'Nother Sip of Gin - Rhys Ford Page 0,65
back then, I figured we should do that now. I’ve even brought some music.”
“Who’d you ask for the music?” Quinn let Rafe drag him to his feet, carefully avoiding the corner of the file cabinet. “Did you ask my mom? Don’t tell me you asked Brigid.”
“I asked Brigid,” Rafe admitted sheepishly. “Everything we listened to in high school wasn’t exactly something you can dance to, and yeah, she chose something a bit cheesy, but it fits.”
“It’s something they dance to, isn’t it?” He sighed. Still, he remembered watching Rafe work his magic on others all through high school, hating being overlooked while knowing his brothers would cheerfully kill their best friend if he laid a hand on Quinn. “Okay, but don’t complain when I step on your toes.”
“Babe, I’m the bassist. You should be watching your feet.” Rafe fiddled with his phone, leaving it angled on the cabinet, and the start of a teeny-bop tune filtered out of the speaker. “There. Now come in close. It’s a playlist of every sickly-sweet slow dance song I could find in what your mom gave me. I figure I’ve got about ten minutes before you die from a sugar overdose.”
Tucked up against Rafe, Quinn let himself drift along in a circle, swaying to the mostly electronic music and ignoring the false soprano wailings of a lovelorn teenaged boy begging a disinterested girl to save him her last dance. It wasn’t dancing so much as it was a prolonged hug, a shuffle around the office floor with no intention of going anywhere but back to where they began just so they could start over again. After a few minutes, Quinn felt the day melt off of him, releasing any tension in his back and shoulders, and Rafe gathered him up closer, supporting him while their circles became a lazy sway.
“Your mom asked me if I was going to propose to you,” Rafe murmured into Quinn’s hair. “I told her she had to mind her own business.”
“How’d that go for you?” Quinn snorted into Rafe’s chest. “She threaten to send you to bed without any dinner?”
“Close,” he said, resting his cheek against Quinn’s. “She told me I couldn’t come over to play with you until I apologized. Just like when I hit Riley with that frozen water balloon.”
“He walked into it.”
“He was two,” Rafe countered. “And she forgave me as soon as she found out Kane was the one who gave me the damned thing. Your dad bailed me out today. He said we can take our time to decide what we want to do. If we want to do anything. I feel like every time they push at us, we just want to not do it.”
“It’s like you know me,” Quinn sighed, then chuckled. “We should elope.”
“She’d kill us.” He moved Quinn about, changing the direction of their shuffle, and the music shifted, deepening into something a bit less maudlin but no less sticky. “But if that’s what you want to do….”
“If… when… if we get married, I’d want to go back to Ireland,” Quinn confessed softly. He’d held an idea of what the day would look like when he and Rafe spoke vows, half wishful-thinking and half daydream. “Nothing big. Just… family, and maybe outside in the old abbey down the road from my gran’s house. Then off to a pub so no one has to cook and we can stumble home drunk later.”
“Nothing big. You’ve got ten thousand cousins over there. It’ll break the place. There’d be no one left to serve us, because everyone’s going to be at the reception,” Rafe murmured, stroking the small of Quinn’s back. “Actually, babe, that sounds perfect. What the hell. We’ll bring in someone to cover at the pub and tell them to stock up on Guinness before we get there.”
“Yeah, right.” Burying his face into Rafe’s shoulder, Quinn exhaled, relaxed and happy. “I’m just glad you’re here. With me. That’s all I need.”
“Really?” Rafe shifted, putting a bit of space between them, and Quinn blinked, wanting the warm shadows back around him. A bit of gold appeared under Quinn’s nose, a pinch of bright between Rafe’s lovely callused fingers. “We’ve talked about this before, but you know, as much as we’ve joked and teased about it, I want to do this with you. Dance with you. Pick the stuff off your grapes. Feed your cat at three in the morning because she’s screaming at me. Let me marry you, Quinn Morgan. I can’t think