Red Flags Go Faster Pat 11.5-12 (Alpha)

This release is 6.5k, bringing the stretch to 11.5k/15k. Depending on how writing tomorrow goes, I might end up pushing a bit into the second set that is supposed to happen later this month.

Chapter 11 (Continued)

“Always the hero, Scrappy-Doo,” she said with a big smile as I finally got close to her.

“Just making sure they can function,” I said, smirking a little as I accepted her offer of a hug, sliding my arm around her waist. “You look great, Lex.”

“Just great?” she asked with a smile. “Not fabulous, or stunning, or breath-taking?”

“Does that sound like me?” I chuckled.

“No, and that’s why I know you meant what you said,” she grinned, then leaned in and kissed me on the cheek before letting me go by her. I stopped to pull her chair out for her once I was by, and she shot me an appreciative look. “So,” she said as we both settled into our seats. “Has the rehearsal been thoroughly rehearsed?”

“I don’t think anyone is going to take a wrong turn and fall into a pond tomorrow,” I said. “But based on the average blood-alcohol content of everyone this afternoon, someone is going to forget their cue for something.”

“It isn’t a wedding without a couple of little stumbles,” Alexis smiled, and that smile turned a little sad as she shook her head and glanced away.

“Sorry, Lex,” I said softly, knowing that she’d just thought of something from her own wedding, which was probably a sore spot at the moment.

“It’s fine,” she said quickly, focusing on me again and taking a quick, sharp breath. “You’re a really good friend to them, Rudy. I’m glad they’ve had you all these years. I know I could have used more of you.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, particularly with the way she put her hand on top of mine and squeezed while keeping eye contact with me. Thankfully, I was saved by the head server grabbing everyone’s attention and making some announcements to keep things moving - limited menu, flat group gratuity for every bill, appetisers and desserts were being covered by the bride and groom, and the bottles of wine that were being delivered to the table were covered by Curtis’s father, but any other drinks were up to whoever ordered them. A further reprieve, as the waitress for our table started at our end, meant that a reply ended up being unnecessary.

“So, you’re doing construction, right?” Alexis asked once the waitress had moved on. “Jeanette and Curtis said you have your own company, but didn’t give me details. I can tell you’re working hard by your hands, though.”

“Construction, and some other kinds of jobs,” I nodded, swallowing as I answered her because Alexis grabbed my hand again, this time turning it over so she could run her fingers across my palm like she was exploring the crags that had slowly formed there over time. Callouses on callouses from working with shovels, picks and the vibrating steering wheels of big machines. “Things are going well.”

“Great, you’ve given me pretty much exactly the amount of detail that Curtis did, Rudy,” Alexis smirked. “What are you actually doing? We haven’t seen each other in a long time. I want to actually know how you are, what you’ve been up to.”

“Fine,” I said, shaking my head ruefully. “We can talk details, but I want some from you, too.”

“For you? I’m an open book,” she promised, then flashed me a wicked little smile. “Well, mostly. A girl has to have some secrets.”

Her parents were good. They’d moved out of our home town a couple of years into her time at college, building a huge home outside of the city, but both sets of her grandparents were still going strong back there. I didn’t mention that I was well aware of this - I often ran into Grandma Edna at the grocery store, and I lived down the street from Reese and Florence and ploughed their driveway for them in the winter. She’d done four full years at that private Christian college her parents had wanted her to go to, which was where she’d met her now-ex Dirk during her third year and his first. He’d been an up-and-coming baseball player, but, since he wasn’t a pitcher with a time clock ticking down on his arm, he elected to play college ball before trying for the major leagues.

They got married the summer after she graduated, and Dirk went down to online classes, got into a combine and ended up grabbing a contract with the Colorado Rockies. They picked up and moved to Denver, and Dirk started grinding to try and get himself noticed by one of the higher revenue teams, hoping for a favourable trade or for when his current contract was up.

“God, the one thing I can honestly thank him for is getting me to wait for kids,” Alexis sighed, gesturing with her fork just like she always had as we ate. “I can’t imagine how much worse this divorce would be if we had kids. Honestly, Rudy? I thought I had everything I wanted. Everything my Mom told me I should want. Handsome, athletic, Christian husband, a church community with strong values, a nice house and room to grow, a job where I could feel empowered and feminine at the same time? Fuck, even saying it out loud now, it sounds dreamy. But it wasn’t real. Dirk was cheating, probably since we’d been dating - seriously, the dating scene at our college was cutthroat. He’d have had plenty of opportunities. As soon as we announced we were separating, I started getting ostracised by the ladies at the church, which was fucking ironic because half of them had cheating husbands too, and they couldn’t bring themselves to do anything about it. The house was a rental, since Dirk wasn’t exactly a franchise player and could have been traded at any time.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “As soon as they found out you were on the outs with Dirk, someone at your job started hitting on you, too?”

