His lips curve too. Smiling with knives. “Of course you did,” he murmurs. Our eyes lock for a beat. “What about editing?”
I feel the dent in my chin before I’ve even lied. The first few years, I checked job listings compulsively. Once I even went to an interview. But I was about to push through a huge sale, and I was terrified to be locked into a lower salary with an entry-level position. Three days before my second interview, I canceled it.
“I’m good at agenting,” I reply. “What about you? How’d you end up in publishing?”
He scrubs one hand up the back of his salt-and-pepper curls. “I had a lot of problems in school when I was small,” he says. “Couldn’t focus. Things didn’t click. Got held back.”
I try to rein in my surprise.
“You don’t have to do that,” he says, amused.
“Do what?”
“The Shiny, Polite Nora thing,” he says. “If you’re aghast at my failure, then just be aghast. I can take it.”
“It’s not that,” I say. “You just put off this . . . academic vibe. I would’ve expected you to be, like, a Rhodes scholar, with a tattoo of the Bodleian Library on your ass.”
“Then where would my Garfield the cat tattoo go?” he asks so dryly that I have to spit my wine back into the glass. “One-one,” he says with a faint smile.
“What’s that?”
“Our spit take score.”
I try to wipe my grin off, but it sticks. Charlie’s commitment to the truth is contagious, apparently, and the truth is, I’m having fun. “So what then?” I say. “After you got held back?”
He sighs, straightens his silverware. “My mom was—well, you’ve met her. She’s a free spirit. She wanted to just pull me out of school and call me helping tend her marijuana plants ‘homeschooling.’ My dad’s the more . . . steady of the two of them.” His smile is delicate, almost sweet.
“Anyway, he figured if I was bad at school, then he just needed to figure out what I was good at. What I could focus on. Tried a million hobbies out with me, then finally, when I was eight, he got me this CD player—probably hoping I’d turn out to be the next Jackson Browne or something. Instead I immediately took the CD player apart.”
I nod soberly. “And that’s how he discovered your passion for serial killing.”
Charlie’s eyes spark as he laughs. “It’s how he realized I wanted to learn how to put things together. I thought the world made sense, and I wanted to find the sense. After that, my dad started asking me to help him work on this car he was fixing up. I got pretty into it.”
“At eight?” I cry.
“As it turns out,” he says, “I have incredible focus when I’m interested in something.”
Despite the innocence of the comment, it feels like molten lava is rolling up my toes, my legs, engulfing me.
I shift my gaze to my glass. “So that’s how you ended up with a race car bed?”
“Along with a ton of books about cars and restoration. The reading finally clicked, and I stopped caring about mechanics overnight.”
“Did it crush him?” I ask.
Now Charlie’s eyes drop, storm clouds rolling in across his brow. “He just wanted me to love something. He didn’t care what.”
Dads, as a concept, have always felt as irrelevant to my daily life as astronauts. I know they’re out there, but I rarely think about them. Suddenly, though, I can almost imagine it. I can almost miss it, this thing I never had.
“That’s really nice.” It feels like not just an understatement, but a complete mistranslation for something vast and unruly.
“He’s a sweet guy,” Charlie says quietly. “Anyway, he let the car stuff go and started picking up paperbacks for me every time he stopped by a garage sale, or a new donation box came into Mom’s shop. He has no idea how much erotica he’s given me.”
“And you actually read it.”
Charlie turns his wineglass one hundred and eighty degrees, eyes boring into me. “I wanted to understand how things worked, remember?”
I arch a brow. “How’d that turn out for you?”
He sits forward. “I was slightly disappointed when my first serious girlfriend didn’t have three consecutive orgasms, but otherwise okay.”
A torrent of laughter rips through me.
“So I’ve found the key to Nora Stephens’s joy,” he says. “My sexual humiliation.”