Sweet Damnation (Richonne Lemon One-Shots)

Hotel Hottie

A/N: A/U - Rated R - Rick Grimes, a 27-year-old successful bachelor is taking a much-needed 'guy's trip' to Cancun with his besties Tyrese Williams and Abraham Ford. He is hoping for an adventure but ends up finding so much more...

"Today sucks," I said, shutting the door of my Chevelle hard; Normally I'd never slam it. My housemate and good friend, Abraham Ford, was sitting in a lawn chair in our garage with a cold Budweiser in his hand.

He threw a beer at me, "Yeah. What makes today worse than any other day?"

"It's hot as the devils-balls, and your father is a jackass."

"Nothing new about that." Abe nodded and then took a swig of beer.

"I am so ready to get the hell out of here." I cracked open the can and took a refreshing gulp.

"Amen to that."

I was the proud owner of a bar called Misfits just outside of Atlanta, and prior to that, I tried my hand at flipping houses. That was how Abe and I met. I hired his fathers' contracting company to do the work on my first house, and here we were five years later.

The housing market had gone to shit, but occasionally I still found a good deal. Currently, I had a project going in a part of town that was undergoing a major revitalization. Abe's dad, Harold, had a crew working on the house for me, doing some demolition and remodeling inside as well as adding a large deck in the back yard.

I wanted the work finished before we left for the Labor Day weekend, but he informed me at noon that there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell' that it was getting finished. I bitched him out and even left the bar where I was finishing up paperwork to drive over there and try to convince him that he needed more men to get the job done as he promised. The reality was that some jobs just took longer than expected, and there was nothing that could be done. They guys had been slowed down by a thunderstorm that put the deck building behind, and the landscaper was pissed at Harold for some reason, so he was taking his sweet ass time on our project.

I took a swig of my beer and sighed. It was ice cold and refreshing. "How did you beat me home anyway? I thought you were working late."

"I work fast. And I bribed a couple of my guys with a case of beer to stay and get everything finished."

Abe was working on a different project for his father, somewhere across town. It was generally best if the two Ford's didn't work on anything together. They nipped and growled at each other like the two alpha males that they were, and I wondered how Abe's mother and sister had survived living with them.

"Are your bags packed?" I asked him.

"Hell, yes. Flip flops, tank tops, and swim trunks. Good to go."

"That's all your bringing?"

"I threw in a pair of khaki pants and a golf shirt. But I'm not bringing real shoes. The hell with that."

Abe had a thing about not wearing real shoes when he wasn't working. He said his feet were sweaty all day in his steel-toed work boots, and they needed to breathe. He even changed into flip flops as soon as the pictures were done at his sisters' wedding. Tyrese and I gave him shit about it all the time. We told him that someday he was going to meet a woman he had to wear shoes for. Our teasing him generally led to a lot of swearing at each other and an occasional wrestling match, but it was all in good fun.

"Whatever. Freak."

"Are you packed?" When I didn't answer, he continued. "Yeah, that's what I thought, jack-turd. People in houses shouldn't, ah shit what's the saying?"