Free Diversion 2 - Collusion by Eden Winters

you?”
Part of a couple? Even during his years with Victor Lucky hadn’t considered himself part of a couple. “I told you I lived with Victor, but we did our own thing when we weren’t together. I didn’t answer to him, ’cept about work, and he sure the hell didn’t answer to me. You?”
“I had a few boyfriends in college, nothing too serious. They were mostly frat boys out for a good time. We may have been close in age, but worlds apart otherwise. And I developed a hopeless fascination for a straight guy while in the Marines. So I guess we’re both two blind squirrels hunting a nut.”
Once more Lucky bit down on a snappy comeback involving “nut.” Intimate moments probably weren’t the right time, although he hadn’t had much experience with intimate moments. They lay in silence for a while until Bo contracted the couch. “C’mon, I’m hungry. Let’s fix dinner. We can finish the conversation in the kitchen.”
Bo’s kitchen matched the rest of his current life—tidy and organized to the point of obsession. The few canned goods Bo allowed—he usually didn’t abide tinned vegetables due to complaints of excess salt—sat neatly arranged in the pantry, labels facing out at precisely the same angle. Silverware lay tucked into compartments in a drawer, unlike Lucky’s own silverware drawer where he simply threw in spoons and forks and untangled them the next time he needed one.
While Bo prepared the marinade, Lucky cleaned and stemmed the mushrooms, scraping out the gills like he’d been shown—the reason his earlier attempts at grilling portabellas didn’t turn out like Bo’s. His still didn’t, but why cook them himself and risk less than perfect results when Bo got them right every time?
“These would have been better over charcoal last night,” Bo commented, while tossing a few veggies and some tofu cubes into a saucepan to stir-fry.
“I’ve no complaints about last night.” Nope, not a one.
“Anything else you want to ask?”
Was there? What should Lucky know about the man he slept with? Walter eliminated most of the biggest issues with a thorough background check, though only the extremely paranoid would ask about any criminal history worse than a misdemeanor, right? What kind of questions would normal people ask? “Where’d you grow up?” That was a normal question, wasn’t it?
“Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Now my turn. Did you have any pets when you were a kid?”
Lucky rinsed and patted the mushroom caps dry before passing them to Bo to marinate and place on the indoor grill. “I lived on a farm with plenty of animals, but you probably wouldn’t call them pets.”
“You didn’t have a dog or a cat?”
“At any given time we’d have a dozen or more barn cats hanging around, but we kids weren’t supposed to tame them.” A memory came to mind of a much younger Lucky trying to sneak a kitten into the house. His father hadn’t approved. “If you tamed ’em they’d hang out on the back steps begging a meal instead of chasing mice in the barn. Of course, Mom always kept one cat in the house as a mouser.”
“Cats, huh? You strike me more as a dog person.”
“We had those, too. We always kept a pair of Great Pyrenees to watch the goat herd, keep foxes and coyotes from picking off the kids.”
“Cool. I’ve never seen one of those before.”
“Beautiful animals, easy going most of the time, but they’d kill a fox in a heartbeat.”
Bo sighed. “I miss having pets. I’m not home enough these days to take care of one.”
“I’m sure old lady Griggs wouldn’t mind you cuddling one of her critters if you wanted.” Lucky envisioned Bo, sitting on the landlady’s porch with a lapful of cats.
Questions about school and old friends occupied their meal, and they’d moved on to early loves by dishwashing time. Bo elaborated on having fallen madly in love with the straight fellow Marine who’d broken his heart by getting married, and Lucky made it a point to avoid