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I moved to peer over his shoulder. The butter now had dark brown swirls that got larger and larger as Alex added more chocolate chips. After a few more moments the mix was a gooey, velvety liquid.
“Beautiful,” I murmured, not really meaning to speak, and he looked up at me.
This time I didn’t feel like he’d snared me with his gaze. I wasn’t prey. He assessed me, then turned back to the thickening batter.
“Is everything else ready?”
“Yes.”
I gathered the rest of the ingredients. Together we mixed and poured and scraped the bowl with my serviceable white spatula that was guaranteed not to crack or stain. The brownie mix smelled liked heaven and filled the baking pan exactly the way it was supposed to.
“Perfect,” I said, and slid it into the oven. “Thank you.”
“And of course it has to be perfect, right?” Alex leaned against the island, hands gripping the edge so his elbows bent akimbo.
I wiped my hands on the dishcloth and started putting utensils into the sink. “It’s nice if it is, isn’t it?”
“Even a flawed brownie still tastes damn good.” He watched me clean without offering to help.
I paused, mixing bowl in my hand. “Depends on the flaw. I mean, if it’s too dry or crumbly, it might not look right but will taste good. Or if the ingredients are wrong it can look perfect on the outside and taste terrible.”
“Exactly.”
I wondered if he’d been baiting me to say something he’d been thinking. “Well. They looked perfect. Unless they burn.”
“They won’t burn.”
“But they might not taste good, either?” I laughed at him. “Is that what you’re saying?”
“You never know, do you?” He shrugged and gave me an upward, sideways, roundabout glance.
Teasing. He was teasing me, judging me. Trying to draw me out. Trying to feel me out. Figure me out.
“I guess we’d better taste it then.” I held out the bowl. “You go first.”
Alex raised a brow and pursed his lips, but pushed himself off the island and held out a hand. “In case they’re vile?”
“A good hostess always allows her guests to have the first portion,” I said sweetly.
“A perfect hostess makes sure everything’s grand before she serves it,” Alex countered, but he scooped a finger along the bowl’s side. It came away smeared with chocolate.
He raised his finger, showing me. Being theatrical. He opened his mouth, tongue showing intimately pink. He put his finger in his mouth and closed his lips over it, sucking hard enough to hollow his cheeks before his finger popped out with an audible noise.
He said nothing.
“Well?” I asked, after a moment.
He grinned. “Perfect.”
That was enough incentive for me. I slid my finger along the small amount of batter left in the bowl and licked it with the tip of my tongue.
“Coward.”
“Fine.” I stuck the whole thing in my mouth and sucked as hard as he had, making a show of it. “Mmmm, that’s good!”
“Brownies fit for a queen.”
“Or James’s mother,” I said and immediately covered my mouth to pretend I hadn’t said anything so remotely derogatory.
“Even her.”
We smiled at each other again, drawn together by our mutual understanding about what sort of person James’s mother was.
“Well …” I cleared my throat. “I should go change my clothes and take a shower. And show you to your room. It’s clean and ready, I just have to bring you some towels.”
“I don’t want you to go to a lot of trouble.”
“It’s not any trouble, Alex.”
“Perfect,” he said, not quite a whisper and not really a sigh, either.
Neither of us moved.
I realized my fingers were numb from clutching the bowl too hard. I loosened my grip at once and put it in the sink. I had chocolate on my fingers from the bowl’s edges and I laughed, gesturing.
“What a mess.” I licked them, the pointer, middle, thumb. “I’m chocolate all over.”
“You have some just … there.”
Alex’s thumb traced the outer edge of my mouth’s corner. I tasted chocolate. I tasted him.
That was how James found us, touching. An innocent gesture that meant nothing, yet I backed away at once. Alex did not.
“Jamie,” he said, instead. “How the fuck’ve you been?”
