He smiled, feeling how sideways and awkward it was. What the hell was wrong with him? “I aim to please.”
It was probably his imagination, but he thought her smile widened, that her dark eyes glittered.
She looked pretty tonight. She looked…better than that. Pretty, and put together, and cheerful, and rosy-cheeked from the heat in the kitchen. She didn’t look anything like Jasmine: no come-hither glance, no “baby boy,” no unsubtle tilt of her hips. None of the things he’d come to think of as normal.
He gave himself a mental shake, because he knew all too well the dangers of that word: normal.
“I’m just gonna…” He pointed toward the living room with the neck of the Scotch bottle, and then headed that way. He told himself he wasn’t fleeing, but that was exactly what it felt like.
~*~
Knocking was polite, so when Reese got to Mercy’s house, he knocked. Ava opened the door, and she wasn’t quite fast enough to cover her surprise at finding him standing on the mat. He’d never sensed that she was afraid of him – truly, never – and she had a way of saying only what was most important that he appreciated. But she hadn’t expected him to turn up tonight, and he felt a momentary twinge of disappointment to realized that he still had a long way to go in his quest to become human. Tenny’s reaction, and his own reading of it, had proved that this afternoon; Ava’s reaction now drove the point home.
“Reese, hey.” She opened the door without hesitation. She’d never been hesitant about letting him into her home, with her children.
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 he noticed it 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,