“What’s this?” Vin asked suspiciously when Caelen pressed a key into his palm.
“It’s a spare key to this house,” Caelen explained the obvious. “But honestly, you’ll probably never need to use it. I almost never lock my door.”
This filled Vin with a profound sense of horror. “Why the fuck wouldn’t you?!”
Caelen shrugged. “I don’t really have anything worth stealing, so what would be the point?”
Aidan laughed. “Our whole family is like this. None of us really lock our doors, and we just walk into each other’s houses without knocking. Even out aunt that does lock her doors has given us the access code to the thing on her garage that will open up and let us in, even if she’s not home.”
Caelen smiled softly. “There’s a day each year when some of the flower shops will give out a dozen roses if you promise that you’ll give most of them away, and so on that day, I like to go around leaving a rose or two at my mom’s house, both our aunts’, and our cousin’s. I couldn’t do that if they were the type to lock their doors.”
Vin really didn’t like the complete lack of security, but despite frowning in disapproval, he didn’t say anything about it. “You said you almost never lock your door, so when DO you?”
Caelen shrugged. “When I know the house is going to be empty for a couple of days in a row. I don’t really know why I bother though, since that’s only sending out a signal that I’m going to be gone for a while. Also, as a police officer, I can tell you how laughably easy it is to pick the simple locks on these doors. If someone wanted to break in and rob the place, it wouldn’t even take them as long as it would to use a key.”
“Yeah, that I know,” Vin admitted with a shrug.
Dying of curiosity, Aidan somewhat abruptly changed the subject. “So… how did you two meet?”
Caelen let out a soft laugh. “Oh, he picked me up at a hotel bar about a year ago, and we’ve been sex friends ever since.”
“Oh! So THAT’S where you’ve been going!” Aidan blurted out in sudden understanding. “I thought you were still just hooking up from an app, but when you do that, you usually come home after, so I wondered why you were staying out all night.”
They chatted about fairly superficial topics for a while, but eventually, Vin sighed and stood up. “I have to go. If I’m late for Sunday Dinner, my mother might actually skin me alive and feed me to her pet piranhas, so…”
Caelen stood up and gave him a quick kiss. “Alright. Come back whenever you want. You have a key now, so even if I was gone for a while, you could still come in and make yourself at home.”
Vin wrinkled his nose unhappily. “We’ll see.”
Rather than beg or belabor the point, Caelen simply let him get dressed and leave.
“You’re serious about him, aren’t you?” Aidan asked when Vin was gone.
Caelen pressed his lips together and nodded.
Aidan ruffled his brother’s hair. “Well, I hope it works out for you then.”
“Me too.”
***
Two weeks before Caelen’s birthday near the beginning of October, he and Vin were cuddled up in bed after a good hard session that had worn them both out. Before drifting off, Vin gave Caelen a kiss and asked: “So… what do you want for your birthday?”
Because Vin’s birthday had unfortunately passed during those two months they’d stopped talking to each other, this was the first time they’d be celebrating a birthday together. Caelen got a sparkly look in his eyes for a moment before shaking his head. He then snorted a laugh.
“I know we’ve only officially been going out for about six months now, but if I could have anything I wanted for my birthday, I’d want a wedding. Since that’s not likely, I suppose I can settle for matching rings.”
Vin was speechless from surprise for a moment. “… You want to get married?”
“Well yeah,” Caelen stated with a shrug. “I’m a Libra and it’s just in my nature to want to be married, but as I said, I understand that it’s not likely. You still go nearly an hour out of your way before coming to see me. How could we possibly have a marriage like that?”
Vin looked away as he thought this over, then he also shrugged. “If you can accept that things will stay the way they are, then I’d be happy to marry you.”
“You mean that?” Caelen asked, feeling breathless with hope.
Vin frowned. “I’m serious. I CAN’T stop being cautious before coming to visit you, and I can’t just live with you and risk bringing danger to your house. I wouldn’t mind you living in my fairly secure house, but since that would probably require you to quit your job, I won’t even ask it of you. So, literally nothing would change, except we’d have a paper tying us together.”
Grinning and giddy, Caelen smothered Vin with a hug. “It means so much to me that you’re willing to marry me, but I was mostly joking. I mean I said I wanted it for my birthday, but it takes 30 days after applying for a marriage license before we could actually get married, and that would be after my birthday. It’d be close to Halloween, and if you think about it, my birthday and Halloween are two days I don’t want associated with our marriage if we ever got divorced.”
Vin cut him off with a kiss. “I can’t get married in this state anyway. I can’t risk there being an easy to access public record.”
“Oh. Right,” Caelen murmured.
“That said, if we went to Vegas… we could elope, it would be legally valid, and no one around here would be likely to find out unless we told them,” Vin reasoned.
Caelen let out a weak laugh. “Heh … Is it pathetic that I think that sounds like a good idea?”
“If you’re pathetic, then so am I. I think it sounds like a fantastic idea. We probably can’t get a flight tonight, but we could probably get an early flight tomorrow, find a chapel and get married by lunch, and be back before anyone even knows we’re gone.”
Caelen pouted. “We don’t have to be quite so rushed. I have plenty of vacation saved up, so I can take a few days off. We can fly out tomorrow, get settled into a hotel room, and then take a look around to see if there’s a particular chapel or theme that appeals to us. After that, we can even have a bit of a honeymoon before coming back.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” Vin agreed with a smile. He kissed his fiancé – they were fiancés now, right? Anyway, he gave him a happy smooch before something occurred to him that made him sigh in mild aggravation.
“Problem?” Caelen asked curiously.
“Not really, just have to do something I didn’t want to.” Vin got out of bed and walked over to where his overnight bag had been tossed on a chair. A moment later, he pulled his main phone out and turned it on. Then he looked over at Caelen. “I usually leave my phone with that woman at the hotel so that my father can’t track me here – nor can anyone else. But I learned that if I turn my phone off, it can’t be tracked, so that’s what I did. I really didn’t want to turn it back on until I got back home.”
“Oh…” Caelen murmured, a little puzzled.
A few seconds later, Vin tapped on the icon to activate the speaker so that he could look online for a flight to Vegas as he talked. This meant that when the call was answered, it was loud and clear.