“No, I didn’t write them with her here. I . . .” he winced. They were going to lose their shit over this. “I sort of told her to go.”
“You . . . told her . . . to go.” Malcolm repeated the words as if they’d never been strung together in that order before.
“It’s just that I knew I needed to get the song down, and I couldn’t do that with her here, so . . . I let her drive my car home.”
Vlad set down his plate and started cracking his knuckles.
“Okay, before you go off,” Colton said, holding up his hands to protect himself from the coming verbal attack, “she wasn’t pissed or anything when she left.”
Conversation ceased suddenly as Pickle exited the mudroom and the location of her litter box. Trailing her was a smell to wake the dead. It spread throughout the kitchen like a dark storm cloud until it blanketed everyone and everything.
Noah covered his nose and mouth with his hand and mumbled beneath it, “Fuck, dude. What the hell are you feeding that thing?”
“Fancy Feline,” Colton grumped. “And who are you to talk anyway? Your girlfriend’s cat is a menace to humanity.”
“But he’s not rotting from the inside out.”
Malcolm gagged. “You gotta switch her to something organic.”
“No cat should produce a smell like that,” Mack said, grimacing at his now-forgotten food. “You need to take her to the vet or something.”
Colton didn’t have time for this shit. “I thought you guys were here to wrap presents.”
“Yes,” Vlad said, shoving one last bite of ham in his mouth. “We must wrap.”
As the guys scattered, Colton grabbed the bags of gifts he’d bought for the guys’ kids and met them all back in the living room. He found them all seated on the floor near the Christmas tree, and the room already looked like an explosion inside Santa’s warehouse. Wrapping paper and bows overflowed from craft store bags next to each man, and towering piles of unwrapped presents filled the center of the room. Clothes and baby dolls and stuffed animals and purses.
Colton chose a puppy-themed paper from the pile in the center of the room and rolled it out between his splayed legs. Then he pulled his first present from the bag—a toy guitar that played songs with a push of a button.
“Please tell me that’s not coming to my house,” Yan said.
Colton grinned. “To Oscar, love Uncle Colton.” Oscar was Yan’s three-year-old son with his wife, Soledad.
Yan groaned. “Someday I’m going to get you back for all the loud things you have given my kids.”
“My wife had to hide that mini drum set you got Grady last year,” Del said of his two-year-old son. He and his wife, Nessa, also had a six-year-old girl named Josephine, or Jo Jo for short.
“It’s my job to promote music education,” Colton said, plopping a red bow on top of the gift.
“What the hell did you get my kids this year?” Gavin asked. He and his wife, Thea, had twin girls.
Colton pulled two ukuleles from a bag. Gavin groaned. “Thanks.”
“Bring the girls to my house,” Colton said. “I’ll teach them how to play.”
“Can I leave the ukuleles there too?”
“Nope.” He wrapped them in the same puppy-dog paper as the toy guitar.
Noah suddenly gaped at Gavin. “What the hell are you doing?”
Gavin’s eyebrows tugged together. “Wrapping.”
“Have you never wrapped a present before?”
Gavin looked down at the crumpled red-and-green monstrosity in front of him. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Way too much paper,” Colton said, mostly because he was grateful that the spotlight was now shining on someone else.
“And you just, like, wrapped that blanket without putting it in a box,” Del added, aghast. “It’s all floppy and ugly.”
“It’s wrapped,” Gavin snapped. “Who cares what it looks like?”
It was as if someone had just torn the exit door off an airplane. All the air was sucked from the room. Papers flew. Packages fell. Yan actually screamed.
“A well-wrapped present is an expression of love,” Malcolm said. “Please tell me you take a little more care with your wife’s gifts.”
“I usually put everything in gift bags.”
Yan shook his head, mumbled something that sounded unkind, and started to stand. “I am leaving.”
Noah grabbed his arm and tugged him back down. “I’m sure he didn’t mean it,” Noah said, looking at Gavin. “Right? You don’t actually just toss everything in gift bags like they never mattered at all.”