This one was fun, mostly because the boys are inherently cute, expecially in the opening scenes of Heiress Daisy Duke.
Betting with Luke Duke is like considering a friendly little conversation with a serpent bearing an apple. Odds are, things will end up a mite messier than they started.
Still Bo figures to win this one. Shoot, all he has to do is outdrive Luke, and he's been doing that since about the time he first learned the wisdom in avoiding the snake-fruit combination.
"You're just afraid that the way it turns out is gonna make a grown man cry," Bo taunts as they skim over the road, not hardly even touching the dirt.
"If it makes a grown man cry it'll just be because whipping your butt always breaks my heart a little bit." Despite the way Luke's chin dips, forcing him to look at Bo through those oh-so-innocent upper lashes of his, Bo believes this might be a little bit true. For all that they're competitive, Luke hates to see Bo miserable. Which is how he usually ends up when he loses.
Speaking of belly-crawlers and an inability to resist food, there's Rosco's cruiser behind them, with two bobbing hats in there, one of which barely shows over the dashboard. Huh, it's rare that Boss gets in on a routine chase.
"Want me to let them get us?" he asks, on the miniscule chance that the law of Hazzard actually has a decent reason for wanting to stop them.
"Oh, you wanna," and that's just straight up goading there, no need to bother with sophisticated tactics like sarcasm. "You wanna drop the whole bet, huh?"
He has no intentions of dropping a bet he can win in a heartbeat.
"No I don't want to drop the whole bet, I just—" why is he bothering to argue with Luke anyway? There are better ways to settle this. "All right," he's pointing Luke back into his own side of the car. "You watch. You just watch. Bye-bye, Rosco!"
And of course it doesn't take much to lose the cruiser. Quick turn here, some dust flying there, and there are no more sirens behind them.
You'd think Luke would congratulate him. Instead he gets, "You should have saved some of that fancy driving for Chester Flats."
"Fancy driving?" That wasn't close to anything he plans to unleash on Luke in a minute or two. Chester Flats, that's where they've agreed to settle the little problem of who gets to drive in this weekend's hot race. Fastest driver from one end of the flats to the other and back gets the wheel and the bragging rights. "Shoot, I was just doing my finger exercises."
Luke's unimpressed. "Keep 'em on the wheel," he suggests. Yeah, that's fine with Bo. There's no temptation to put those fingers anywhere else.
Luke gets first crack at the flats. He's not a bad driver; Bo's sometimes impressed by what the man can do. But, "two forty-five oh-six," as Bo announces his time to be, should be easy enough to beat. It'll be a pleasure to wipe that smirk off of Luke's face.
"Well, you wanna concede and save yourself some embarrassment?" Just watch Luke stretching out his arms like he's ready for a nap now. And Bo might just second the notion of a nap, once he works up a sweat, beating the pants off of Luke.
"Now hold on a second. Who's trying to convince who of what?" Apples and snakes, there's something Jesse always claims Bo didn't quite grasp in that lesson. "Let's let the General Lee cool on down and then I'll give it a try, and you can hold the watch."
So they get out of the car agreeably enough, and spend a couple of minutes leaning on the trunk until the ticking of the General's engine comes to a halt. It's just that quiet out here, where there's nothing more intrusive than bird call and each other's breathing to distract them from the sound of heat evaporating into thin air.
"Ready?" Luke asks him, those eyebrows cocked in reminder that Bo's got a lot to prove. One last chance to back out, cuz, those pretty blue eyes are saying, while Luke purses his lips together as proof that he never uttered a sound.
"Yeah, I'm ready," Bo agrees. "You just get back on in there, and I'll show you how it's done.
They pass each other on the way to their respective sides, and Luke swats him on the butt. Good luck.
Bo lines the car up and revs the engine, looking to Luke for the signal. Yeah, he doesn't have to watch his cousin, he'll hear the "go" clear as day since it'll be yelled at him from all of a foot and a half away. Still he likes to watch Luke in these unguarded moments when he's so busy concentrating on watching the second hand tick around to the twelve that he doesn't even know Bo's eyes are on him.
There comes Luke's tongue and Bo snaps his head forward just in time to take off on cue. Not that he needs to look; there's the sound of the engine, the gusts of air blowing through the car, the feeling of dirt running to sand at the far end of the flats, reminding him to pull that one-eighty.
He's halfway back to where they started when Luke admits, "You're doing all right." It's such a rare compliment, that Bo takes lets his attention get drawn to his right.
"Really?" He turns his head long enough to see that proud little smile on Luke's face, before he skids the car to a stop. It reminds him of sunny afternoons on the old sand lot, with a fat stick and whatever they could find that was round enough to pass for a ball. Even when they were on opposite teams, Luke was always rooting for him.
"Well?" he asks when the car has stopped jostling them.
Pure innocence there on Luke's face. "Two forty-five oh-six." It ends in a smile.
"You're kidding." No, he's not. He's chuckling, and Bo's laughing. Until it stops being funny. "Well, now what? We can't both drive in the race."
That proud little smile of Luke's turns one-sided. Bo loves that look, the one that means Luke's up to no good.
"Sure, we can." And he also hates that look, because no good can come of it. There's forbidden fruit in that smile.
"Luke, don't you remember?" It's been a few years, but Luke's got the memory of an elephant. There's no way he could forget. "That time, with Cooter's car?" In the end they'd both won and both lost, because on the way they'd stopped trusting each other. And it had been so unpleasant that they'd agreed never to do it again.
"Not like that," Luke stops him before he can go back over the details. "Like this." He slides over, straddling one leg across the console and into Bo's lap. "Move your hand," he get instructed, but the words are extraneous, because his right hand's getting pried off the steering wheel so Luke can duck under it. "You got the clutch, and I got the gas."
Luke's mostly in his lap now, and Bo's got one arm around his shoulders. "Who's got the brake?" Bo asks.
Luke turns his head to catch Bo's eyes, breathing hard into the tight space between them. Who needs paradise when there's an apple right here? Bo turns his own head to meet up with Luke's, noses touching, eyes barely focused, sharing air and space and then a kiss.
"We ain't gonna need no brakes," Luke assures him.