I never dreamed of having my own kids, but the way I felt during Libby’s first pregnancy really sealed the deal. There are just too many things that can go wrong, too many ways to fail.
I pitch myself onto a stool at the corner of the bar and almost fall over in the process.
Charlie catches my arms and steadies me. “How about some water?” he says, sliding onto the empty stool beside mine, that suppressed smirk/pout/what-even-is-this tugging his full lips slightly to one side as he signals to the bartender.
I square my shoulders, trying for dignified. “You’re not going to distract me.”
His brow lifts. “From?”
“I won one of those games. You owe me information.” Especially given the horrifying amount I just blurted out.
His head tilts, and he peers down his face at me. “What do you want to know?”
Our lunch two years ago pops into my head, Charlie’s irritated glance at his watch. “You said you were trying to catch a flight the day we met. Why?”
He scratches at his collar, his brow furrowing, jaw etched with tension. “The same reason I’m here now.”
“Intriguing.”
“I promise it’s not.” Waters have appeared on the bar. He turns one in place, his jaw tensing. “My dad had a stroke. One back then, and another a few months ago. I’m here to help.”
“Shit. I—wow.” Immediately, my vision clears and sharpens on him, my buzz burning off. “You were so . . . together.”
“I made a commitment to be there,” he says, with a defensive edge, “and I didn’t see how talking about it would be productive.”
“I wasn’t saying—look, I’d gotten dumped like forty-six seconds earlier, and I still sat down for a martini and a salad with a perfect stranger, so I get it.”
Charlie’s eyes snag on mine, so intense I have to look away for a second.
“Was he—is your dad okay?”
He turns his glass again. “When we had lunch, I already knew he wasn’t in danger. My sister had just told me about the stroke, but it actually happened weeks earlier.” His face hardens. “He decided I didn’t need to know, and that was that.” He shifts on his stool—the discomfort of someone who’s just decided he’s overshared.
Even factoring in the gin and beer sloshing around in my body, I’m shocked to hear myself blurt, “Our dad left us when my mom was pregnant. I don’t really remember him. After that, it was pretty much a parade of loser boyfriends, so I’m not really an expert on dads.”
Charlie’s brows pinch, his fingers stilling on his damp glass. “Sounds terrible.”
“It wasn’t too bad,” I say. “She never let most of them meet us. She was good about that.” I reach for my glass, trying his tic, turning it in a ring of its own sweat. “But one day, she’d be floating on a cloud, singing her favorite Hello, Dolly! songs and fluffing embroidered thrift-store pillows like Snow White in New York, and the next—”
I don’t trail off so much as just outright cut myself off.
I’m not ashamed of my upbringing, but the more you tell a person about yourself, the more power you hand over. And I particularly avoid sharing Mom with strangers, like the memory of her is a newspaper clipping and every time I take it out, she fades and creases a little more.
Charlie’s thumb slides over my wrist absently. “Stephens?”
“I don’t need you to feel sorry for me.”
His pupils dilate. “I wouldn’t dare.” A dare is exactly what his voice sounds like.
At some point, we’ve drawn together, my legs tucked between his again, an endless, buzzing feedback loop everywhere we’re touching. His eyes are heavy on me, his pupils almost blotting out his irises, a lustrous ring of honey around a deep, dark pit.
Heat gathers between my thighs, and I uncross and recross my legs. Charlie’s eyes drop to follow the motion, and his water glass hitches against his bottom lip, like he’s forgotten what he was doing. In that moment, he is one hundred percent legible to me.
I might as well be looking into a mirror.
I could lean into him.
I could let my knees slide further into the pocket between his, or touch his arm, or tip my chin up, and in any of those hypothetical scenarios, we end up kissing. I may not like him all that much, but a not insignificant part of me is dying to know what his bottom lip feels like, how that hand on my wrist would touch me.
Just then it starts to rain—pour—and the corrugated metal roof erupts into a feverish rattle. I jerk my arm out from under Charlie’s and stand. “I should get home.”
“Share a cab?” he asks, his voice low, gravelly.
The odds of finding two cabs at this hour, in this town, aren’t great. The odds of finding one that isn’t driven by Hardy are terrible. “I think I’ll walk.”
“In this rain?” he says. “And those shoes?”
I grab my bag. “I won’t melt.” Probably.
Charlie stands. “We can share my umbrella.”
8
WE MAKE OUR way out of Poppa Squat’s huddled under Charlie’s umbrella. (I’d called it fortuitous, but it turns out he checks a weather app obsessively, so apparently I’ve found someone even more predictable than I am.) The smell of grass and wildflowers is thick in the damp air, and it’s cooled considerably.
He asks, “Where are you staying?”
“It’s called Goode’s Lily Cottage,” I say.
He says, almost to himself, “Bizarre.”
Heat creeps up my neck from where his breath hits it. “What, I couldn’t possibly be happy anywhere that isn’t a black marble penthouse with a crystal chandelier?”
“Exactly what I meant.” He casts a look my way as we pass under a bar of streetlight, the rain sparkling like silver confetti. “And also it’s my parents’ rental property.”
My cheeks flush. “You’re—Sally Goode’s your mom? You grew up next to a horse farm?”
“What,” he says, “I couldn’t possibly have been raised anywhere but a black marble penthouse with a crystal chandelier?”
“Just hard to imagine you belonging anywhere in this town, let alone so close to a manure pyramid.”
“Belonging might be overstating things,” he says acidly.
“So where are you staying?”
“Well, I usually stay at the cottage,” he says. Another sidelong glance at me through the dark. “But that wasn’t an option.”
His smell is so uncannily familiar, but I still can’t place it. Warm, with a slightly spicy edge, faint enough that I keep catching myself trying to inhale a lungful of it. “Then where?” I ask. “Your childhood bedroom?”
We pause at the dead-end street the cottage sits on, and Charlie sighs. “I’m sleeping in a race car bed, Nora. Are you happy?”
Happy doesn’t begin to cover it. The image of stern-browed, highly polished Charlie tucked into a plastic Corvette and scowling at his Kindle makes me laugh so hard it’s a struggle to stay upright. He’s probably the last person I could picture in a race car bed, aside from myself.
Charlie hooks an arm around my waist as I keel over. “Little reminder,” he says, keeping me moving down the gravel lane. “That is far from the most embarrassing thing one of us has said tonight.”
I get out, “Were you, like, a NASCAR kid?”
“No,” he says, “but my dad never stopped trying.”
I devolve into another fit of laughter that threatens to tip me over. Charlie pulls me against his side. “One foot in front of the other, Stephens.”
“Mutually assured destruction indeed,” I cry.
He starts to lead me up the hillside, and immediately my heel sinks into the mud, pinning me to the ground. I take another step and the other heel punctures the mud too. An indignant half shriek rises out of me.
Charlie stops, sighing heavily as he eyes my shoes. “Am I going to have to carry you?”
“I am not letting you give me a piggyback ride, Lastra,” I say.
“And I,” he replies, “am not letting you destroy those poor, innocent shoes. I’m not that kind of man.”
I look at my mules, and a miserably petulant sound squeaks out of me. “Fine.”
“You’re welcome.” He turns and hunches as I hike up my dress and say a fond farewell to the last remnants of my dignity, then hook my arms over his shoulders and hop onto his back.
“All good?” he says.