“I think we both graduated in the bottom half of our year,” she joked to make him feel better.
Reece stiffened. He looked over her shoulder as if in search of a back button on the conversation.
Fuck. She’d brought it up. Graduation.
Charlotte apologized all the time at work, even when she’d done nothing wrong. I’m sorry that call caught you by surprise when Roger was late to a meeting. I’m so sorry I haven’t completed that project when her boss never assigned it in the first place. A good bullshit apology required taking full responsibility for mistakes that weren’t your fault. It was a trick she’d learned while living with her mother and honed further when she dated Ben. The important part was never to mention who was really to blame.
She owed Reece an apology. A real apology, not a phony one.
Charlotte looked around. They were insulated at the side of the party, but conditions for the conversation they needed to have were far from ideal. A gaggle of lacrosse girls were doing shots out of someone’s flask. Charlotte suspected her breath reeked of pilsner. Reece’s face defaulted to his usual resting half smile, even as his thoughts looked miles away. He was being so goddamn nice to her.
She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t put the right words together. There wasn’t a crowbar big enough to open that Pandora’s box of regrets.
As she faltered, Reece took pity on her. “Tell me you have a fiancé and a golden retriever,” he quipped.
She snorted, surprised. Then she laughed from deep in her belly. The tension between them broke like fresh snow under a boot.
“No, I have nothing,” Charlotte said. She waved her hand at his raised eyebrows. “You know what I mean. I have a shitty roommate and my own pod at Front End.”
“You have a nap pod?” he asked, poking fun.
“No, it’s a desk that doesn’t touch any other desks.” She outlined a box with her hands, roughly four feet wide and three feet deep. “Like a cubicle but with no walls. Front End has an open-plan office.”
He whistled. “Well, that sounds less fun.”
“It’s loud and always smells like someone’s lunch. Whenever one person has a cold, the rest of us get it too. I used to wear noise-canceling headphones, but my boss said it made me look antisocial.” Charlotte pulled a face and Reece laughed, his eyes crinkling.
“Do you like your job? You’re an assistant, right?”
“To the CEO. He’s actually the commencement speaker on Sunday, Roger Ludermore?” She qualified her answer to explain its misery, not to show off, but he was nonetheless jazzed.
“Dude, that’s awesome!”
Charlotte grimaced. “Is it, though?”
“If Roger’s as smart as everyone says, he’s figured out that he’s lucky to have you around.” Roger was definitely not as smart as everyone said, but before Charlotte could crack a joke, Reece took her shoulder and gave her a congratulatory squeeze. Her skin hummed where he touched her and didn’t let go.
As much as she wanted to be honest with him, she didn’t want to shatter the glowing impression he had of her life. She’d also forgotten Reece’s knack for complimenting a person so sincerely that they were temporarily disarmed. She could tell he really meant it. And it meant something to her, that he’d see her that way. Especially when the version of her he’d known in college was such a live wire. When they met in support group senior year, she still flinched at sudden movements.
That was then, and this is now, she reminded herself.
“Thanks for that. But what about you?” she asked. “Perhaps a designer doodle and a condo by the sea?”
Reece chuckled. His hand fell from her shoulder. She missed it. “You heard about Thomas’s new place, huh?”
Charlotte rolled her eyes. The last time she saw Thomas Irons, he was passed out on the President’s Lawn in a unicorn onesie using his balled-up graduation gown as a pillow. “Seriously, what the hell. How is he the most stable of all of us?”
“I don’t know about ‘stable,’ but I ask myself that question every single day.”
She gathered her nerve to ask the question she told herself she was only posing to be polite. “How are things going with Jess? Jackie mentioned her a while ago. And that you were moving in together?”
Reece’s eyes fell to his sneakers. “We actually broke up a few months ago.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
Charlotte was not perfect. On occasion, stuck late at the office while Roger’s meetings ran long, she stalked her exes on social media. From the pictures Reece posted on Facebook, Jess was beautiful, full stop. She had flawless skin and volunteered every weekend at the local shelter for unhoused folks. The only thing Charlotte could complain to Jackie about was her rosé all day tank top in her profile picture. Even then, while Jackie agreed the shirt was cringe, they agreed that Jess made it work.
Charlotte liked Jess even more now that she wasn’t Reece’s girlfriend.
“It’s all good.” Reece shrugged. “It was a mutual thing. We figured out we were incompatible before anything got serious.”
She quirked her own brow, a courtesy are you sure? Despite how casual he made the breakup seem, incompatible was a meaningful word, the vocabulary of responsibility and adulthood. You only worried about compatibility when you were serious about someone, when you were planning your future and factoring in that other person.
A new insecurity twitched in her chest as she realized she’d never calculated her compatibility with a partner. Not since Ben, at least, and her math had been very off. There was only so much you could do with a corrupted data set. Ever since then she hadn’t been tempted to factor another person into her future, always breaking relationships off before things got too serious. Merielle came the closest to mattering, but every night they spent at bar trivia together meant at least six emails for Charlotte to answer when she got home.
Had Reece ever considered his compatibility with Charlotte? Before she bolted like a startled deer?
Reece nodded. He pulled on his collar to reveal a stretch of tan skin. “Anyway, we can talk about something other than my ex.”
She didn’t like the sudden stiffness in his voice. “No, it’s…” She trailed off, searching for something to say other than I’m glad she messed it up. Mossy green jealousy and sunrise yellow relief warred in her chest as she read the tension in his body. Jess’s loss was the rest of the world’s gain. “It doesn’t bother me.”
Heat spread down Charlotte’s neck under the intensity of his gaze. His lips parted as he took a deep breath, and for a moment it looked like he was about to say something important, something hard. Charlotte leaned forward, straining to hear his thoughts.
Suddenly, one of the lax girls shrieked and Reece jerked back. Charlotte’s heart heaved. It was so transparent, how his walls went flying back up.
“Who invited a feral cat colony?” she asked, deadpan, hoping to make him laugh again. He chuckled, thank goodness. Then his attention caught on something over her shoulder.
“Hey, listen,” Reece said, his voice low. “Garrett is glaring at me. I’m getting major stop talking to your ex eyes. This is supposed to be a boys’ weekend.”
