He still marveled over the fact, sometimes. “Mercy invited me,” he said, still rooted outside. “He said I could bring Tenny, but–” Too much. She hadn’t asked, she didn’t care. He wasn’t sure why he’d blurted that.
Her brows drew together, and she opened the door a little farther. “Well, you’re welcome to come in. We’re just about to eat.”
He nodded his thanks, wiped his boots, and entered.
Every available surface in the kitchen seemed to be heaped with food, including the table, where the women sat, wine glasses in front of them, an array of cheeses, crackers, chips, and bowls of dip interspersed amongst covered dishes. He recognized Aidan and Tango’s wives. But there was a newcomer he hadn’t seen before: small, black hair, brown, almond-shaped eyes.
No, not new, exactly. He’d glimpsed her once before, in the main office at Dartmoor the day he and Tenny took an injured Carter to see Maggie. She’d been sitting in a chair across from Ghost’s wife, and she’d looked over at the tableau they’d made with undisguised interest.
She looked at him that way now, too. He could see the spark of recognition, and open curiosity. She was probably wondering why he was here – just like he was, a little.
But it was different from the looks Samantha and Whitney gave him. Whitney’s carefully composed; Samantha’s edged with a fear that she couldn’t quite control.
A familiar look, in his presence. It had never bothered him, and still didn’t, but henoticedit now, in a way he never used to.
No one looked at Tenny that way, because Tenny had perfected his mask. He was good at making faces, unlike Reese, and maintaining them.
Usually.
He’d replayed the moment in the kitchen over and over again on his ride here. Turning it over, trying to look at it from different angles. It still didn’t make sense. Tenny was the one who kept initiating Reese’s sexual education. Who inserted himself and in turn pulled Reese into his own couplings. The touching, and the kissing lessons, and the praise – all Tenny, from the start. So why play offended now? If play it had been – it had seemed like genuine affront. Reese didn’t understand, and he didn’t begin to know how to ask anyone for advice.
“The guys are in the living room,” Ava informed him, snatching him from his spiraling thoughts. “Do you want a beer?”
That was social protocol, right? “Yes. Please.”
~*~
Mercy and Ava’s dining room was too small for the amount of people they were currently trying to cram into it, but no one seemed to mind. An extra folding table had been snugged up to the regular table, both draped with a big, black cloth, and mismatched china and silverware squeezed in for everybody.
Leah offered to sit on one of the tight corners, all but straddling the table leg, since she was the smallest, and, somehow, she ended up sitting next to Carter.
He hesitated a moment, before he set his plate down. “Oh. Hey.” Then he settled in his chair like nothing was the matter. But she’d noticed the pause, just like she’d noticed it in the kitchen when he’d first come in.
If she didn’t know any better, she would have said he’d been surprised to see her here tonight – and just now, even, in the seat next to his.
“Hey,” she said, easily, though she got that funny, squirmy feeling in her belly again.
Unlike him, she hadn’t been surprised to see him walk through the door, had been almost waiting for it, actually, but she’d still had that sudden pulse ofohwhen he walked in. Setting sun coming through the window and catching in the summer wheat of his hair, shirt bunching around heavy biceps as he lifted his bottles in offering. It had been – a sight. Worth looking at. Definitely.
He smelled nice, too, she could tell now, beside him: a woodsy sort of grown-up cologne far different from the Axe spray she’d expected.
The club table was always a loud one, tonight’s no exception. All save Reese – who sat silently down on the far end with a spare plate and what Leah thought might already be his third beer. Conversation swelled, and overlapped, and murmured around them, laughter punching through in bursts.
“…and then I was like…” Aidan was telling a story about an irate customer at the bike shop that had everyone in stitches. Everyone but Reese…
And Carter. Quiet beside her.
It was the sort of rowdy dinner table that offered pockets of relative privacy, for two people sitting close.
“You didn’t bring your girlfriend?” Leah asked, cutting into her barbecue chicken.
He coughed. Recovered with a swallow of beer. “Uh, no. Not really my girlfriend, remember?”
“Right, right.” She tried and failed to bite back a smile. “Sex fiend.”
“Oh my – don’t say that,” he hissed.
A glance proved that his gaze bordered on panicked, and she snorted. “What, like your bros don’t know?”
