She stuck her tongue out at him. “What about you? What’s your postgrad life story?”
Reece ran a meaty hand through his hair, sending it in all directions. “Pass.”
“C’mon, you can’t just ask me questions all weekend.” Charlotte poked his shoulder. “Tell me about your life. I want to know.”
“Buckle up, Charlie.” Reece stole the water bottle back and took a swig. “I lived in St. Louis for a year, walking dogs and doing SAT tutoring and stuff. Somehow managed to sober up. Drove around listening to Death Cab feeling sorry for myself. Then I applied to business school.”
Charlotte couldn’t contain her surprise. “What?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I know. No idea what I was thinking. Didn’t get in anywhere, obviously.”
Reece filled her in on his ensuing move to Columbus for a marketing job, where he met his ex-girlfriend. Charlotte kept her face still at the mention of Jess, not sure what reaction she was entitled to as his weekend-hookup-ex-person.
“How long were you together?” she asked.
“Two years.” Reece’s eyebrows did a lot of communicating for him. She watched his face contort and smooth out again. “It feels like longer because we got serious so fast. She wanted everything as soon as possible.”
Charlotte didn’t follow. “What do you mean?”
“Marriage, a house, kids.” Reece fiddled with the cap of the water bottle, screwing it on and off and on again. “And yeah, I’d like those things someday, but now? I’m twenty-seven and broke, the country is falling apart, the world is on fire. Becoming a dad is the last thing on my mind.”
“That’s fair,” Charlotte said.
“The more I thought about it, the less sure I was that she was the person I’d want that future with anyway. So I moved back home.” He examined his hands, calloused and tanned. “I shouldn’t complain,” he added. “I have my car, and my health.” Reece’s face fell, no doubt thinking of his dad. “The city college has a good vet tech program. It’d mean more debt, but at least that’s a real track, you know?”
Reece looked at her, his green eyes swimming with poorly disguised insecurity.
Charlotte wanted to wrap her arms around him and squeeze until he understood that he had nothing to be ashamed of. His life wasn’t as glamorous as some of their classmates’, sure, but everyone else was full of shit. She didn’t care that he wasn’t living in a name-brand city or making his fortune at a scammy startup. It mattered more that he was finding his own way, building a life without a cheat sheet.
She pictured Aubrey leaning back in her desk chair, filling out her fantasy bracket for The Bachelor while Charlotte skipped lunch to type up board meeting minutes. It wasn’t fair that someone as generous as Reece struggled while people like Aubrey sailed through life on a yacht of good connections.
“What’s the clinic like?” Charlotte asked, pushing her resentment aside. “Did your mom ever expand?”
“She did.” His face brightened with pride. “We can board pets now, which is a good revenue stream. Sometimes I work nights to keep them company, midnight pee breaks and stuff. When we get a super nervous dog, I take ’em into the office to watch Netflix.”
“I’m sure they find sci-fi very comforting.”
Reece grinned. “Dogs love Star Trek.”
“You’re a doofus.”
“I will not argue with you on that.”
They fell into a comfortable silence as Misty licked Charlotte’s hands. The sun moved out from behind a cloud and spilled across Reece’s back. He groaned as it baked his skin, his head rolling forward to rest his chin on his chest. She watched the blades of his shoulders move, muscle stretching taut across bone.
A memory of last night returned, her fingertips tracing his spine. The light pressure of her touch had sent a shiver through his body, his hips canting forward to rock into her just so. Charlotte licked her lips, her throat dry for different reasons.
When would they be alone again? She couldn’t kick Jackie out of their room two nights in a row.
Reece lay down on the towel. He moved to rest on his side, one hand propping up his head so that he could look at her. “How are things with your parents? Any progress?”
Charlotte frowned at the tonal shift. Her teeth found the inside of her cheek, worrying the tender skin. She shrugged with a practiced, blasé whatever. “My father looks me up when he’s in New York on business. We go out for a nice steak dinner and talk about the stock market.” He didn’t laugh at her crisp enunciation. She waggled her eyebrows. “Want any investment tips? Booth Thorne has loads of ’em.”
Reece’s brows crinkled. She didn’t know what bothered him more, that her parents made barely any effort to see her or that she called her father by his full name.
“I’m good, thanks,” Reece said. “I have a Starbucks gift card that will appreciate any day now.”
She snorted.
“And your mom?”
Charlotte stared at the dirt. She hated talking about her family under normal circumstances. Telling Reece felt like peeling back her skin to show him her small intestine.
He already knew her tale of queer teen neglect from support group. But no one other than Jackie knew the mortifying details and how they all connected: her mother’s homophobia, why she and Ben broke up, what had made her blow off Reece at graduation. She kept too many secrets, and this one was impossible to expose to the daylight after so long locked away.
But the door in her memory already sat ajar thanks to her return to campus. All she had to do was open it a little further. Bravery didn’t always mean jumping off cliffs.
“It’s been years. She’s not in my life anymore, not since graduation.”
She heard Reece’s quiet exhale of breath, his innocent surprise. Charlotte braced herself for judgment or pity. Or worse, for him to run away screaming. He knew her family was messy, but this was top-tier fucked-up family dynamics. Charlotte’s father had been functionally irrelevant for years, an unreliable pen pal on a different continent, but that was old news and not Charlotte’s choice. What kind of daughter didn’t speak to her mother for half a decade?
Family was everything to Reece. His dad’s death created a tight unit of respect and unconditional support. The Kruegers had been to hell and back, and they adored each other. Their nuclear-family love was never, ever in doubt.
But Reece didn’t say anything, and his face remained still. He caught Misty’s tail and ran it through his fingers before she squirmed out of his reach.
Charlotte wrapped her arms more securely around the dog, who settled down in her lap immediately.
That raw, dark wound in her chest roared inexplicably to life, the same way it did in the lead-up to graduation. The same way it did when Ben kissed her, when the honeymoon phase of their relationship ended and loving him required hating herself.
