Total pages in book: 39
Estimated words: 37426 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 187(@200wpm)___ 150(@250wpm)___ 125(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 37426 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 187(@200wpm)___ 150(@250wpm)___ 125(@300wpm)
“Three is more than two,” Todd pointed out. “Plus there’s Seamus.”
“Exactly,” Lucas said. “Anyway, now that we’ve rebranded this place, let’s get back to the topic of what Seamus has going on.” He looked at Seamus expectantly.
“I’m just dealing with family drama and that’s more draining than being on my feet behind this bar for nine hours.”
“Is everything okay with your family?” Todd asked, his expression sincere.
“Spill the deets,” Lucas said as he leaned onto the bar. “I love other people’s drama, and this town’s had a gossip dry spell for months. I’m desperate for entertainment.”
“He doesn’t mean it like that.” Todd gently pushed Lucas’s shoulder.
“Yes, I do,” Lucas said.
“I’m not sure how scintillating you’ll find it. I’m going to my hometown next week for the Battle of the Boyne parade and my parents are already talking about potential wives they have lined up for me. That’s the drama.”
“What’s a Battle of the Boyne parade?” asked Todd.
“Potential wives?” Lucas shrieked.
“Irish holiday,” Seamus answered. “Pretty much everyone in the town I’m from is Irish so they have a little parade and a bunch of barbeques. It’s a good time for me to visit because I can knock out a bunch of people in a few days and July is hot as hell here anyway. It’d actually be nice if my parents would stop trying to arrange a marriage.”
“Family can be hard,” Todd said, voice sympathetic.
“Before I got together with Jared, my dad used to refer to me as the one we pray for,” Lucas said.
“I didn’t know your family was religious.”
“They’re not,” Lucas said drolly.
Turning his attention from Lucas to Seamus, Todd said, “Can you tell your parents that you’re not interested in getting married?”
“Oh, I’ve told them that. Repeatedly.” At thirty-six years old, everyone Seamus had grown up with had been married for at least a decade. “My, uh, family’s different.”
“What do you mean different?”
“It’s hard to explain if you don’t have any experience with it.”
“I have experience with all sorts of things.” Lucas lifted the toothpick from his glass and sucked off the olives. “Hit me with it.”
He couldn’t help but smile at the sass coming from the man who lived on a farm but still dressed like he was in Beverly Hils.
“My ancestors originally came to America from Ireland along with a bunch of other families. They settled in the same town outside of Boston, spent all their time together, and eventually they formed a… group of sorts.” People in the area sometimes called them a cult, but it wasn’t like that. They didn’t have an all-powerful leader or a belief in a sacred deity. They just stuck together very, very tightly and they weren’t open to outsiders. “In a lot of ways, it’s great. They support one another. They frequent each other’s businesses. Holidays are always fun with lots of gatherings. Growing up, we all went to the same schools, played sports together, belonged to the same clubs, ate at the same places. The town’s about the size of Hope and everyone who lives there is in the community. It’s like having a really, really big family.”
“That sounds nice,” Todd said. “Really nice.”
“It is. Unless you don’t want to follow the rules. They’re extremely insular and obsessed with family. The expectation is that you get married young and you do it from within. I had to move all the way across the country to escape that fate.”
“You aren’t allowed to be single?” Todd asked.
“I mean, you can try. But you won’t hear the end of it.” Seamus picked up a cleaning cloth and started wiping the bar, just to have something to occupy his hands. “At first, it wasn’t that bad. I wasn’t quite nineteen when I moved to Hope and my family thought I was being rebellious, and I’d get it out of my system and come home after a few months. Then a few months turned into a few years, and they were mostly okay because I was so young. But when I was nearing my mid-twenties, they’d had enough.”
“What did they do?” Lucas asked. “Threaten to cut you off?”
“They can’t do that or maybe they would,” Seamus said, mostly kidding. His parents loved him and didn’t want him to suffer, which was why they relentlessly tried to marry him off. In their minds, he couldn’t be happy if he wasn’t married. More specifically, he couldn’t be happy if he wasn’t married to one of them. “But what they can do is find me a wife. They used to spring a fiancé on me every time I went back to visit.”
“Uh, what?” Todd’s eyes were wide.
“It was wild.” Seamus shook his head. “I’d go home for a holiday and there’d be a woman there who thought we’d be getting married. Sometimes they’d have wedding dresses to show me. My parents set it up with her parents and everyone thought that made perfect sense. Like I’d meet her, and bing bang boom, I’d get married just to go along with it.”