“No, actually,” Alexis smirked. “Both of my bosses were straight women, so I was pretty safe there. There wasn’t any room to grow, though. It was a really strong team, doing really good work, but no one at a management level was looking to move or make a change any time soon. The good news is that both my bosses are willing to help mentor me if I decide to set up my own shop out here - I’d be far enough away that I wouldn’t really be competing for the same clients or poaching potential employees.”

“That’s really good of them,” I said. “And if you’re still the same Lex that I remember, you’ll be good at being the boss.”

“Are you saying I was a bossy bitch in high school?” she chuckled.

“I’m saying you knew how to set expectations and communicate them clearly,” I grinned. “Remember Pauly di Angelo?”

“Oh, God, why would you remind me of him?” Alexis laughed and rolled her eyes. “He was such a toolbag.”

“Hey, you went on two dates with him,” I shrugged. “But he wasn’t even mad when you sent that picture of his dick around the school, since you’d warned him you would if he sent you it.”

“How the fuck did I not get in trouble for that?” Alexis snorted, covering her mouth.

“Because you had Mr Barker wrapped around your finger,” I smirked. Our principal had been a bit of a skeezebag, and everyone knew he let the pretty girls get away with murder, but he’d also kinda been our skeezebag. He’d once gotten in a fistfight with a football referee who was letting a bunch of dirty, dangerous hits get thrown at our team while we’d been at an away game.

“I had him wrapped around my finger?” Alexis laughed. “Rudy, he bought you a steak dinner after you punched Josh Hannity so hard that he lost two teeth.”

“Technically, he bought me a gift card ‘for my birthday,'" I grinned. “And he wasn’t the only staff member at the school who did that. And you know why.”

“I remember,” Alexis grimaced at the memory.

“You know he died, right?”

“I heard,” she nodded. “Couldn’t have happened to a bigger asshole.”

I’d broken Josh’s jaw when he had refused to take no for an answer from one of the Freshman girls who had been on Alexis’ cheer squad while we’d been in our Senior year. Well, Josh had technically been on his second ‘victory lap’ year, supposedly trying to get his grades up to get into a community college, though it had been pretty apparent he was just there to sell weed, antagonise the teachers who had been hounding him for years, and try to hook up with girls that were starting to be way too young for him. If it hadn't been me that day, it would have been Brad or Bill, since we’d all heard the commotion around the back of the school portables at the same time. I just got to him first.

Josh had expectedly turned into a local skid mark in the underwear of our home town, and had ended up in and out of jail a couple of times before he got ripped on some concoction of bath salts and meth, climbed the local water tower and tried to ‘shoot down the moon’ with a hunting rifle. When he opened fire on the cops who came to get him to stop and come down, it was sort of a done deal.

“Still,” Alexis continued. “That brings us back to you being a hero consistently. Do you have bright red stretchy underwear you put on over your work gear when you stop to save a family of ducklings or a lost puppy?”

I snorted and rolled my eyes at her. “You weren’t that far behind me back then, Lex. I seem to remember you ran, what, three different fundraiser drives to save local non-profits? The pet shelter, the food bank and… what was the last one?”

“It was the flood relief,” she blushed a little. “But I just stepped in on that one when Becky had to drop it to focus on her grades.”

“Not to mention being the head of the Peer Mentors club, Head Cheerleader, volunteering at the Suicide Prevention Hotline, and starting the Special Friends thing with the special needs kids,” I said.

“OK, fine, I was kind of disgustingly heroic too,” Alexis said, blushing more and fanning herself as she chuckled. “God, how did I find the time? Or the energy?”

“Good question,” I smirked. “I always thought you must have been sniffing some smelling salts before you entered a room.”

“You did not,” she scoffed and laughed, slapping my arm.

Down at the far end of the table, I was pretty sure I saw Jeanette looking my way and grinning. I tried to ignore her.

“Well, I didn’t think it was cocaine,” I teased Alexis further.

