her knuckles.
“I just don’t see why I can’t go hang out with my friends,” her husband, tall and lanky, complained. “She nags me constantly. I just wanna go watch sports.”
“You don’t even have your wedding ring on!” his wife screeched.
I looked down at Grace’s noticeably bare hand.
“Where’s your ring?” I whispered in her ear.
“It was like a twenty-thousand-dollar ring,” she hissed back out of the corner of her mouth. “With my luck, I’d lose it. I put it in a safe place.”
“Where?”
She pursed her mouth.
“Where?”
“I can’t remember.”
I bit back a laugh as another bride interrupted the crying of the brunette.
“He said I’m not a sexual being.”
“I didn’t say that!” her husband, a bald man with a potato-shaped head, snapped.
“We have sex every day!” the woman continued.
“We used to,” he barked. “But then you stopped, and all you want to do is post stuff to Instagram and dress up your dog.”
“Because my dog doesn’t judge me!” she yelled at him.
“He is judging you!” her husband hollered back. “I see him staring at us when we’re having adult time.”
“You have your dog in the room when you’re having sex?” Linneah asked.
I poured Grace and myself more wine.
“This is way more interesting than I thought it was going to be,” I said under my breath. “I could use some popcorn.”
She nudged me with her foot but was clearly trying to hold back a smile.
“It seems like everyone is having some issues in their relationship,” Priyanka remarked as the servers set down the platters of Indian food.
“Not us,” Teddy said happily, planting a big kiss on Linneah’s mouth. She recoiled.
Teddy seemed oblivious.
“Hey, Chris,” he said excitedly, “we should all do a double date. Whad’ya say?”
I silently shook my head. Grace snickered into her wineglass.
“That brings us into a segue,” Priyanka said. “Have you all still been dating your spouse? A marriage is work. You have to fall in love with each other every day. Otherwise, these marriages are not going to last.”
“But it seems one of our couples is a lot happier than they were the last time,” Rainbow said happily.
Grace was too focused on her food to notice. I nudged her, and she wiped her mouth and took a swallow of wine.
“You mean us?” She pointed between her and me.
“You both seem much more relaxed and flirtatious,” Rainbow said, beaming.
Linneah glared daggers at Grace.
Grace straightened her shoulders and shot a fiery glare back at Linneah.
“Must be the excellent food,” she drawled, “and the fact that I know that after this excruciating dinner, I’m going to get fucked by a thirteen-inch cock attached to the finest man in Manhattan.”
I caught my lower lip in my teeth to try to bite back the crazy grin. She likes me! Grace likes me!
“You’re so vulgar!” Linneah shrieked.
“Yeah,” Grace said lightly, inspecting her fork. “What Chris does with his mouth is pretty vulgar. But he’s my husband now, so I’m stuck with him.”
Grace leaned against the wall of the elevator as it whooshed us up to the penthouse level.
“So,” I said. “Do you want me to do more vulgar things with my mouth?”
“I was counting on it,” she purred.
I kissed her, picking her up as I spun us around to the front door. But as I punched in the keycard while Grace undid my tie, I remembered—my parents were still here.
“Shit.”
I pushed through the front door, expecting to be accosted by my mother and father. Instead, Grace and I were blasted with loud eighties techno music.
“Get those legs up, ladies!” Grace’s grandmother hollered. “This isn’t a leisurely walk around the park! We’re getting our blood pumping! We’re combating osteoporosis and poor muscle tone!”
“I demand you leave at once!” my mother shrieked over the music. She sounded hoarse.
“Oh my God,” Grace muttered.
In the living room were about twenty senior citizens all doing synchronized jazzercise while my parents huddled against the wall, trapped by a sea of neon-colored spandex.
“Reach and extend,” Gran called. “Tighten those lats and obliques.”
“Chris,” my father barked, “I demand you evict them! We’ve been trapped here for hours!”
“See.” Grace smiled at me. “I told you Gran would handle it.”
“They’re guests in my house,” I drawled, leaning back against the long reclaimed-wood table that divided the kitchen from the living area. “They’re welcome to be here just like you.”
“I’m your father!” my dad roared. “You owe me. And I want them gone.”
“Actually,” one of the elderly women said, “I have a date I have to get to. We’ll do it again next Tuesday.”
“You betcha!” Gran said, turning