“Seriously Reid, why are you so late? Why didn’t you call?”
“No service,” he said with a mouth full of food. “Sit down, will you?” He kicked out a chair and nodded to it as he took another big bite.
I sighed and sat down. “I’m just trying to figure this out.”
“I get it.”
“You can tell me, you know.”
He looked at me for a second. “I love how you look with your hair like that.”
I laughed. “Soaking wet and in a bun?”
“Exactly. Soaking wet. Just the way I want you.”
“Not the time.”
“It’s always the time. With a body like that, you should be getting fucked constantly.”
“Reid, not here.”
“Okay, I can fuck you somewhere else, then.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
He took a deep swig of his beer and grinned at me. He looked so cocky and sure of himself, although the tiredness was pushing in around his eyes. “It’s what I mean, though.”
“Look, I just want to know where you went so I can make your mom feel better.”
“Cora is fine. This isn’t the first time I’ve been late.”
I was quiet at that, letting the implications sink in. “So Cora knows about where you’ve been?”
“Not exactly. But I’m willing to bet she has a guess.”
“Is this about what Lindsey said?” He didn’t respond, just kept eating his food. “You can’t just ignore me, Reid. Other people say things about you, too. It’s really obvious something is going on.”
Suddenly, he stopped eating, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. When he opened them, his gaze was dangerous, like he was trying to size me up while looking deep into my heart. It was the most excited and afraid I’d ever felt, all wrapped up in one moment. I could see something in him, something wild and dangerous. I hadn’t seen it before, but Reid was harboring something, carrying something difficult and heavy and dark around with him.
“Are you sure you can handle it?” he said softly.
“If you’re in trouble, I can help.”
He shook his head sadly. “You can’t help me.”
“Tell me what’s going on.”
He picked up his beer and finished it off in three big swallows. When he was done, he placed it back down in front of him gently and then locked his gaze on to mine. Butterflies filled my stomach.
“When my mom got sick,” he started slowly, “your dad wasn’t making much money. I’m not saying that to blame him or to belittle him. He provides the best he can and he’s a decent enough guy, even if he hates me. But back then, when she was first diagnosed, money was really, really tight.” He paused and looked down at his food and then back up. “Do you know how much cancer drugs cost? Hospital stays?”
I shook my head. “No, I don’t.”
“One afternoon, a few weeks after she started her treatments, I found a bill. And let me tell you, it was for a lot of fucking money. Worst of all, though, I could tell that it was just one of many that we’d be getting in the future. Each new bill meant years of debt, years of hard work and toil and maybe even worse than that.”
“What about insurance?” I asked.
“Insurance helped, but it couldn’t cover everything we needed over the years. Try as hard as he did, your dad just couldn’t cover it all, either. Nobody could, not really.”
I remembered this time. I was coming home as often as possible, and I kept begging Cora to let me drop out of school to be with her, but she kept refusing. “Cora said you started winning more climbing competitions at this point?”
“That was the story, yeah.”
“What do you mean, ‘the story’?”
“Even in the largest regional competition, first prize was only a few thousand dollars at most. It just wasn’t enough. In that first year, I entered and won pretty much every competition within driving distance, but that money was still just a drop in the bucket.”
“What happened, Reid?” I asked softly.
“I did what I had to do for my family. If I hadn’t gotten involved with Thom, we’d probably be living in a trailer somewhere. Cora would probably already be back at work and your dad would be dead from pulling double shifts every day.”
“What did you do?”
“I talked to Thom. He had contacts in the mob, some French Canadian group of guys. They’ve been running prescription drugs across the Canadian border for years, mostly painkillers and stuff like that. But their smuggler had gotten caught and they needed someone who knew the woods to take his place.”