Joey

“So, tell us what happened,” Santi’s mom said and held onto her husband’s hand.

Santi turned to me and batted his lashes the way he did when he needed me to take over something difficult.

“Oh no. I’m not telling them. It was your fault, you deal with the consequences,” I told him and squeezed his thigh to emphasize just how serious I was.

I wasn’t risking his parents’ wrath on this one. I might never recover from it.

Santi pouted, pursed his lips and finally turned to Esme and Lorenzo.

“So…we went down to our hotel’s casino,” he started.

***

“I can’t believe you’ve never been to Vegas!” Santi glued himself to me like I was his most prized possession and, well, a guy could get used to that.

A guy was used to that.

After six months of being inseparable I was starting to believe that there was nothing that could come between us.

Not that I didn’t know it before.

Nothing like your life being put at risk twice in two days to make you realize what—or who—is important in life.

But, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop. For Santi to wake up one day and realize what a big mistake he’d made being with me.

But if anything, he’d spent every day showing me just how much he loved me. And our little kitten family. Even if they were killing him a little at a time.

Thankfully, the cleaner I’d hired twice a week kept his asthma at bay most times.

And as for me? I still woke up every day feeling the luckiest man alive.

“It never interested me. Why would I come to Sin City when I don’t care about booze, gambling or sex with strangers?”

He shrugged and the elevator doors opened with a ring.

“You don’t have to like any of those things to visit Vegas. Are you trying to tell me no one from your Squadron ever got engaged and had his bachelor party here?”

“Well, if they did, I wasn’t informed.”

Santi squeezed my forearm and looked up at me.

“I like being your first. Now let’s have some fun.”

We walked through the hotel reception and stepped down to a cluster of slot machines and cigarette smoke.

“Ah yes. I feel the fun ripping through my lungs already,” I said only to get a slap on the chest.

“Stop being a party pooper and let’s enjoy tonight.”

“Your wish, my command, my love,” I told him.

And as promised I stopped noticing just how noisy, smelly and weird the vibe was in the casino and tried to enjoy myself. Even when some old farts stared at the two of us holding hands, I just growled at them and moved on.

***

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. We get it. You were being cute and gross. Nothing out of the ordinary there,” Esme said and shook her hand to urge her son onward.

“Then…I don’t know. We gambled some money,” Santi answered her and glanced at me with hesitation.

“If by gamble some money you mean we gambled our lives, sure,” I told him, raising my eyebrow.

“Gambled your lives? What does that even mean?” Lorenzo asked.

***

“Oh God, I’m gonna throw up,” he panted.

I didn’t stop running. I just tightened my hand around his and kept going. That was the only thing we could do with two mountainous men after us. And probably more we didn’t know about.

“I’m gonna have…an asthma attack…I can feel…it coming,” he said.

I glanced behind us. There was no one there. For now. But they’d catch up with us.

I scanned the area around us. I didn’t even know which hotel we were in after having run out of ours.

There was a set of white doors with a pink rose arch around it. There was an Open sign hanging off one of the doors and pushed it open, turning the sign to Closed as the door closed behind us.

“We’re okay here. Do you need your inhaler?” I turned to Santi as he collapsed against the door.

He nodded at me and I unzipped the fanny pack strapped around my shoulder.

“And you said fanny packs are for losers.” I passed him his inhaler.

“I…stand…corrected,” he answered and took a puff.

“Hey, I wasn’t the one who thought it’d be wise to report a cheat to the dealer.”

I watched Santi’s face turning red as he held his breath when he really wanted to bite back at my comment.

Which, of course, he did as soon as the ten seconds were up.

“How was I supposed to know they were working together?”

“How could you not? It was so obvious.”

“Oh shut up. Even so. I didn’t think we’d have the Godfather after us for telling on one of his goons.”

“You better hope that statement isn’t true, or we’re fucked!”

“Shhh!” someone said behind me.

I straightened my body realizing that I hadn’t even scoped the room we were hiding in. I snapped around to an older lady with bleach blond hair up in a bun with cat-shaped glasses sitting behind a desk.

She pointed to the end of the room and shushed us again.

Santi and I looked where she was pointing at a scantily clad man and a woman in a costume were staring at us. As was the Dolly Parton between them who gave us the nastiest look on earth if that was even possible or imaginable.

“Do you, Mia Dahl, take Patrick Dwayne…” Dolly said under gritted teeth and the couple turned to each other.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“Well, it’s not the White House Correspondents dinner,” Santi answered.

“Are you here to get married?” the blonde woman whispered at us.

“What? No.” Santi laughed.

“If you’re not here to get married, you need to leave!” the woman said.

I cracked the door open to check outside and shut it back down again.

“Yeah. Let’s get married,” I said.

“Huh?” Santi looked at me all shocked.

“It’s either get married in here or get battered out there,” I said.

“Is there a lot of them?” he whispered with a pained expression.

“They’ve certainly multiplied.”

“Oh dang it! I’m so sorry, baby. It’s all my fault.”

“So? What’s it gonna be?” the woman said, raising her voice, losing her patience with both of us.

Santi turned to her, smiled all innocently and opened his mouth to say the sweetest words I never thought I’d hear on this trip.

“One wedding, please!”

***

“You didn’t!” Esme gasped.

Santi squeezed my hand under the table and winced as he nodded slowly.

“I’m so sorry, you guys,” he whined.

