Amanda gapes at him. “You mix your Soylent in with Diet Mountain Dew! You make chocolate fudge with Velveeta!”
“Liar!” he screeches, pointing at her, giving Geordi the side eye. “Velveeta is the tool of Satan. Do you have any idea what it does to the microbiome of the gut?”
“Is that a food hack?” Geordi asks. “I’ve heard the plastic in Velveeta can actually help to break down biofilms.”
“Really?” Josh’s eyes go wide.
Is this what public school does to people?
“Can we get back to who I’m married to?” I ask, as Geordi and Josh debate the merits of adding Kava to a mixture of CBD oil and Velveeta. I don’t get foodie geeks. Then again, my girlfriend—wife?—is a Cheeto-marshmallow freak.
“No one,” says a woman’s voice. We turn in unison.
I’ve never seen hackles rise. The room fills with ozone, the tiny hairs that dot my arms rising up slowly, like little tension boners.
“Kari,” hisses Amanda. Her eyes narrow, fingers curling into claws, and her face morphs. Gone is the sweet, open woman I love, who approaches the world with an attitude of possibility and trust.
She is replaced by Katniss facing off against Clove.
A tall blonde with brown eyes and a friendly, open expression looks at me. She’s wearing a red and white flower-patterned dress that hugs some very nice hips. Unlike Amanda this morning, she does not look like she was the unwilling drumhead for a bongo last night.
When her eyes flick to Amanda, they narrow, her expression guarded and suspicious. The change almost makes me laugh. Whatever the battle between these two, the stakes are low.
Which makes me wonder why they’re fighting in the first place.
“Andrew McCormick,” I say, reaching out for a handshake, introducing myself. Amanda’s hand immediately goes to my other arm, her grasp primitive and protective. She shuffles closer, her soft warmth radiating from my calf to shoulder, her cheek hovering above my shoulder, her chin defiant.
Mine, she says with her body.
I stand taller, a predatory creep making my skin buzz.
Who in the hell is this Kari person?
“Kari Whitevelt. I’m a colleague of Amanda’s.” She takes my hand, her eyes shifting between mine and Amanda’s. Nothing special about her handshake, other than she’s not one of those limp-wristed women who give you their hand like it’s a wet, crumpled napkin they just sneezed in.
“Colleague?”
“She’s foked,” Amanda adds helpfully.
“I work for Fokused Shoprite,” Kari says through gritted teeth.
“Nice to meet you. I’m—”
She laughs, showing perfectly straight teeth, her smile making the skin beneath her eyes wrinkle in a friendly way. “I know who you are. Can’t work in Boston and not know who the McCormicks are. So nice to finally meet you.” A quick glance at both our left hands and she smirks. “You’re in much better shape today compared to last night.”
I tighten my grip on Kari’s hand. Amanda sinks her fingers into my bicep, like a claw.
“You saw us last night?”
“Saw you? You crashed my wedding!” Kari exclaims, eyebrows up to her hairline, her laughter a weird mix.
“Your wedding?”
“My work wedding.”
“What’s a work wedding?”
“It’s like a work date,” Amanda says with a sigh, as if I’m supposed to have this vocabulary.
“You’re evaluating DoggieDate, too? You married a dog?” These mystery shopping companies are hard core.
“Ewwww, no.” She gives Amanda an odd, smug look. “I am getting married fifteen times this week. You crashed wedding number eight. You insisted that the twenty-four-hour drive-up Elvis shop take your order before they finished my wedding. You appeared at the window and asked for a Venti mocha half-caf with cinnamon and peppermint, a twenty-pack of chicken nuggets with marmalade packets, and proceeded to shove marriage licenses through the window.”
“Marriage licenses!” Our first factual clue. I look at Amanda. “We had marriage licenses made?”
Plural. She’s saying this in plural. My gut tightens. If I’m going to be a bigamist, being married to two guys isn’t exactly how I’d envision this.
Four people. Two to the power of four. Sixteen possible marriage combinations.
Wait! Not exponential. Factorial.
Screw it. I can’t math right now.
Exactly how many of those combinations happened last night?
Hold on. I latch onto hope for the null set. Zero. Best case scenario, zero marriages happened last night.
Kari nods. “They made you come inside because you tried to have too many weddings done at the same time at the drive-thru. And they were out of chicken nuggets.”
“Too many? There really was more than one?” Amanda gasps, looking at her ring, loosening her grip on me.
“You two don’t remember any of this?” She looks at Josh. “You don’t remember hitting on me?”
Josh goes from pale to the color of fresh snow.
Amanda folds in half with laughter, then begins moaning with pain, holding her head. “Josh hit on you? Josh can’t look at a vagina without doing an Exorcist imitation! He would never hit on a woman!”
“His exact words were, ‘Hey, baby, I’d love to see your vagina dentata. Show Daddy some teeth.’”
Josh faints. Drops to the floor like a sack of bones and Velveeta, resting quietly next to Chuckles, who stands up, still on the leash, and begins head butting Josh with his cone.