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I shot him a worried look. “What do you mean?”
“Your cousin’s husband’s 30th birthday party? Dragging me to a pub crawl with a bunch of people I don’t know. What about your cousin? Did you tell her you were bringing me? Does she know we’re just friends with kinky benefits?”
He was just teasing me. He’d actually been pretty excited when I asked him to go, although he tried to play it off. Sometime in the past three weeks, Sebastian and I agreed that we were quasi-dating. It was pretty useless for me to cling to the friends-with-benefits label, especially when I wanted more.
“She knows you’re coming.” I watched the traffic as we started moving again.
“This feels awfully like a date, wifey. Are you sure you’re okay with that? What if your cousin thinks I’m your boyfriend?” He gasped in fake horror.
“I told her we were banging each other every weekend like clockwork.” I slid a glance over at this profile. “She’s happy for me. What did she say? Hmm. She said you had a really nice body, and you were well-endowed. That’s a direct quote.”
Bash scrunched his eyebrows adorably. “Well, duh. But, how does she ... Is she a big fan of Ghost Parker or something? Those fan websites can be freaky with the stuff they post.”
I suppressed a laugh. Bash was in for a big surprise when he saw my cousin. Years ago, she’d had such a crush on him that she begged me to take her to every party I knew Ghost Parker was attending. Until that one time, when she spent the night with Bash and then woke up the next morning to find an infant in front of his door. That infant was Kody, and that was the end of the budding romance between them, even if the romance was only ever budding in my cousin’s mind.
Sadie was now married to her goth prince — a khaki shorts-wearing computer nerd. She was a different woman. She even wore colors besides black every once in a while now. I wasn’t sure if Bash would even recognize her.
I looked at the temperature display on the navigation screen between us and groaned. “It’s 54 now. It dropped another degree. I’m going to freeze. I say we ditch the party when we get to the first pub. We’ll just stay behind, and they’ll never notice. I don’t want to be walking around outside all night.”
I’d forgone any sense of fashion to wear my heaviest pair of jeans, a black base layer shirt that was made for skiing — because Sadie told me we would be getting matching T-shirts to wear so I couldn’t wear anything bulky, and my Chunky B platform sneakers. I’d brought along my puffer jacket, a beanie, and a pair of gloves as well, just in case. Inside the bars, I’d probably overheat, but I hated being cold.
Bash turned onto the famous Sunset Boulevard. We were getting close to where we’d meet up. “I think you’ll survive 54 degrees. It’s actually pretty nice out for the end of January. We can always sneak a cab instead of walking between bars.”
After we parked in the parking garage Sadie suggested we use, we set out to meet up with the group. We saw them from afar as we approached. They looked like a group just escaped from a Star Trek convention; maybe it was the matching mustard-yellow T-shirts that they all wore. It wasn’t until we got closer that I could read the glow-in-the-dark neon green lettering printed on the back: The Nerd Herd.
Bash suddenly looked nervous. He was giving me the side eye, but I kept a poker face.
Sadie squealed when she saw us approaching the group. She broke off and ran towards us in her ugly mustard, nerdy T-shirt. “Lacey! You made it. And Bash! Long time no see, huh?”
It took a few seconds for Bash’s brain to catch up to what he was seeing. “Sadie? What are you doing here?”
Watching the emotions flit rapid-fire across Bash’s face was fun: confusion, dawning recognition, denial, anxiety, suspicion, and finally an uneasy acceptance of the situation.
“Well, it is my husband’s birthday party, and I did all the planning, so I invited myself,” she deadpanned.
He looked back and forth between us. “This is your cousin? Sadie? Wait, you two are cousins?”
We looked nothing alike. I was the champagne blonde, blue-eyed, sun-kissed California girl, and she was the dark-haired, heavy makeup with pale skin goth girl. She still wore black lipstick and heavy makeup, but she’d toned down the rest of the look ever since she got married.
“She didn’t tell you?” Sadie snickered and then locked her arm with Bash’s, leading him toward the group. “Marius, that’s my husband — can’t wait to meet you. I told him all about you. Well, not everything.” She gave me an exaggerated wink. “Marius is a lot like Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, but even hotter.”
Bash was clearly uncomfortable, but I thought I’d let him stew for a bit before rescuing him.
Marius broke away from his friends and gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek when he saw me. “Lacey, I’m so glad you could make it.”
Sadie pulled Bash up in front of us. “Marius, this is Lacey’s special friend, Bash.”
Marius clapped his back heartily. “Hey, Bash. Thanks for coming. Come meet The Nerd Herd.”
Marius had nerd tendencies, but he was very gregarious and a genuinely kind person. He brought out the absolute best in my cousin. His friends ran the gamut from low-level nerds, like Ross Geller on Friends, to complete nerds like Napolean Dynamite.
We were introduced to all of Marius’s friends, mostly people from his job, but some high school friends, his old college roommate, and his brother who was a beanpole version of Marius with glasses. They all had weird nicknames like Chewie, Bug, and Decaf. Even the girls had nicknames like Coco, Peach, and Leeloo, and I noticed that Sadie was called Raven by the group.
Sadie handed us our Nerd Herd T-shirts and soon Bash and I matched the group. As twilight fell, a monstrosity of a vehicle pulled up to the curb in front of us; it looked like a bar on wheels and it was captained by a woman wearing a purple wig and an eye patch. A boisterous cheer went up from the nerds who’d all been stealthily doing shots on the sidewalk.
Bash had been doing a shot with Bug, but he came over to eye the crazy contraption with me. “What the fuck is that thing?”
It kind of looked like an open-air trolley car. A long bar top ran down the length of the vehicle on each side. Where the bar stools would be were six bike seats on each side hooked up to actual pedals at each station. A wide bench seat made up the back. The roof was blazing with flashing LED party lights and the speakers were cranking out Let’s Get It Started by the Black Eyed Peas.