“Maybe I’ve always been a drug kingpin,” she smiled brightly. “My Grandpa has always claimed we’re a distant relation to Griselda Blanco.”

“How far back?” I chuckled. “Pre-American Revolution?”

“Probably,” she snorted.

The dinging of a fork on a wine glass brought our conversation up short, and everyone in the room turned as Jeanette’s Dad stood, grinning amiably. “Well, folks, Jeannie says I’m not allowed to make a long speech at the reception tomorrow, and I’m not allowed to make her cry either, so I guess I’d better get all the sappy stories out right now.”

“Dad,” Jeanette complained, getting a round of laughter out of the collected family and friends. Almost everyone who was coming in from out of state for the wedding was present since they were staying at the hotel, which made up around a third of the overall guests when you added in the family and wedding party.

“Fine, fine,” Jeanette’s Dad grinned. “No embarrassing stories about the face you used to make as a baby whenever you were filling your diaper while I was holding you, or how you would talk and talk about this annoying kid named Curtis in middle school and how much you wanted to punch him right in the kisser.”

“Dad,” Jeanette complained again, to more laughter.

“Alright, I get it, no stories,” he said, holding up his hands in defeat. “I’ll keep my comments to what I’ve been ordered to say.” He pulled out his reading glasses, and his wife handed him some paper, and he made a show of reading the top. “A List of People to Thank.” He then let the paper unfurl, and it spilt down like a scroll all the way to his feet. “Settle in, folks,” he said to everyone. “Jeannie and Curt have needed a lot of help over the years.”

“I didn’t realise Jeanette’s Dad was so funny,” Alexis snickered, leaning towards me and whispering.

“He’s in his element,” I chuckled. Then I glanced back at her, and I almost grunted out loud.

I’d fallen for Alexis the first time we looked at each other like this. Not on purpose, not in an intimate setting. Just two friends in the 10th grade, lost in the middle of a crowd in the school gymnasium, and our gazes connected, and I saw her. Raw, no social shields, no jokes or teasing. Sure, we’d both done a lot of growing up since then, but it hit me just as hard as it had back then. There were small smile and stress lines at the corners of her eyes - not a lot, but just the start of what I was sure would be an elegant ageing process. If Alexis was anything like her mother, she’d probably age like fine wine, peaking somewhere in her early forties and maintaining that mature beauty for a decade or two at least. Her eyes were deceptively large, though she’d never had that cartoonish Bambi look some girls could pull off, and when I looked into them, I felt like I was falling into her soul.

She blushed a little as I held her gaze, but she didn’t look away. She gave her lips a little lick, and the corner of her mouth came up in just a slight teasing smirk.

The room broke into laughter again, and I looked back towards Jeanette’s Dad and his antics, the moment gone.

Alexis put her hand on my thigh under the table, slid it a little higher, and gave me a squeeze.

I drew in a large breath through my nose, slow and steady, trying not to think about what that hand might mean.

Jeanette’s Father finished his speech, and Alexis pulled her hand from me so she could clap with the rest of us. I turned to look at her again, something wanting to jump off my tongue even though I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. I didn’t get the chance, though, as Curtis’s Dad stood up and started making his own toast.

So I looked at Alexis again, and she met my gaze, but that raw openness wasn’t there. The shield was back up, and she smiled at me warmly, but not with any real vulnerability. I smiled back, and she laughed at something Curt’s Dad said, then looked back at me and winked.

Fucking hell, I cursed internally. My heart felt like it had just gotten ripped out of my chest, pumped a few times to make sure it was still working, and then shoved right back into place.

Curtis’s Mom ended up interrupting his Dad, who was just mildly slurring his words but was clearly rambling through his unplanned toast. His Mom took over, thanking Jeanette’s parents and Cheryl for helping organise and decorate for the dinner. By the end of her speech, when she made a joke that really should have fallen flat but got some mild chuckles just because of the mood of the room, a lot of the conversations had started back up.

“I heard the plan is that a bunch of us are heading to the hotel bar,” Alexis said, leaning towards me and speaking lowly. “Buy me a drink, Rudy? For old time’s sake? This is the best day I’ve had in years. I’d hate for it to end now.”

“Let’s settle up with the waitress, and then I’ll buy you that drink, Lex,” I agreed, and I wasn’t sure whether my heart, my gut or my balls reacted the most to her pleased grin.

