men, Richie. You’re a babe.”

Richie and Mary laughed and chatted back and forth, and John bobbed along behind them. His brain was still frozen on the moment when Mary had called him hot.

“Oh, are you free, John?” Richie’s voice pulled John out of his blurry reverie.

“Huh?”

“Mary invited us to a party at her house this weekend. Saturday afternoon. Can you make it?”

“Oh. Uh.” John made a show of pulling out his phone and looking at his calendar app when he already knew for certain that his day was glaringly, depressingly free. Richie knew him well enough to know that there was almost no way that John had plans on a Saturday and was likely asking him to give him a chance to figure out if he wanted to go, regardless of his schedule.

Hot. Hot. Hot.

Beer and lemonade. Ball games with Mary.

Crap.

“Yeah. I’m free,” John said gruffly.

Richie narrowed his eyes at John. “We’ll be there, Mary.”

“Great! I’ll see you then. You don’t have to bring a thing.”

She, again, kissed both men on the cheek. She waved her hand through the air, had a cab screeching to a halt and then was whisked away, back to her fancy Cobble Hill apartment.

John and Richie stood on the sidewalk and watched the cab disappear.

“Shit,” Richie sighed.

“Yeah,” John agreed, feeling that Richie had just pretty much perfectly summed it all up.

CHAPTER NINE

FRIDAYAFTERNOON, MARYmuscled her way up the flight of stairs to her apartment. She was laden down with bags of goodies for her small get-together tomorrow, and her spirits were higher than they’d been in a long time. She blamed it on the hot, soggy weather they’d been having, but Mary had been a little down for the past couple of weeks. It had been so good to hang out with John and Richie on Wednesday night that Mary had resolved then and there to have a party this weekend. She wanted them to meet her friends. Because her friendships were what was bringing light to her life right now.

She froze when she realized that her apartment door was unlocked. She never, ever did that. She was the only person who lived in this building, it was just the one unit over top of the shop, and she was always careful to lock up after herself. She set the bags of groceries down and grabbed her cell phone, pulling up 911 just in case. Mary creaked the door open.

“Hello?”

And then she smelled the Estée Lauder.

“Mary, love, your tulips are wilting,” her mother said as she stepped out from the kitchen, the corners of her mouth as wilted as the tulips apparently were.

“Well, they’re a week old already. Hi, Mom.” She kissed her mother on the cheek and went back into the hallway for the groceries.

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