They collapsed into a flurry of backslapping and insults. Two grown men reverted to the behavior of fourteen-year-old boys in front of my eyes, both of them rumbling and posturing. Alex grabbed James around the neck and knuckled his hair until James stood up, face flushed and eyes bright with laughter.
I left them like that, to their greeting. I crept away down the hall and into the shower, where I ran the water cold as ice and stood beneath the spray, mouth open, to wash away the taste of my husband’s long-lost best friend.
Mrs. Kinney often looks as though she’s smelling something bad but is too polite to say so. I’m used to it being directed at me, that carefully curled lip, those delicately flaring nostrils. I assumed it was meant for me this time, too, until I saw how her eyes had focused over my shoulder.
I had intended to nod and smile but not really listen to her commentary on the dinner, how it was being prepared, how much to serve, where everyone should sit. So when she stopped, stuttered, actually, like a wind-up doll whose key has rusted, I turned to follow her gaze with mine.
“Hi, Mrs. Kinney.” Alex had showered, too, and changed into a pair of black trousers and a silk shirt that should have looked too dressy but didn’t. Smiling, he came forward for the sort of hug and kiss to the cheek she insisted on giving me every time we saw each other, though I hate casual embraces.
“Alex.” Her reply was as stiff as her back, but she inclined her head to accept the peck he put on it. “We haven’t seen you in a while.”
Her tone clearly said he hadn’t been missed. Alex didn’t seem offended. He merely shook Frank’s hand and waved at Margaret and Molly.
“James didn’t tell me you were back,” continued Mrs. Kinney, as though if James hadn’t told her it simply couldn’t be true.
“Yeah, for a while. I sold my business and needed a place to crash. So I’m here for a few weeks.”
Oh, he knew how to play her in a way I envied. An answer, delivered in a manner casual enough to belie the fact he knew exactly what she was fishing for but not as much information as she wanted. My estimation of him went up a notch.
She looked over at James, who was busy swinging one of his nieces in the air. “You’re staying here? With James and Anne?”
“Yep.” He grinned, all teeth. Hands in his pockets, he rocked on his heels.
She looked at me. “My, how … nice.”
“I think it will be very nice,” I answered warmly. “It will be very nice for James and Alex to have some time together. And for me to get to know Alex, of course. Since he is James’s best friend.”
I smiled brightly and said no more. She digested that. The answer appeared to be enough, if not satisfactory, and she gave him a nod that looked like it hurt her neck. She lifted the casserole dish in her hands.
“I’ll just go put this inside.”
“Sure. Anywhere you like.” I gestured, knowing she’d put it anywhere she liked no matter what I suggested. When she’d gone inside and Alex and I were alone for the moment, I turned. “What’d you do to piss off Evelyn?”
He smirked. “Aww, and here I thought she adored me.”
“Oh, you must be right. That was clearly a look of adoration on her face. If adoration looks like she just stepped in dog crap.”
Alex laughed. “Some things don’t change.”
“Everything changes,” I told him. “Eventually.”
Not Mrs. Kinney’s feelings about him, apparently. She avoided conversation with him for the rest of the evening, though she didn’t skimp on the “crap, I stepped in crap” looks.
For his part, Alex was cordial, polite, slightly distant. Considering how long he’d known James and how “welcoming” they were to everyone, the fact Evelyn was giving him the cold shoulder was very telling.
“Well, well, well, Alex Kennedy,” said Molly as she brought me a handful of plates for the ancient, cranky dishwasher I only used when we had company. Dinner had ended and everyone stayed out on the deck. The dishes could have waited, but I was looking for tasks to occupy me so I didn’t have to make small talk. “You know what they say about bad pennies.”
I slotted the dishes into the washer and filled the soap dispenser. “You think Alex is a bad penny?”
I liked Molly well enough, in that I didn’t dislike her. She was older than I by seven years, and we didn’t have much in common other than her brother, but she wasn’t as overbearing as her mother or an opinionated drama queen like her sister.
She shrugged and grabbed up the lids to the open containers of deli salad on the counter. “You know the boy your mother warned you about? That’s Alex.”