“Esme, get my ax. There’s going to be a murder in this house!” Lorenzo told his wife.

“Please no, Papi. Not the ax,” Santi begged.

“How could you get married? In Vegas of all places. Without any of us? What am I going to say to Celia? What am I going to say to the family? They expected a big wedding with lots of booze—” Esme started.

“To be fair our wedding had a lot of booze,” Santi said and turned to me but I scowled. “Don’t you scowl at me like that. It was your idea!”

“What? Is that true?” Esme raised her voice.

“You said you wouldn’t tell them that!”

I pinched Santi’s thigh but he was so smug he didn’t flinch.

“I’m not getting all the flack for this. Sorry, hubs!”

I bit down a huff and turned to my in-laws—I guess it was official now—and tried to save my hide.

“I didn’t mean for that to happen, Esme, Lorenzo, you have to believe me.”

Esme crossed her arms and pouted.

“It was your fault anyway. If you hadn’t told the dealer that guy was cheating we wouldn’t have ended up at the chapel.”

Santi gasped and then grimaced.

“How dare—well, yeah, I guess that’s true.”

Esme and Lorenzo weren’t pleased with that admittance.

“Oh come on, guys, don’t be mad,” he pleaded with them.

“Esme, who is that? I don’t have a son anymore. Kick him out,” Lorenzo said to his wife.

“Son? What son? I thought they were some weird Mormons you invited in,” Esme added.

“Oh, don’t be like that. Come on. We had no other choice,” Santi said.

“They’re not even very good Mormons. They haven’t talked about God at all,” Esme muttered under her breath and Lorenzo nodded with a huff.

“Help!” Santi wailed at me and I bit down a laugh.

I put my hand on top of his on the table and turned to Mayberry’s top comedians across from me.

“What if we promise to do a bigger, better wedding at the end of the year? Will you forgive us then?”

“End of the year? Pfft, end of the summer,” Esme said.

“How can we plan such an extravagant wedding in three months? You’ve gotta give us more time than that,” I said and turned to Santi for support.

He nodded with big puppy dog eyes that melted my heart but from the looks of it did nothing for his parents.

I didn’t know how they could resist forgiving him. Cruel, cruel people!

“I’m not having a winter wedding. Those are for silly white people who get sunburned from getting too close to an oven,” Esme said.

“Next summer then?” I asked.

Both of them grimaced.

“Think how big and epic it will be. Titi Celia will eat her heart out.” I must have said the magic words because their grimace turned to a grin and then into a smile.

“My boys are married!” Esme exclaimed after a moment.

“Oh now you recognize us, huh?” Santi huffed.

“Take the win, dude!” I elbowed him and that seemed to make him bury his sarcasm.

“Your boys are married!” he said, matching Esme’s newfound enthusiasm.

Well that was one crisis averted.

***

“So…how do you feel…husband?” I asked Santi as he stood across from me in our hotel room wearing the shiniest dress I’d ever seen and a blue wig with matching fake eyelashes.

“Weird as fuck,” he said.

“Good weird?”

He shrugged and gave me the once over.

“Well, I never thought you’d be dressed as a fairy on our wedding day, but I’m not opposed to it.”

“That’s fair,” I answered and put my hand on the small of his back, pulling him into my arms.

“Our friends are not gonna believe the night we had,” he whispered to me.

“What? That we were chased by gangsters, got married by Dolly Parton, then dressed up in drag so we can sneak back into our hotel room so we don’t get killed? Yeah I’m pretty sure no one would believe us.”

Santi trailed his fingers on my torso, up my neck, staring right at me.

“It’s very us, though, you have to admit. Husband.”

The hairs on the back of my neck rose and goosebumps crawled all over my arms at the sound of the word coming out of his red puckered lips.

“It is, isn’t it? Husband,” I replied. “Definitely a kickass story to tell the kids.”

Santi bit his bottom lip.

“I love it when you talk cute like that.”

He snatched the wig off his head and attacked me with his mouth.

And I let our tongues, eyes and bodies do all the talking.

I never thought this little fun Vegas trip would result in us getting hitched, but now that it had happened, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

“You know what that means though,” I said after a mindblowing blowjob from my husband.

“What?” he said, walking backwards with my hands in his, guiding us to the bed.

“We can never come back to Vegas,” I told him. “It’d be too risky and I wouldn’t put it past those people to get shots of our faces from CCTV and get it plastered across town.”

“Huh! You think that’s bad, what do you think Esme and Lorenzo will do to us if they find out we got married and they weren’t invited?” he said and pulled me down the mattress with him.

His cock rubbed against mine and even though I’d just come in my husband’s mouth it went hard again as if it had a life of its own.

Tonight was going to be a long night!

“Oh shit!” I said as I realized what would happen when we told my mother and father-in-law.

“Uh huh.” Santi picked up the lube from the bedside table and grabbed my cock with both hands. “But don’t worry about that now. It’s time to fuck your husband for the first time.”

My dick throbbed in his hands and my breathing turned heavy again.

“Mmm, I like the sound of that,” I hummed and my toes curled as Santi drove me inside him.

“I like the feel of that. Hubby,” he moaned as he wrapped his legs around my butt and pulled me all the way to the root.

And in that moment, that night, I forgot about gangsters, in-laws, and Dolly Partons and focused on my Santiago.

My love.

My husband.