The Secret We Keep – Chapter 2 – Good Idea
The drive out took an hour and forty minutes, and Kate spent the first thirty of them not talking to me.
Window cracked, feet up on the dash, sunglasses on even though the sky had gone that flat gray that doesn’t really need them.
Jason drove.
I sat up front because it was his car and that felt like the rule, even though nobody had said it out loud.
Danny had left an hour before us in his own car, insisting he needed to “get the place ready,” which turned out to mean opening windows and putting beer in a cooler.
Somewhere around the halfway mark, Kate finally spoke.
“So how do you know Danny again?”
“High school,” Jason said. “Grew up two streets over from each other.”
“And he just – has a house?”
“His parents’ house. They’re not really using it.”
“Must be nice.”
“It’s not that nice,” Jason said. “There’s no Wi-Fi and the water heater takes twenty minutes to warm up.”
“Still nicer than my apartment.”
“Everything’s nicer than your apartment,” I said, and she flicked a bottle cap at me from the back seat.
By the time we turned off the highway onto the smaller roads, Kate had taken her sunglasses off and was leaning between the two front seats, arguing with Jason about a song on the radio. She had a laugh I hadn’t heard much at the store, lower than her talking voice, a little surprised each time it happened, like she wasn’t used to being the one who made a joke land.
The house came up through the trees, wood siding gone silver-gray, a porch wrapping one side, the river below it wide and slow, catching the light in long flat streaks.
Danny was already on the dock, shirt off, a beer in one hand, waving the other as we pulled in.
“There she is,” he said, jogging up, gesturing at the house with his beer. “Three bedrooms, private dock, and a water heater that hates you personally. Welcome.”
He hugged Jason first, three back-slaps in it. Then me, briefer, one arm. Then he turned to Kate.
“You must be Kate.”
“Must be.”
“Danny.” He put his hand out, formal, like she was someone’s mother he was meeting for the first time. “Grace talks about you like you run that store single-handed.”
“I do,” Kate said. “They just let other people badge in.”
He laughed, head back, and said, “I like her,” to Jason, like Kate wasn’t standing right there, and I saw the corner of her mouth twitch – not offended, just filing it away.
He carried her bag inside for her. Gave her the bedroom with the better view of the water without her asking, said something about the other room having a mattress that dipped in the middle like it held a grudge.
While we were unloading the car, Danny reached past Kate for a grocery bag and his hand landed against her waist for a beat longer than the reach required.
“Sorry,” he said, though he didn’t look particularly sorry.
Kate handed him the bag. “Kitchen?”
“Yeah.”
And that was it. Nobody stopped moving.
By late afternoon we were all on the dock.
Danny had music going from a speaker propped in a kitchen window, low enough to drift instead of dominate. Kate had her jeans rolled up, feet in the river, complaining about the cold and not moving them.
“It’s not that cold,” Danny said.
“You have no nerve endings. This is river water in September.”
“Toughen up.”
“I deliver pizza in the snow. I have plenty of toughness. I’m choosing not to use it on your freezing river.”
Jason laughed and pulled me down onto the dock next to him, his hand finding my knee. We’d been together long enough that his hands on me had mostly stopped feeling like an event. That afternoon it felt like one again – low and warm – because for the first time in months there wasn’t a door thirty feet away that somebody else had a key to.
He leaned in close, his mouth near my ear instead of my neck, his hand sliding up my thigh under the hem of my shorts, just resting there.
“Later,” I said.
“Define later.”
“After dinner.”
“That’s four hours.”
“Then you’ll be very motivated.”
He groaned quietly against my shoulder, and behind us Kate said something to Danny that made him laugh too, and for a while the four of us existed at the same easy temperature.
Dinner was Danny’s doing – steaks, a grill he clearly took some pride in, more beer than four people needed, and then a bottle of something dark and expensive-looking that he poured without asking.
Kate had two glasses of it, and somewhere during the second one her shoulders finally dropped from around her ears.
“Okay,” she said, gesturing at the river with her glass. “I take it back. This is very nice. You people are forgiven.”
“For what?” Jason asked.
“For making me feel guilty about a Saturday shift I’m not even doing this weekend.”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“I didn’t say thank you.”
“You will.”
She rolled her eyes, smiling while she did it. Knees pulled up on the porch step, glass balanced on one knee, laughing at something Danny said about his terrible college roommate.
Danny told stories well. A whole one about getting lost kayaking as a teenager that had all of us laughing, Kate wiping her eyes at one point.
He refilled glasses without being asked, cleared plates, fed the fire pit once the sun went down. He touched people when he talked – a hand on Jason’s shoulder, a hand briefly at Kate’s back steering her toward a better chair, mine at some point, resting on my arm while he made a point about something.
Later, with the fire down to embers and Kate three drinks into an evening she’d stopped monitoring, Jason pulled me up under the pretense of getting more wood and walked me around the side of the house instead, out of the firelight, and kissed me against the cool siding.
“Finally,” I said against his mouth.
“Shut up.”
His hands were under my shirt, and I had his belt half undone before either of us said anything else. We didn’t finish – Danny called out from the fire, something about needing help finding the good scotch, and we broke apart laughing, breathless.
“He has the worst timing of any human being alive,” Jason said.
“We have two more nights.”
“I’m holding you to that.”
We went back to the fire, I hoped only slightly disheveled. Kate was leaning back in her chair, eyes half-closed, humming along to whatever Danny had put on now.
“Having fun?” I asked her.
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
“Too late.”
“Fine. Fun. I’m having fun.” She said it like admitting it physically hurt. “This was a good idea.”
I smiled at her. “I told you.”
“Don’t ruin it.”
“Too late.”
Danny came back from the house with another bottle and four glasses.
Kate held hers out first.