Page 65 of Reckless
I almost smiled but I searched Charlie and said, “You value your life very strangely.”
Charlie lifted both hands.“I’m helping.Believe me and you’re welcome.”
Hope elbowed him hard to make him wince.“Ignore him.We need Kelly inside.Maman wants to show us something in the vault.”
Kelly blinked.“The what.”
“My mother’s jewelry vault,” I said.
Her whole face did something caught between dread and fascination.
“Come on,” Hope said, grabbing her hand before either of us could do anything more reckless than stare.
Kelly let herself be pulled toward the doors, then half-turned once on the threshold and called back to me, “Try not to ruin anything while I’m gone.”
My gaze held hers.“That seems optimistic.”
She rolled her eyes and disappeared inside with Hope and the other women.
Charlie lingered.
He came to stand beside me at the rail and looked out over the water like we were two brothers enjoying the evening instead of one of us actively considering all the ways to bury the other in the dunes.
“You like her,” he said.
“No.”
He laughed.“You are so bad at denial.Must be hard for you to actually have to remember details about a woman.”
I looked at him.“Is there a reason you enjoy living dangerously.”
“It’s exercise.”
I should have left.Instead I stayed because he was family and because somewhere under all his chaos Charlie did occasionally stumble into truths no one else would say first.
“She’s not forgettable,” he went on.
The line I hadn’t meant to speak.
The one that landed in the air between us and stayed there.
Charlie heard me.
He looked at me then, not joking for once, not entirely.“don’t be stupid with her.”
I gave him a flat stare.“That from you.”
“Yes.Because I am stupid in obvious ways.You’re stupid in expensive, emotionally repressed ways.Don’t hurt that one.”
I wanted to tell him he was projecting.Instead I looked back out at the Atlantic and listened to the waves break below us in the dark.
Inside, my mother’s laughter rising over the women’s voices, bright and victorious.
Kelly’s came after it.
Warm.Real.Uneven, like she was trying not to give too much and forgetting not to for a second.
The sound went through me more cleanly than anything that had happened all evening.
