Chapter 13 — The Wall And The Room #6
"Thank you," Tatum said, mouth already full of pizza. "I worked very hard."
"I can tell." Shay leaned over and stage-whispered, "The walls aren't that thick, Trouble."
Tatum pointed at her with a crust. "Then you're welcome for the entertainment."
Penny laughed from her chair, low and real, and Kiki pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling in the manner of a woman choosing not to say approximately eight things.
Reese had dropped her bag by the couch and settled on the floor in front of it, her back against the cushions near my knee.
She looked up at me and there was something in her face that was warm and knowing and not jealous, just aware, and underneath that something else.
A wanting that had been patient a long time.
She glanced at the photo wall visible down the hallway, then back at me.
"I found two more boxes," she said. "Photo boxes.
At my mom's place. Old ones. I think there are pictures in there from the first year you had this house.
" She picked at a thread on her sleeve. "There's a whole box my dad put together too.
Old home videos, some photos from before my mom went digital.
All of it's still at the house." She looked up at me, and the warmth in her eyes had a current under it.
"You should come over. We could go through them.
I could cook, or we could order in, and we could do a whole Photo and Video Night. Like old times, kind of. But not."
The Madden house. A few doors down in the summer circle.
Reese's parents' place, where I'd been a hundred times over twenty years.
Where her bedroom was, down the hall from her parents'.
Where her father trusted me and her mother fed me, and where everything about the situation was more complicated and more charged than it had any right to be.
I felt the pull of it immediately. Not just the heat. The whole picture. Old memories and new ones, Reese in her own space, the risk of it, her parents maybe home or maybe not, the way she was looking at me right now like she knew exactly what she was inviting.
"Yeah," I said. "I'd like that."
Her smile came up slow and real, and the relief in it nearly undid me. "Okay. I'll let you know the night."
Eden had been quiet since coming in, but she'd been listening. She set her phone down on the arm of the chair she'd claimed and looked at me with her most Eden expression, strategically pleasant and not quite as casual as it looked.
"Speaking of events," she said. "Archer Casino Night.
Three weeks. Charity thing at my parents' house.
Black tie, open bar, poker tables all over the downstairs for people who want to feel sophisticated.
" She tilted her head slightly. "I have a table.
I need someone who won't embarrass me, can actually play cards, and won't spend the whole night talking to my father about baseball. "
"I can talk to your father about baseball," I said.
"I know you can. That's why I'm asking you not to." She held my gaze, chin level, composure intact. "Come as my guest. Partner. Whatever you want to call it. I need someone I trust to keep up with whatever trouble I'm planning, which is significant trouble, and also very, very fun."
The Archer house was a few doors down in the summer circle, which made the invitation more dangerous, not less.
It was public in the way these families understood public: parents nearby, old friends watching, neighbors drifting through rooms with drinks in their hands and twenty years of trust making everyone blind in exactly the wrong direction.
The invitation meant something, and she offered it with her chin up, her eyes clear, and the full awareness of what she was doing.
"Okay," I said.
Something behind her eyes settled. She nodded once, picked up her phone, and went back to scrolling, and if her mouth was slightly less set than before, she wasn't going to acknowledge it.
Shay handed me another slice of pizza. Kiki dropped onto the couch beside Tatum, who leaned into her immediately, tactile and affectionate and completely comfortable.
Penny had moved to the chair arm and was watching the room with the warm possessive look she got when she was feeling claimed in a direction that included all of us.
The photo wall was visible from where I sat.
Twelve frames in the hallway, fifteen years of summer evidence, all seven of us scattered through them in different combinations.
Proof of something I still didn't have a clean word for, but it was real, and it was on the wall, and anyone who walked into my house would see it.
Reese leaned her head back against my knee for a moment, tilted her face up toward me, then looked back at the TV. Her hand rested on my ankle, warm and light.
I thought about the Madden house. Old home videos and Reese's kitchen and the hallway to her bedroom and how long I'd known her and how different that knowing had become. I thought about Eden in a black-tie room with her chin up, trusting me to keep up.
The house was warm around all of us. The pizza was getting cold. Tatum was already stealing Kiki's slice.
I was, I thought, in a significant amount of trouble.
The good kind. The Tatum-defined kind. The kind that meant something real was happening and there was no clean way back to before it.
I didn't want one.