Page 63 of Pick Me
I nodded. “You’re a nice guy, Jack, but I’m not…” I broke off with a helpless shrug before I could finish with“interested in anyone but Goodman.”
Jack grinned. “I get it. It’d be weird anyway. I mean…” He lowered his voice. “Webb might think he wants to see us together, but he’d freak if I ever dated one of his brothers. He got so messed up with”—he mouthed the wordAmanda—“that he’d need to be overly involved just to make sure no one got hurt. He’d act as our straight-guy chaperone and follow us on dates to make sure I didn’t get handsy in public and ruin your reputation. He wouldn’t hesitate to knock on my door with a box of condoms and a YouTube video on How to Do the Gay Sex so he could educate us, despite having zero practical experience. Right, Hawk?”
Hawk didn’t seem to find this funny, butIfound it so hilariously accurate that I laughed out loud… and then choked on the bite of potato salad I’d taken, so Jack had to whack me on the back.
From down the bench, Webb beamed at us, confident his silly plan was coming to fruition.
“Hey, Knox, I’ve been meaning to ask… D’you remember that Eagle Scout badge you got for adding a wheelchair ramp over at the Theater in the Hollow?” Webb called.
“God, man,” Jack groaned, covering his face with his hand. “Stop.”
“Uhhh… It was twenty-something years ago,” I reminded him. “But I remember it vaguely.”
“You had to write up a bid for all the materials and then do the work, didn’t you?” Webb stroked his beard. “It was a lot of work.”
“Sure.” Where was he going with this? “I guess.”
Webb took a bite of potato. “Do you know, that thing was so sturdy, it’s still there to this very day?”
“That’s… good to know,” I agreed, peering down the table at Lumberjack Yenta curiously.
Em, Hawk, Jack, Marco, and Gage all stopped eating to stare at Webb, too. And while all of us except Jack looked at Webb like we suspected he’d lost his mind, Jack glared at him like he knew it for a fact.
“What?” Webb said defensively. “Knox is good at construction projects, that’s all I’m saying.”
I took a sip of water. “You know, I seem to recall thatyouwere also an Eagle Scout. Didn’t you construct a—”
“You know, Knox, itjust this very minuteoccurred to me as I was telling that completely unrelated story,” Webb interrupted, “that Jack needs some help building a wheelchair ramp at his mom’s place. She messed up her knee, and she’s gonna need wheels for a while. It would be really neighborly if you could help out.”
The man was as subtle as a sledgehammer.
“Webb Sunday,” Jack muttered. “I told you I was going to hire that handyman from Two Rivers. Knox has his own work, and I—”
“I’m happy to help,” I assured him. “I don’t know how helpful I’ll actually be since that ramp was the last time I did any construction, but Webb’s right about it being neighborly.” That was theonlything he was right about.
“Well, there’s no rush. My mom’s still in rehab since she hurt her hand in the fall, too, so I have a couple weeks.”
I nodded. “Pick a date, and I’ll put it on my calendar.”
Gage leaned back so I could see him and grinned mischievously at me. “You’re so efficient, Knox.”
Hmph.It was hardly an outlandish thing to keep a calendar. Almost everyone did. In fact, Goodman should keep one himself, and I was going to tell him so. At great length. At the earliest opportunity.
Was it fucked-up that lectures were our foreplay? Probably. But I liked it.
A lot.
“You know, Gage, speaking of neighborly things,” Marco said. “Drew and I saw Helena Fortnum at the Farmers and Artisan Market today—she sells her wildlife photography prints, you know, and her nephew makes spice racks and medicine cabinets out of reclaimed barn wood—”
Goodman’s mouth pulled down in an exaggerated frown. “Huh. Remy Fortnum, the guy with the tattoos, makes spice racks?”
“Lovely ones,” Drew agreed. “Nice boy.”
“Anyway,” Marco went on, “I told her she should ask Gage to make her a, ah… whatjamacallit.” He snapped his fingers. “A thing on her website that lets her sell things direct to customers?”
“Oh, a storefront?” Gage nodded. “That’s easy enough.”
Marco beamed. “I knew you’d say that. But then we started brainstorming about how Remy would need a website, too…”
