“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?”