Page 52 of What He Doesn't Know

We were both silent for a moment, eyes balanced in the distance.

“Not that I think there should be any comparison,” she said after a while. “Or that one loss is more than the other, or that we can measure a loss in the scars and memories left behind — but you have them, too. You have scars.” She pressed a cold, tiny hand over my heart, and I felt the beat of it through her palm. “They’re just not where you can see them. But you can feel them.” She shrugged. “You always will.”

“It hurts,” I admitted, voice breaking, and Charlie hugged me in an instant, wrapping her petite arms around me. It took every ounce of manhood I had left not to give into the urge to cry in that instant. I hadn’t cried since the day my family died, and I’d never cried in front of Charlie. I didn’t want to break that streak now.

But she felt like home. That hug, it felt like the only thing I had left in the world, like the missing piece to a puzzle I didn’t know was incomplete.

“I know. I’m sorry.” Her voice was just a whisper. “I wish I could say that hurt goes away, but I know you know as much as I do that it doesn’t. And I know it’s hard to hear, that it’s easier to just put the blame on yourself and wish it was you in their shoes, but there’s a reason you’re still living, Reese. And they would want you to live happily.”

I didn’t dare say another word, not when I had her in my arms like that. The comfort I felt just from her being there, from her warmth pressed against mine, from her being tucked into my chest like that — it was more than I deserved. It was more than I knew I was allowed to have from a woman who wasn’t mine, but I took it greedily, like a hot meal offered to a starving man.

“And you?” I asked after a moment, pulling back only enough to capture her gaze with my own. “Are you living happily?”

“I am.”

“Don’t lie.”

She blinked, taking another step back — enough to break our hug. She crossed her arms again. “I didn’t come out here to talk about me, Reese. Tonight isn’t about me.”

“It could be,” I countered. “You made me feel better, maybe I could do the same.”

“I feel great,” she said with a smile that was almost convincing. To anyone else, it would have sealed her lie with a perfect little bow — but it didn’t fool me.

The doors flew open then, and Mr. Reid’s voice bellowed my name. He had his arm around a guy my age, and he immediately launched into his name and role at Westchester and why I needed to know him.

I barely registered any of it, because my eyes were still locked on Charlie.

She kissed her dad’s cheek, clueing into the conversation well before I did, then she offered me one last smile and flash of those doe eyes before she slipped back inside.

The rest of the night was a blur of handshakes and dances, of stories shared over dinner and jokes shared over bourbon. Charlie and I did a sort of dance around each other, never existing within the same space for long before one of us was swept off somewhere else. But I was aware of her, and she of me, just like we always had been.

I wondered, distantly, if I would ever find a woman to make me feel the way Charlie made me feel. Would my future wife know what to say on the hard nights, how to bring me comfort only by existing. Charlie didn’t even have to have the right words that night — she just needed tobe there. To exist.

With her, with the way I felt for her — that was enough.

She’d always been enough for me, even when I’d had to sit on my hands to keep from touching her when we were younger. Five years had separated us then — five long, cruel, forbidden years. I didn’t have the power to change those years, to warp time, to make it okay for a twenty-one-year-old to fall for a girl still in high school.

But as Charlie and Cameron said goodnight to everyone, I realized those years weren’t what separated us any longer. I held her a beat longer than normal when she leaned in for a hug, thanking her for what she’d given me that night, and then I shook Cameron’s hand, all the while wondering if what I’d heard about him was true.

And I realized it then.

Hewas what separated us now.

And he was only a man.

Charlie

The following Tuesday, my parents hosted all of us for game night.

It had been a tradition when Graham and I were younger, one we’d included the Walkers in on once our families had become close. We’d all sit around the big coffee table in our living room, playing different board and card games for hours on end. Eventually, the parents would filter off into the kitchen to drink wine and bourbon and talk about more adult things, but with the kids, we were always caught up in the competitive nature of the night.

It was the first game night for Cameron.

We were kickstarting the tradition up again, and I wondered how he felt about it.

His hand was on my knee on the car ride over, but he seemed distant, lost in a thought somewhere down the road where his eyes rested. I thought about asking him what was on his mind, but the truth was I needed the silence, too.

Reese and I had shared such a powerful moment at the fundraiser, one where he let me in the way I had let him in the night on the Incline. I realized that night that he needed my friendship even more than I realized, and that he was hurting in the same way I had been for years.