Page 13 of What He Doesn't Know
“I’ll be ready,” I assured him. “Have fun.”
He held my gaze a moment more before his eyes flicked to Reese. “You too.” Then he turned, Dad talking business with him the entire way out the door as Mom, Reese and I made our way to the kitchen.
“So, do I even want to know what a Wild Walker is?” Mom asked when it was the three of us. She immediately went back to prepping the salads she’d been working on when I arrived, and Reese threw me a devilish grin over his shoulder as he reached into the cabinet for a glass.
“Just Reese’s famous cocktail from his party days,” I answered, taking a seat at one of the bar stools at the island. I’d always thought my kitchen was expansive, but Mom’s was straight out of a magazine. It was built for a professional, or rather, ateamof professionals. I barely noticed it anymore, but I still remembered when Dad had the entire thing gutted and remodeled to be Mom’s dream kitchen. She’d practically lived in it my entire senior year of high school.
“And the culprit in your daughter’s first experience being drunk.”
I balked, unsure how my mother would react to that information, but she just laughed. “What? You mean to say my daughter had a drink before she was the legal age of twenty-one? Impossible!”
“Not our sweet little Charlie!” Dad chimed in as he entered from behind us. He winked at me, taking the seat to my left.
“You’re right,” Reese agreed, his back to us as he secretly mixed his famous concoction at the liquor buffet. “I must be mistaking her for someone else.”
A warmth filtered in slowly in that moment, being in the kitchen with my parents and Reese. And for the first time in years, a small smile found my lips.
A real one.
“Very funny, everyone. I’ll have you know, I got so hammered that night that I threw up in Mom’s hydrangeas.”
She paused, hands stilling where she’d been cutting the onion for our salads. “That’swhy they died?! Poor Salina and I racked our brains for weeks trying to figure that out before we had to just pull them and replant.”
They all laughed as Reese handed me the finished product. I took the first sip, cringing a bit at the sting of whiskey before the familiar warmth of spice and cinnamon tickled my tongue. It brought me back to that night, to that feeling of youth, and I shook my head.
“Never thought I’d ever have one of these again.”
Reese watched me take another sip, his eyes falling to my lips briefly before he ripped them away and took a drink of his own. “Yeah, well, surprises always were my thing.”
“They were, indeed.”
I noted the flecks of gold in his emerald eyes, the same way I had the first time I’d tasted a Wild Walker. He was watching me closely, like he wondered if I’d forgotten. He used to bring me books, little “surprises,” ones he stole from the parties he attended. He’d sneak into the libraries or studies at the houses and pick one out for me, even though he knew I’d yell at him for taking someone else’s property.
Half the books in my library were from house parties at Mount Lebanon’s finest.
It was strange having Reese back in my childhood home. It felt different than seeing him at Westchester, a place I’d never seen him before, a new place for us to exist in. That had been more formal, more professional. But now, sitting in my kitchen with my brother’s best friend, with a boy I used to watch play our piano in the next room, it was different — familiar. It was comforting. It was an old friend coming home, bringing all the memories we’d made over the years back with him.
Mom laughed at something Dad had said, something I’d missed, and Reese smiled, lifting his glass into the air.
“To surprises.”
It was suddenly too warm.
My cheeks burned, but I lifted my glass, anyway.
“Surprises.”
Our glasses clinked, and as we took a sip, Mom announced that dinner was ready.
Reese
“You did not,” Charlie accused, holding her coffee cup close to her mouth so the steam hit her nose.
We were standing at the gate that separated her house from my old one. Both of our yards had been so big that we were a block away from front door to front door, but this gate had always been the shortcut. When we’d first moved in, it’d been a solid gate, but our parents had an entryway installed for easy access between our houses.
“I was there that night, remember?” Charlie cocked an eyebrow. “And I know for a fact you did not spray paint anything in your bedroom. Your parents would have killed you.”
I did remember. We were reminiscing on my last night in town, the night before I, along with my entire family, moved away from Mount Lebanon. I was going to Juilliard after dicking around for three years after high school, and Mallory was going to NYU as a freshman. Our parents wanted to be there with us, so we all made the move to New York City together.