After a while, he texts from the desk, Where’d Julie Andrews go?
Back to the nunnery, I write. She gave up. She couldn’t help you.
I have that effect, he says.
Not on Dusty, I write. She’s loving you.
She’s loving us, he corrects. Like I said, we’re good together.
I cast around for a response and find none. The only thing I can really think about is the strained look on my sister’s face and her sudden departure. Libby had some mysterious plans, I tell him.
He says, Must be the grand opening of the Dunkin’ Donuts two towns over.
A minute later, he adds, you okay? Like even from separate rooms, with multiple screens between us, he is reading my mood. The thought sends a strange hollow ache out through my limbs. Something like loneliness. Something like Ebenezer Scrooge watching his nephew Fred’s Christmas party through the frosty window. An outsideness made all the more stark by the revelation of insideness.
All I really want is to go perch on the edge of Charlie’s desk and tell him everything, make him laugh, let him make me laugh until nothing feels quite so pressing.
Fine, I write back. Afterward, I catch myself refreshing my email a couple of times and force myself to click back over to the manuscript. I’m so distracted by trying to distract myself, it’s eight minutes after five when I next look at the clock.
The shop is silent, and I pack with the care of one trying not to wake a pride of hungry lions. I sling my bag over my shoulder and run-walk from the café, still unsure whether Charlie is the lion in the scenario or if I am.
That’s what I’m pondering when I make it through the doorway and almost collide with Charlie on the other side, which might explain why I shout, “LION!”
His eyes go wide. His hands fly in front of his face (maybe he thought I meant, Here’s a lion! Catch!), and miracle of all miracles, we both screech to a halt, landing almost toe-to-toe on the sidewalk, but touching absolutely nowhere.
My heart thrums. My chest flushes.
“I didn’t know you were still here,” he says.
“I am,” I say.
“You always leave at five.” He shifts the watering can in his left hand to his right. Behind him, the flowers in the shop’s window box glisten, plump droplets clinging to their orange and pink petals and sparkling in the afternoon light. “Exactly five,” Charlie adds.
“Things got busy,” I lie.
His eyes dart to my chin. My skin warms ten more degrees. Quietly, he begins, “Is everything okay? You haven’t seemed like—”
“Hey! Charlie!” A low, smooth voice cuts him off. Across the street, an angelic giant of a man with twin dimples and gemstone eyes is climbing out of a muddy pickup truck.
“Shepherd,” Charlie says, somewhat stiffly, his chin dipping in greeting. It’s not like there are daggers in his eyes, but he doesn’t seem happy to see Shepherd either. History, subtext, backstory—whatever you want to call it, these two people have it.
“Sally asked me to drop this by,” Shepherd says, thrusting a tote bag in Charlie’s direction as he crosses the street toward us.
Charlie thanks him, but Shepherd’s facing me now, his smile widening. “Well, well, well, if it isn’t Nora from New York,” he says. “Told you we’d run into each other again.”
I read once that sunflowers always orient themselves to face the sun. That’s what being near Charlie Lastra is like for me. There could be a raging wildfire racing toward me from the west and I’d still be straining eastward toward his warmth.
So despite being eighty percent sure Shepherd’s flirting with me, of course I look straight toward Charlie. Or rather, to the shop door swinging closed behind him.
“Hey,” Shepherd says. “Any chance you’re free right now? I could give you that tour we talked about?”
“Um.” I check my phone, but there are still no new messages from Libby. For a beat, anxiety swells on every side of me, a hundred fists banging on the doors of my mind, demanding to run loose. I shove my phone back into my bag. Focus on something you can control. The list. Number five.
Resisting the urge to glance back at the shop window, I meet Shepherd’s eyes, smile, and lie through my teeth: “A tour sounds perfect.”
* * *
We drive with the windows down, the smells of pine and sweat and sunbaked dirt braided into the wind. I’ve never seen anything quite like the Blue Ridge Parkway, the way its easy curves are sliced into the side of the mountains so that shaggy treetops tower over us on one side and unfurl beneath us on the other. Shepherd’s a rare sight too. He has the kind of forearms that authors could spend full pages on, thick with muscle and dusted with fine golden-blond hair. He hums along to the country song on the radio, fingers drumming on the steering wheel and the clutch.
After the initial thrill of doing something spontaneous, the nerves set in. It’s been a long time since I’ve been out with an unvetted man. Setting aside the possibility that he’s a rapist, murderer, or cannibal, I also just don’t know how to talk to a man I know nothing about and am not considering as a long-term partner.
You can do this, Nora. You’re not Nadine to him. You can be anyone. Just say something.
He finally puts me out of my misery: “So, Nora, what you do?”
“I work in publishing,” I say. “I’m a literary agent.”
“No kidding!” His green eyes flash from the road to me. “So you already knew Charlie, before your visit?”
My stomach drops, then surges upward in my chest. “Not really,” I say noncommittally.
Shepherd laughs, a clear, booming sound. “Uh-oh. I know that look—don’t judge the rest of us based on him.”
I feel a swell of protectiveness—or maybe it’s empathy, an understanding that this might be how people talk about me. Simultaneously though, I’m annoyed that I literally got into a stranger’s car like it was a deep-space escape pod, and somehow the specter of Charlie is still here.
“He’s not as bad as he seems,” Shepherd goes on. “I mean, coming back here to help Sal and Clint, when pretty much all he ever wanted was to get away from . . .” He waves his hand in a sweeping arc, gesturing toward the sun-dappled road ahead of us. He turns up a side street that winds further up the foothill we’ve been climbing.
“So what do you do?” I say.
“I’m in construction,” he says. “And I do some carpentry on the side, when I have time.”
“Of course you do,” I accidentally say aloud.
“What’s that?” he asks, eyes twinkling like well-lit emeralds.
“I just mean, you look like a carpenter.”
“Oh.”
I explain, “Carpenters are famously handsome.”
His brow crinkles as he grins. “Are they?”
“I mean, carpenters are the love interests in a lot of books and movies. It’s a common trope. It’s how you show someone’s down-to-earth and patient, and hot without being shallow.”
He laughs. “That doesn’t sound too bad, I guess.”
“Sorry, it’s been awhile since I’ve been . . .” I stop short of saying on a date—which this is definitely not—and finish with the far more tragic “anywhere.”
He grins, like it hasn’t even occurred to him that I might have recently escaped a doomsday hatch in the ground after years of little to no socialization. “Well then, Nora from New York, I know exactly where I’m taking you.”
* * *
I’m not much of a gasper—dramatic, audible reactions are more Libby’s terrain—but when I climb out of the truck, I can’t help it.
“Bet you don’t have views like that back in New York,” Shepherd says proudly.