Chapter 12

“And then Curtis - yeah, you, you smarmy bastard - Curtis hops over the fence like he’s a jackrabbit and takes off running, leaving us all in the dust for Coach Wellesley to pull up in his old Bronco and start shouting at us before he got his window rolled down,” Brad was laughing, telling what had become one of our friend groups’ infamous stories.

“Wait, so you guys were just out there with no pants?” Juliette asked. By all rights, the seventeen-year-old Bridesmaid probably shouldn’t have been allowed in the bar, but she’d slipped in along with the rest of us and was sipping on a Diet Coke. Considering we were somehow the less raucous group, as the Parents and extended family of aunts and uncles were down at the other end of the bar partying like it was already the reception, the staff didn’t seem to mind at all that she was there.

“Hey, it was Jeanette’s idea in the first place that we go all Donald Duck in our football uniforms,” Bill grinned.

“No way,” Jeannie laughed, shaking her head and denying it. “It was Bobby-Jo’s idea, I just repeated it.”

That started a good-natured argument between the Bride and her Maid of Honour, with most of our group laughing along, and I rolled my eyes and lazily looked beside me at Alexis. She was laughing at our friends, and she glanced my way and caught me watching her, only to break into a broader smile. She leaned my way a little more and reached out, rubbing my arm. “God, I missed this,” she said.

“It’s good to have you back, Lex,” I told her, putting my hand on top of hers for a moment, hoping she knew I meant it.

“Is it?” she asked playfully.

I shot her a look, and she smirked. “I missed you,” she said.

“I missed you, too,” I promised her.

It was true. Complicated, but true. Especially that first year.

The group conversation moved on, and I realised that Alexis had settled in with her hand still on my arm. She’d always been a bit touchy, which was probably one of those things that teenager-me had gotten hung up on with our friendship and not-quite-dating stuff. Even looking back at it with perspective, I wasn’t lovesick over her at the time or anything, but we’d been intertwined in complicated ways. We were, in effect, everything we’d wanted from a boyfriend or girlfriend except doing any of the romance stuff. Emotional and physical support, physical platonic intimacy, and investment of time. We’d just also been dating other people; particularly Alexis, considering her status and popularity, but I hadn’t exactly been some dateless sadsack either.

It felt good and natural to be sitting next to her with her hand on me. Comforting. Nostalgic. And maybe, if everyone else hadn’t been building up some expectations, I wouldn’t have thought twice if I’d been surprised by Alexis being at the wedding. We’d have ended up, just like this, and I wouldn’t have been nearly as… suspicious was the wrong word. Unsure, maybe. I wouldn’t have been so unsure about her intentions or desires. Or my ability to read them.

Was Alexis just being Alexis and how we’d always been, even if we’d spent the better part of a decade apart? Or was this more than that?

Was this everything that teenage-me had fantasised about back then? Was she thinking that same way?

It also didn’t help that I noticed other people noticing us. Jeanette caught my eye and gave me a questioning eyebrow raise, wondering if I’d made any decisions. Ed caught my eye too, giving me a mouthed, ‘Duuuude!’ and a subtle air-high five.

The person who surprised me the most, really, was Bobby-Jo. When she noticed the way we were sitting around the gathered tables, my perpetual tomboy friend bounced up out of her seat and came around, hooking a finger into my shirt collar to tug me up out of my chair. “Come on, Best Man,” she said. “Come help me grab another round.”

“Hey,” Ed complained. “I’m the Best Man!”

“Do you want to stand up and help me carry the pitchers?” Bobby-Jo asked him with a knowing smirk.

“I hereby deputise you as my understudy, Rudy,” Ed said, waving dramatically. “Your first order of business is helping Bobby with the Beer.”

Charlise, sitting next to her husband, rolled her eyes at him.

I got up and followed Bobby-Jo, but when we got across the room to the bar, she didn’t call for the attention of the bartender and instead turned to me, crossing her arms and glaring. I took a long breath, checking myself a bit to decide how drunk I was and finding the answer was Not Very. Definitely not as much as the previous night. Two glasses of wine with dinner, and one beer after, meant I was probably the most sober of the group, other than Juliette. I also didn’t question Bobby, knowing she’d say what she wanted to.

“Are you sure about that?” Bobby finally asked me, eyes flicking back towards our group.

“I’m not sure about anything,” I admitted to her.

Her shoulders relaxed, and her glare softened, but her arms remained crossed over her chest. “Can I say something controversial?”

