“Does that mean you want to date my bullies, or to humiliate them?” He grabs some bread from the basket on the table, tears off a piece, and slips it between his lips.
I look away as the heat creeps up my neck. “That’s all down to whether they ask how big my feet are within the first five minutes of meeting.”
Charlie chokes over the bread. “Was it, like, a fetish thing?”
“I think it was more of a Wow, did you have to fall in a pit of radioactive waste to get that tall? kind of thing.”
“Blake never did have the most secure sense of self,” Charlie muses.
We’re interrupted by a teenage waiter with an unfortunate bowl cut taking our order—two goat cheese salads and cacio e pepes.
As soon as he’s out of earshot, I say, “Libby picked Blake. She’s running an app for me.”
“Right.” His brows rise apprehensively. “MOM.”
“Two dates on the list. Blake is the first.”
Charlie’s eyes do a bored allusion-to-an-eye-roll. “Save yourself the trouble and use this as number two.”
“I already told you. You don’t count.”
“The words every man dreams of hearing.”
“Consider yourself the grape juice of dates.”
“So number five is go on two shitty dates with men you could never be into, in a town you couldn’t stand to live in,” Charlie says. “What’s number six again? Voluntary lobotomy?”
I slide his mostly full wineglass toward him. “I’m still waiting on your secrets, Lastra.”
He pushes the glass back toward the middle of the table. “You already know mine. I’m the uninvited prodigal son, here to run a rapidly dying bookstore while my dad’s busy with physical therapy and my mom’s trying to keep him from climbing on the roof to clean the gutters.”
“That’s . . . a lot,” I say.
“It’s fine.” His tone makes it clear that sentence ends with a period.
“And Loggia’s been good with letting you work remotely,” I say.
“For now.” When his gaze meets mine, it’s startlingly dark. It feels like I’ve stumbled toward the edge of something dangerous. And worse, like I’m trapped there in viscous honey, incapable of stepping back from the ledge.
“Now, what does Libby have on you that you went out with Blake?” Charlie asks. “Did you sell state secrets? Commit a murder?”
“And here I thought you had a younger sister.”
He relaxes back in his chair. “Carina. She’s twenty-two.”
Even though I’ve met his mother, it’s hard to imagine Charlie with a family. He seems so . . . self-contained. Then again, that’s probably what people say about me.
“And Carina can’t compel you to do something simply by asking?” I say. Or by dodging you for months, keeping secrets, and consistently looking like she just got unhitched from being dragged behind a train.
Charlie hesitates. “Carina’s why I’m here.”
I lean into the table, its edge digging into my ribs. I’ve got that feeling of reading a mystery novel, knowing a reveal is coming up, and fighting the urge to skip ahead.
“She was planning to come back and run the bookstore after college,” he says. “Then she decided last minute to just stay in Italy for a while. Florence. She’s a painter.”
“Wow,” I say. “People really just do that? Move to Italy to paint?”
Charlie frowns, turns his water glass in place, then readjusts his silverware into a tidy row. It’s satisfying to watch; feels like having someone scratch the spot right between my shoulder blades. “The women in my family do. My mom also went there to paint for a couple weeks when she was twenty and ended up staying for a year.”
“The whimsical free spirit bringing magic into everyone’s lives,” I say. “I’m familiar with that trope.”
“Some people call it magic,” he says. “I prefer to think of it as ‘raging stress hives.’ Carina was living in an Airbnb owned by a literal drug dealer until I booked her another place.”
I shudder. “That is exactly Libby in a parallel universe.”
“Little sisters,” he says, the twist of his mouth deepening the crease beneath his bottom lip.
I stare at it for a beat too long. My brain scrambles for purchase in the conversation. “What about your dad? What’s he like?”
He tips his head back. “Quiet. Strong. A small-town contractor who swept my mom so thoroughly off her feet that she decided to put down roots.”
At my self-satisfied look, he leans forward, matching my posture. “Fine, yes, they are the quintessential small-town love story,” he admits, eyes sparking as our knees press together. Under the table we’re playing a game of chicken: who will pull away first?
The seconds stretch on, thick and heavy as molasses, but we stay where we are, locked together by the challenge.
“All right, Stephens,” he says finally. “Let’s hear about your family. Where exactly do they fall in your catalogue of two-dimensional caricatures?”
“Easy,” I say. “Libby’s the chaotic, charming nineties rom-com heroine who’s always running late and is windblown in a cute and sexy way. My dad’s the deadbeat, absent father who ‘wasn’t ready to have kids’ but now, according to a paid PI, takes his three sons and wife out in their boat on Lake Erie every weekend.”
“What about your mom?” he asks.
“My mom . . .” I rearrange my own silverware, like they’re words in my next sentence. “She was magic.” I meet his eyes, expecting a sneer or a smirk or a storm cloud, but instead finding only a small crease inside his brows. “She was the struggling actress who chased her dreams to New York. We never had any money, but somehow, she made everything fun. She was my best friend. I mean, not just when we got older. As long as I can remember, she’d take us with her everywhere. And you know, for a lot of people who move to the city, it loses its glow in a couple years? But with Mom, it was like every single day was the first one.
“She felt so lucky to be there. And everyone fell in love with her. She was such a romantic. That’s where Libby gets it from. She started reading Mom’s old romance novels way too young.”
“You were close with her,” Charlie says quietly, halfway between observation and question. “Your mom?”
I nod. “She just made things better.” I can still smell her lemon-lavender scent, feel her arms around me, hear her voice—Let it out, sweet girl. Just one look and those five words, and it would all come spilling out. I do my best for Libby, but I’ve never had that kind of tenderness that slips past defenses.
When I look up, Charlie isn’t watching me so much as reading me, his eyes traveling back and forth over my face like he can translate each line and shadow into words. Like he can see me scrambling for a segue.
He clears his throat and hands me one. “I read some romance novels as a kid.”
My relief at the topic change rapidly morphs into something else, and Charlie laughs. “You couldn’t possibly look more evil right now, Stephens.”
“This is my delighted face,” I say. “Did they teach you anything helpful?”
He murmurs, “I could never share that information with a colleague.”
I roll my eyes. “So that would be a no.”
“Is that how you got into books? Your mom’s love of romance?”
I shake my head. “For me, it was this shop. Freeman Books.”
Charlie nods. “I know it.”
“We lived over it,” I explain. “Mrs. Freeman used to run all these programs, things that were free with the purchase of a book, and it made it easier for our mom to justify spending money. I was never stressed out there, you know? I’d forget about everything. It felt like I could go anywhere, do anything.”
“A good bookstore,” Charlie says, “is like an airport where you don’t have to take your shoes off.”
“In fact,” I say, “it’s discouraged.”
“Sometimes I think Goode Books could use a sign about it,” he replies. “It’s the reason I never tell customers to make themselves at home.”
“Right, because then the shoes and bras go flying, and the Marvin Gaye starts playing at top volume.”