“Was,” I said, helping her close up the plastic tubs of macaroni salad and coleslaw. “In high school.”
She looked out the window toward the deck, where James and Alex were laughing quite loudly.
“I don’t know,” Molly said. “What do you think?”
“He’s James’s friend, not mine, and he’s only staying for a few weeks. If James likes him—”
Her sharp burst of laughter stopped me. “Alex Kennedy led my brother down a lot of bad roads, Anne. Do you really think someone like that can change?”
“Oh, c’mon, Molly. We’re grownups, now. So what if they got into trouble a few times as kids? They didn’t kill anyone. Did they?”
“Well … no. I don’t think so.” She sounded like she wouldn’t have been surprised if Alex, at least, had committed murder.
I knew she’d never think such a thing of James, the beloved baby of the family. Just like I knew that no matter how much James had been a part of whatever hijinks he and Alex had got into as kids, it would always be Alex’s fault and never James’s. The Kinneys hadn’t done their son and brother any favors by setting him on such a high perch, in my opinion. James had a lot of self-confidence, which was good. He wasn’t so great about taking blame, which wasn’t.
“So tell me what they did that was so bad, then.”
Molly rinsed and wrung one of the dishcloths and proceeded to wipe down the center island, though I’d already done it. This annoyed me much less from her than it would have from her mother, who’d have been doing it deliberately. Molly simply had been conditioned to following after someone else’s efforts and straightening the edges—even if they weren’t untidy.
“Alex doesn’t come from a very good family.”
I didn’t comment. If you want to know how someone really feels, you almost never have to ask. Molly swiped at invisible spots with her cloth.
“They’re white trash, to be perfectly honest. His sisters were sluts. One or two of them got pregnant in high school. His mom and dad are drunks. They’re all low-class.”
I don’t think I flinched at her judgment of Alex’s family. She wasn’t talking about my sisters, or my parents. Or about me.
I wanted to tell her that she was lucky nobody judged her based upon how her parents acted, but I kept that opinion to myself, too. “There must have been something good about him for James to be his friend, Molly. And we aren’t always what our parents are.”
She shrugged. There was more she wanted to tell. I saw it in her eyes. “He smoked and drank, and more than cigarettes, if you know what I mean.”
“Lots of kids do that, Molly, even the so-called good ones.”
“He wore eyeliner.”
My eyebrows rose, both at once. There it was. The worst of it. Worse, somehow, than the drinking or the weed smoking, or even the fact his family was white trash. This was the real reason they hadn’t liked Alex Kennedy, and didn’t like him now.
“… eyeliner.” I couldn’t help saying it like it was ridiculous, because … well … it was.
“Yes,” she hissed, glancing again to the deck. “Black eyeliner. And … sometimes …”
I waited while she struggled with whether or not she could possibly bring herself to continue.
“Lip gloss,” she said. “And he dyed his hair black and wore it spiked out all over, and he wore high-collared shirts with pins at the throat and suit jackets ….”
I could picture him, a Robert Smith wannabe, or like Ducky from Pretty in Pink. “Oh, Molly. So did lots of people. It was the 80s.”
She shrugged again. Nothing I could say would change her mind. “James didn’t. Not until he started hanging out with Alex.”
I’d seen pictures of James from that time. He’d been scrawny and gangly, a hodgepodge of stripes and plaids and battered Converse sneakers. I hadn’t noticed any liner or gloss but could easily imagine him wearing it. It would have set off his vivid blue eyes quite nicely, I thought.
“Anyway,” Molly said. “He doesn’t seem to have changed much.”
“I’ll keep an eye on my makeup bag.”
This time, she didn’t miss the veiled sarcasm. “I’m just telling you, Anne, Alex was bad news then, and he’s probably no better now. That’s all. Do with it what you want.”
“Thanks.” I didn’t want to do anything with it. The more they all hated Alex, the better I felt I wanted to like him. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