“Bobby,” I sighed, and I pulled her into a hug. “Please say something controversial. Everyone else has been tiptoeing around.”

She hugged me back lightly and shook her head up at me. “We just met her, but Amber is fucking cool. I’ve never not been friends with Alexis, but she left, Rudy. Not just to go to college, she left. Started over. When you didn’t get an invite to her wedding? That was the line for me; I knew we were just part of her history. It wasn’t her reaching out, she just wanted to fill seats and have that feeling of having a big circle. She started over, deciding she didn’t need any of us, and that’s fine. She’s allowed to do that, and we don’t need to be butthurt about it or anything. We can still be casual friends with her. But now that her start-over has fallen apart, that doesn’t mean she should be able to come in and disrupt good things.”

“Amber’s here in the city, and I live back home,” I said. “Amber and I even talked last night and this morning, and we don’t do… whatever we’re doing, and it felt weird, but was good for what it was.”

“You sound like you’re trying to convince yourself, not me,” Bobby-Jo said, softly beating one fist against my chest to drive her point home. 

I grunted. “Maybe I am,” I sighed.

“I won’t judge you or anything either way, Rudy,” Bobby said. “Hook up with Alexis or don’t. Hell, it would probably be good for you in a way if you got it out of your system. And maybe I’m wrong and this is a fairytale Hallmark Christmas Movie special where you two are supposed to end up together or something, and we don’t ever have to talk about this conversation again, and I’ll support your disgustingly cute relationship, wedding, and Lex popping out your maniacally attractive children. Just make sure you, right now, are actually OK with her, and not just how you remember her.”

“Thanks, Bobby,” I sighed, and pulled her into another hug, and this time she squeezed me back tighter.

“No problemo, you big dope,” she grunted. Then she pulled away and smirked up at me. “I’ve seen her Instagram, by the way. Amber’s, I mean. Dude.”

“I know,” I chuckled.

“Dude,” she repeated herself, nodding once and widening her eyes in emphasis.

“I know,” I shook my head.

We finally ordered another quartet of beer pitchers, and I delivered one over to the Parents' tables as our tribute to our elders, before cycling back to our group. On my way over, Alexis caught my eye as she was tossing her hair and running her fingers through it, then brushed her hands down the front of her dress.

God, she looked good. As ‘Fuego Frank,’ one of my more crass rig drivers (and a man who regularly complained that his piss felt like burning, but refused to go to the doctor for his obvious STD problem) would say, ‘she was all woman, no goat.’ 

She looked up as I was approaching and broke into another grin, then did something I hadn’t seen her do since we’d still been in high school and she was blatantly flirting with a guy on a rival high school team to distract him from the game. It was just as effective in her current dress as it had been on the sidelines of a field or court in her cheerleader uniform. She opened her mouth, grinning a little more, and licked her perfect white teeth. It was silly and lascivious at the same time, but combined with her gorgeous look and the way she could put pure sex into her eyes at that moment, it felt like some sort of primal promise. A carnal desire, whether it was real or not, that spoke to my inner caveman.

Alexis broke into a laugh, light and joyful, as she saw my expression when she did that. We’d talked about her doing that move way back then, and how it was going to get me into a fight someday when one of those rival team members tried to follow up with her and got turned away. Then she winked and blew me a little kiss.

I set down my second pitcher of beer on the table, joining the two that Bobby had already brought over, but before I could go sit down with Alexis again and figure out if that had all been play, or maybe something more, I had an arm looping with mine.

“Come on, Rudes,” Charlie said. “Let’s talk.”

“Sure, Charlie,” I said, mildly frustrated but also thankful to her for giving me a second to clear my head. Instead of leading me to a quiet corner of the bar like I expected, she actually led me out and into the hotel lobby, then wound through the building and out into the back pool area. There were some other hotel guests out there, and the pool was lit from within and creating a pretty illumination of the area.

“All the way out here?” I asked her.

“You know it,” Charlise said, dragging me around the pool to a back corner where there were some unoccupied benches, and she took my hand so I could help her sit down in her heels, and then I sat next to her. She pulled a little cigarette case out of her purse and a lighter. “Think they’ll mind?” she smirked a little.

“If someone complains, we can apologise,” I chuckled, knowing that the case held joints and not cigarettes.

