He shrugged. “I just like it when you talk.”
“Oh. Um. Thanks? I like it when you… exist.”
He scooped the bacon off the stove onto two plates, which were loaded with eggs and buttered English muffins. He took them to the table while I poured the coffee, grimacing as I mixed in creamer and the unhealthy amount of sugar that he liked so much. I took my coffee black because I was a man.
I handed him his mug as I sat next to him at the kitchen table. It was quieter than it normally was on a Saturday morning, and I realized it was because the radio he normally played in the mornings was turned off on the counter.
“No music?” I asked.
He shrugged, looking down at his plate. “I turned it off.”
Which was… okay. Fine, but his shoulders were a little tense. “What happened?”
He sighed. “Nothing big. Just… Dad stuff. They were talking about the possibility of more charges coming his way. I dunno. It bummed me out to hear, so I just turned it off.”
Goddamn Andrew Taylor. I couldn’t wait for that asshole to be gone from our lives completely. He’d been arrested at the end of last year for tax fraud, money laundering, and a bunch of other shit, the biggest of which having been the misappropriation of funds he’d raised for charities. He hadn’t been jailed for long before he’d been out on bond. He’d been charged, but a case had to be built against him before a trial occurred. He’d initially refused to step down from his mayoral duties, but finally did so last month amid continued pressure from all sides. The deputy mayor had stepped in until a special election could be held, and Andrew Taylor had all but disappeared from public eye, no doubt holed up in one of his homes in Tucson.
Darren had escaped the brunt of it, given that he was the bastard child resulting from an affair that the mayor had had decades before. Most people didn’t know about him.
Vince hadn’t been so lucky. He’d been in the spotlight for a long while until their falling-out due to Vince refusing to remain in the closet as his father had demanded. Vince hadn’t cared about the publicity that came with being the son of a mayor of a midsized city. There’d been a few LGBTQ publications that had tried to reach out to Vince after he’d come out, but he’d turned them down, wanting to go to college and just live his life quietly.
But then Andrew Taylor had come back into our lives via a nonsensical plot out of an eighties movie involving Sandy, Darren, and Jack It that I still didn’t quite understand but had no desire to know more of. Granted, Vince hadn’t exactly seen his father face-to-face since the day of his mother’s funeral, but the media didn’t know that. In the weeks that had followed Andrew Taylor’s arrest, reporters had tried to get a comment from Vince, even going as far as to camp outside our house for a couple of days. Which, unfortunately, led to a front-page photo of me looking slightly crazy-eyed out my front door as I demanded they leave Vince alone. It didn’t help that they’d described me in the article as Vince’s “portly roommate.” That hadn’t been one of my finest moments. I’d written a letter to the editor saying that I was his portly lover, but it had never been published. When I’d told Vince about it, he’d laughed so hard he’d almost fallen down, which, in the end, was worth it completely.
But every now and then, Andrew Taylor would be held over us like he was right now. Vince was happy. I knew he was happy. But there
were moments like this where I knew he couldn’t help but think what if? What if his father hadn’t been a homophobic asshole? (Though, I wasn’t so much convinced of that as I was that Andrew Taylor was a Republican tool who went with whatever thought would get him the most votes.) What if his father had been involved in his life? What if his father could stand with him at his wedding? What if, what if, what if?
“What did it say now?” I asked, treading carefully.
“Nothing new,” he said. “Not really. Just more stuff coming out about his supposed charities. It goes back further than they thought.”
“You okay?”
He shrugged. “Yeah. Think so. I’ve had time to get used to it. It’s just weird hearing something new every now and then.”
“Are we going to be stalked by paparazzi again?”
I saw the smile quirk on his lips. “Nah. Don’t think this rates up high enough to be stalked.”
“We’re getting married,” I said seriously. “Maybe we need to consider hiring security so the wedding isn’t crashed and then splashed all over the Tucson society pages. You know that everyone is going to be asking what I’m going to be wearing. I don’t want to see the disappointment when they hear it’s from the Spring 2016 JCPenney Big and Tall Collection.”
That got him. He grinned wide and beautiful at me. “You dork. You know as well as I do that Sandy would never allow you to wear anything from JCPenney.”
“He said it’s the physical embodiment of what he thinks drug addiction would look like. I still don’t quite understand what that means.”
“I don’t understand what a lot of you say,” he said. “But I figure if it’s important, you’ll explain it to me.”
And I said, “I got you, babe,” because my best friend was a drag queen, after all.
Vince didn’t get it. But that was okay.
He sat up straighter and dug in to his breakfast. “I feel better now,” he said through a mouthful of eggs.
“Obviously,” I said with a grimace.
“You figure out what Sandy is making you do tonight?”
I shook my head. “I expect it to be aggravating. And intoxicating. And probably a whole bunch of other –ing words. Concerning? Terrifying. What about you?”