“It almost seems like I know your parents better than you do, Gabriel. How sad.”
“Just… no. Come on.”
I grab the bag in the back that has both their gifts and the cookies I made for them. “I put sleeping pills in the cookies, so we don’t have to stay overly long. My guess is they’ll be out by six.”
“It’s five fifty-seven! How much would have to be in them to knock them out in three minutes?”
“Enough,” I say.
Gabriel laughs. “You better not have drugged the cookies.”
“I didn’t! I promise. Did I think about it? Maybe as a passing thought, but when you were over there looking sexy licking out the cookie dough bowl, I knew I had to be good.”
He sighs, like anything I said might be as strange as the way he’d held that bowl like Gollum fromThe Lord of the Rings.After exiting the car and ushering me up the sidewalk, Gabriel lets himself right into the house as an older dog with a gray muzzle and wiry fur meets us at the door.
“Hey, Buddy,” Gabriel says as he pets the dog a moment before there are two beaming faces rushing around the corner. I understand Gabriel is the best thing ever created, but I didn’t know others felt that way as well.
“Gabriel! Sweetie!” Mabel, his mom, enthuses as she grabs him in a bear hug and threatens his very existence. It’s bad enough I start to question whether I need to begin preparations for dealing with her to keep Gabriel’s ribs intact.
“Hey, Mom. I’m fine. I promise. You know the guy who took me is dead, right? He’s still dead. I promise.”
She just squeezes him tighter, and I wonder if Gabriel would give me a bad review if I put his mom in a headlock to save his life.
“You’re squishing me… to death,” he protests.
“Good! You shouldn’t worry me!”
“Your mom has barely been able to sleep since the whole incident,” Clark, Gabriel’s dad, says as he pats his son on the back. Like a good whack or two will restart the heart that his mom has crushed.
“Mom, I’m fine, I really wish you’d stop worrying unnecessarily. I want you to meet my boyfriend, Liam.” He finally manages to scrape her off in time to wave toward me.
What I don’t realize is that she hasn’t filled her quota of death by hugs, and she grabs me.
I freeze,notexpecting the hug that is as bone-crushing as it looked. Like… who the fuck is going to put her in a headlock if she’s attached to me?
“I heard all about your heroics saving Gabriel. I really can’t thank you enough,” she gushes as I suddenly understand what it means to be a deer in the headlights. Like… what the fuck am I supposed to do with this? What the fuck do I do with my arms? I know I’m supposed to wrap them around her, but weirdly, they seem to only want to go around her neck in an attempt to save my own life.
Is this a threat? Is she telling me that she could end my life with a simple hug if I don’t keep her son safe enough? My first instinct is to threaten her back, but Gabriel’s over there looking like he’s trying to chase off a case of giggles.
“You are just a delight!” Mabel coos as she removes her arms of crushery from around me to grab my face in her hands. Apparently, the threat of crushing my body wasn’t enough and she’s now showing me that she could pop my eyeballs out if shesqueezes my face to the extreme she’d squeezed my body. “And handsome too.”
“Mom, please,” Gabriel says.
She giggles, and I come to the conclusion that Gabriel’s parents are avid drug users. It’s odd he’s kept this secret from me, but I suppose I’ve kept plenty of secrets from him.
“I think you’re scaring him, Mabel,” Clark says, as though I could look serial killers in the eyes moments before their deaths but be frightened by this lady who holds everything in her hands. This single person could determine whether or not Gabriel commits his life to me.
“It takes a lot to scare me,” I assure him. “I’m Liam, but it sounds like Gabriel already told you that.”
Mabel says, “He did. It really is such a pleasure to finally get to meet you. I’ve been begging him to bring you around forweeks. I was starting to think that you were a fictional character from how long it was taking him.”
“I was busy, Mom. I explained that.”
“When he was little, he pretended to have a girlfriend. It was so funny and cute,” she tells me.
“Oh? Should I be jealous of her?” I ask Gabriel, realizing that this woman might have dirt on him. That sounds delightful and might be worth putting up with her for.
“Absolutely not. I was young and all my friends had girlfriends, and it was so stupid.”