She quickly pulled one out and lit it up, blowing smoke into the quickly deepening evening sky, then took another drag and handed me the joint. I took a quick drag and puffed it off the side, feeling the weed hit me with a nice, mild cloud a couple of seconds later. Then I had to cough, and my sister’s best friend chuckled and slapped me on the back before I could pass her the joint back.

“Hug,” Charlie then demanded, and I knew why, and we hugged side-by-side on the bench in the dark as she held the joint out of the way. And we cried.

Melina was an ache in both of our hearts, a loss that was never going to be filled. A matching hole, or as close to matching as we could probably get. She’d been my actual older sister, but she’d been like a sister to Charlie since they were kids.

We didn’t sob or anything, and this wasn’t the first time we’d grieved together in the past couple of years. Hell, it wasn’t even the first time we’d grieved while getting a little high - my sister hadn’t been a pot head, but she’d sworn that a few mild joints were way better for a party than a keg or a case of vodka coolers. So we met up on special occasions at Mel’s grave and shared a joint and cried - her birthday, the anniversary of her death. The last time had been a quick twenty minutes on Charlie’s last birthday, when she’d been feeling the loss particularly bad.

“Thanks, Rudy,” Charlie eventually sighed, pulling out of the hug and sniffing hard, then wiping under her eyes.

“Always,” I promised her.

Charlie took another quick puff from the joint and offered it to me, but I waved it off for now. I didn’t want to get too buzzed.

“OK,” she said after blowing another stream of smoke into the night air. “Let’s talk.”

“About Alexis?” I guessed.

She nodded. “And this Amber girl,” she said, frowning at me for a moment. “I’ve heard things from Ed.”

“Have you seen things, too?”

She snorted. “I might have seen too much. So have Ed and Paul.”

“Jesus,” I sighed.

“Did Mel ever tell you why she didn’t like Alexis?” Charlie asked.

That caught me up a little. “I thought she was neutral on Alexis,” I said.

Charlie rolled her eyes at me. “For real, Rudy? I mean, really? Mel went out of her way to be friendly with everyone; if she was neutral on Alexis, would she have been that cold about her?”

I swallowed hard. “OK,” I said. “No, she never told me. Even after that summer.”

“Oh man,” Charlie chuckled. “That summer? You know I had to stop her from tracking Alexis down, right? Not that I didn’t think Alexis deserved the beating your sister wanted to give her, but I also didn’t want Mel going to fucking prison for beating in the beloved Head Cheerleader's face before she went off to Bridal College.”

“Wait,” I said. “Mel told you about-”

“Of course she did,” Charlie said, looking at me like I was being stupid. “And honestly? It sounded to me like she was trying to burn the bridge so that she wasn’t looking back and getting tempted by it. It was dirty, and mean, but if she wanted to run off and do her thing, she probably needed to convince herself as much as she needed to hurt you, so she had to repeat every nasty thing her parents were telling her about you. Which, I mean, obviously turned out to be untrue - you’ve absolutely made something of yourself, without college. You’re going to be an amazing husband and father to someone, not some redneck wife-beating piece of shit. And you’ve got stronger moral character than just about anyone. You were always going to be everything that assholes like her parents thought you couldn’t be, because they forgot how their parents got them to where they are.”

“So you’re saying that her ripping my heart out back then wasn’t really about me?” I grimaced questioningly.

“Rudy,” Charlie said, giving me a look. “It was completely about you, but it was coming from motivations that weren’t. And I’m not fucking saying that you should be OK with it, or forgive her for that shit. She still said all of it, and in a way that was meant to hurt you the most it could.”

“This sounds an awful lot like some God-awful plotline that ends up with me forgiving her for being a total bitch because she thought she was doing it for both of our own good,” I snorted.

“Fuck, no,” Charlie scoffed. “The reason Mel never liked Alexis was because Alexis clearly liked the idea of you more than who you actually were. She hated that Alexis so obviously wanted everything that you were, and everything that you could give her, including all the more gritty things about you and Mel coming from a lower-class family, but she wanted it all from someone from a family that her parents would approve of.”

“...What?” I asked. “That doesn’t- Why would that make Mel so different?”

“Because it was your heart that Alexis was fucking around with,” Charlie smiled sadly. “And Mel knew that telling you Alexis was fucking around wasn’t going to change anything, so she tried to just push it down and be there for you. She just wasn’t very good at bottling up her very particular enmity for the girl playing with her little brother’s heart.”

