Page 99 of All the way home

“I—it’s a list.”

Rena, a known list enthusiast, approved on principle. “Can I see?”

“No,” Lucas blurted out.

She raised both eyebrows but chose not to press. A few weeks later, she’d find out from his older sister Aubree—tipsy on champagne at a yacht-racing afterparty—that Lucas kept a list of things Rena liked and disliked on his phone. Aubree had been rather haughty about it, but then again, Aubree was haughty about most things, and Rena had found it so endearing that she’d gone to find Lucas and spent the rest of the evening leaning against him with her arm wrapped around his waist the way he always seemed to like so much.

Lucas had never gotten her a black tea again, and on subsequent dates, he paid close attention to what she liked and what she didn’t.

Of course, there were some compromises too.

“Kill me,” Oscar said one morning when Lucas kissed her right on the mouth at her locker before school. “Gag. Horror. This is deeply upsetting.”

Siobhan—holding too many textbooks—freed up a hand to smack him, hard.

Kissing at her locker was one such compromise. Rena didn’t particularly like being kissed in front of people, but she knew Lucas did. They didn’t hold hands very often, because she didn’t like it, but he liked it a lot, so sometimes she let it happen. She liked that he was so constantly interested in being around her, even if he did things like hugging her from behind at school when she didn’t know he was there.

After Lucas had gone, when Rena asked if all the kissing really bothered him, Oscar rolled his eyes.

“No.” With a finger raised, he went on. “But if you’re going to start frenching in front of me, I will lay claim to my right to projectile vomit on both of you.”

“Please don’t,” Rena said. “Also, what is frenching?”

“It’s what I did with your brother,” Oscar told her, all shark-tooth smile and waggling eyebrows.

Siobhan—still juggling the textbooks—smacked him again, harder.

(Rena had googled what frenching was later on and consequently come to a place of deep and thorough resignation with the state of the world.)

But besides Oscar’s vocal distress about it, being a girlfriend was nice. It was very nice to always have a study partner—her biology grade improved significantly. His mom seemed to like her, and to her surprise, her parents approved of Lucas straightaway.

Kieran, however, was a different story. It took him three months to start being civil at all, and even then he was only just civil. He stopped bothering them after he’d walked in on a kiss—which she had heard about afterward for weeks—and instead seemed to willfully perceive Lucas as though he were a soccer-inclined piece of furniture. But even then, Rena could tell that he didn’t like Lucas at all.

They get along just fine now. Lucas is one of the few people who knows the truth about last Christmas, and they’ve shared enough family dinners and holidays that they’ve learned to find their common ground and lean into it. Besides, Kieran actually admitted to enjoying the few afternoons they’d spent together over the past summer, even if they were spent with Lucas actually playing golf and Kieran mostly focusing on as many small acts of property destruction as he could get away with.

He’s just as much a part of the family as any of them. Once, Rena heard Kieran refer to Lucas as “my brother” when he thought she wasn’t listening.

It’s just that she’s always listening.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Zach

“Okay.” Kieran leans back in his chair and folds his arms. “Question.”

Zach just raises an eyebrow.

“You said I was going to have to earn the story of your first kiss.” Kieran looks him dead in the eye. “Have I?”

Zach sits back in his chair.

No one has ever been this keenly interested in knowing things about him before.

When he doesn’t say anything, Kieran urges, “Was it at least good?”

“I mean—aren’t first kisses with anyone a little awkward?” He hopes this makes him sound more suave than he is, as though he’s kissed more than one person in his life.

“Oh, always. I loathe them.”