Chapter Text
“Oh god I'm so not drunk enough for this!” Alex Reagan was sitting in Richard Strand’s countertop wearing what was an actually nice dress and with bare feet. The dress may have been new but the sitting on the countertop was something old, another concession on he'd made to having his life invaded by an insufferably persistent reporter who butted into it. This was habit now, and had been ever since Alex had returned from Turkey and she spent so much time at his father's house.
The shoes being off of course were to prevent scuff marks. Ruby would kill them both if Alex scuffed up the cabinet doors she'd replaced.
But Alex stealing the wine with which he had been cooking was new, and so was her drinking it out of the bottle. With a sigh Strand just took a second bottle out of the rack before wordlessly handing her a goblet.
“No.” The word was a sharp protest and Alex followed it up by taking a swig directly from the bottle. “I just told you, I'm so not drunk enough for this, Richard.”
Richard just cleared his throat for a moment before returning to the sauce that was rapidly coming together on the burner. When he spoke, his words were carefully neutral, and he didn't look at her when he said, “I wouldn't think that my meeting your parents was that big of a deal, Alex. Colleagues occasionally meet one another's parents, especially if they just show up in town and one’s colleague has the inability to cook and hadn't cleaned ‘in a while.’” One could practically hear the air quotes around those words.
“Come on Richard. We're friends. Aren't we definitely friends at this point?” There was a hopeful little note in her voice that drew a sigh and a nod from him before he turned back towards her and picked up the bottle she'd been drinking and poured himself a glass before starting on the other bottle with a corkscrew.
“Okay so. First an apology. I'm really sorry for this. All of this. And I do appreciate you making dinner more than words can say. But do you remember when you listened to the podcast and I talked about my mother calling me every Sunday and asking when I was going to get married?” Richard nodded, making his smug get on with it Alex face which meant that Alex Reagan, podcast host stumbled over her words.
“So my mother thinks that we're dating. And have been for a while. Right around my vacation, she stopped asking me about getting married and instead started asking me about bringing home ‘the nice young man from your show.’” Alex was going to avoid her mother’s commentary on everything else Richard from the idea that he probably needed fattening up (at that point he did; Power Bars and no sleep do not a healthy body make) and Coralee letting him think she was dead for so long.
For Richard’s part, he just stared at her utterly dumbfounded. So dumbfounded in fact that he didn't even make a biting or sarcastic comment about her mother calling him a ‘young man’. Instead all he could do was parrot back to her. “Your mother thinks we're dating and have been for over a year?”
Alex just nodded quickly. “I've been telling her that we're just friends from the first time that she said it but she just keeps going on with ‘a mother knows when her child is in love with someone and is involved with them, Alexandria Margaret Reagan so don't go trying to pull one over on me.’”
At which point Richard proved that he was listening if nothing else because this time he just asked, “your mother thinks you're in love with me?” His voice is in that slow tone when he's trying to explain something to her in the most patronizing way possible.
“Yes! That's what I'm telling you and apologizing in advance for them! After we” whatever the rest of Alex's sentence was going to be was lost to the sound of the antique doorbell and Alex's squeak of panic.
“I am not drunk enough for this,” Richard muttered and took a long swig of wine bottle. It was going to be something of a night.