I sucked in a deep breath slowly, looking up at the deep blue evening sky. Back home, we would have had stars out by now, but here in the city, the glow overwhelmed that particular natural beauty. “What would Mel think about all this now?” I murmured.

“Do you really want to know?”

“What, do you have a recording or a letter or something?” I chuckled. “Break Glass in case of the return of Alexis?”

“No,” Charlie rolled her eyes at me. “But- And this is going to be mean, but it’s what Mel told me during that summer after you and Alexis fought. She said that Alexis was probably going to go off to college, get a ring on her finger, and maybe get knocked up by some guy who looked good on paper but who wouldn’t measure up to you. And, five or six years down the line, she’d come crawling back, probably with a couple of kids in tow, and she’d make problems for you and whatever relationship you’d found. Mel wasn’t right about all of it, but from what I’m hearing, she got enough right for it to be a little scary.”

“No kids,” I pointed out.

“It does change things a little,” Charlie shrugged. “Not that I begrudge a single mother wanting to date and find someone, but her not having kids makes it a little less cringey. She’s not looking for a new Daddy for them, she’s just looking for a new husband.”

“And I’m single,” I said.

“Ninety-eight per cent,” Charlie said.

“You mean Amber?” I asked.

“I heard you were playing Fake Boyfriend for her.”

I was about to tell her it had just been when we first met, but it hadn’t. There was no way I was going to tell her that it sort of led all the way to the end of the night, but I wasn’t going to lie about it either.

“I also hear she’s your plus one tomorrow,” Charlie pressed me.

“She’s…” I said slowly, trailing off.

“I don’t want to know what you think of her,” Charlie cut in before I could expand. “Let me make my own opinion tomorrow. I’m not thrilled for you over what she does for a living, and Ed keeps calling her ‘the pornstar,’ so you would need to be OK with that perception lingering around. But I’ve also heard from the girls, and from Curtis, that they hadn’t seen you look at a woman for a long time, the way you were looking at her. And she was giving you those same eyes.”

“I just had this conversation with Bobby-Jo,” I grunted.

“Bobby-Jo knows you pretty damn well,” Charlise said, hugging me around the waist and leaning against me comfortably as she took another drag off the joint. “But she’s not Mel, or me. And she doesn’t know that Alexis stomped on your heart the way she did. You do know that none of them would have been OK with Alexis after that, right?”

“Why do you think I didn’t tell any of them?” I pointed out. “I didn’t want her to be friendless when it was just between me and her. I only told Mel, and she wasn’t supposed to tell anyone either.”

“That’s the thing about you, Rudy,” Charlie sighed. “Even as she was grinding your heart into the dirt, you were thinking more about her than yourself.”

“So what do I do?” I asked her.

“You mean tonight?”

I nodded.

Mel took one last drag off the joint, then dropped it and ground it under the toe of her shoe before blowing out the smoke. “Another thing I heard is that you got blue balled this morning,” she said, smirking a little.

“Ed and Paul really need to learn to keep some shit to themselves,” I grimaced.

“I love Ed, Rudy, for a whole lot of reasons that have nothing to do with a weekend like this,” Charlie smirked. “It’s weekends like this where he thinks he’s like Bradley Cooper’s character in The Hangover that I want to fucking throttle him. Once my sister brings the kids in tomorrow for the ceremony, I’m sure he’ll calm down, but for now, he’s being a bit of an annoying prick. But, ignoring my husband’s faults, I’m still aware that you need to get laid. So figure out who you’re going to fuck  and when, Rudy. Alexis isn’t a bad option for a hookup, as long as you think you can do it without getting sucked all the way in and you come out the other side as her new Boo tomorrow morning. Amber sounds like a hell of a lot of fun, and doesn’t come with baggage. Hell, fuck them both this weekend if you can swing it.”

“Is that advice from you, from Mel, or a bit of both?” I asked, almost choking on my embarrassed laughter.

“Both,” Charlie smirked. “Mel wasn’t as crazy as I was while we were in community college, but she had her moments. If she saw you now, she’d tell you straight up that you needed to relax and get laid, and she’d even take you out to the bar and be your wingwoman. I’d do that too, except it doesn’t sound like you need me to help convince anyone of anything.”

I sighed, shaking my head.

“She loved the shit out of you,” Charlie said after a long moment of grinning at me.

“I know,” I said, sniffing softly and clearing my throat. “She loved the shit out of you, too.”

“I know,” Charlie answered, hugging me again. It was how we usually finished these conversations about my sister.