Charlie rolled her eyes, heading for the wraparound porch outside. She needed to get some air. The intensity of her anger at Suzie bothered her. She didn’t get jealous. Not like that.
It didn’t make sense to long for someone who was already yours.
It’s the alcohol, she told herself, as she sat on a porch swing that she hoped wasn’t full of spiders.
Most of the nearby houses didn’t have lights on, but a scattered few caught her eye. The soft glow of a pink night-light in a child’s room. A television, the screen moving between images. A beacon burning over a garage door, waiting for someone to return. This area had all been farms once. Tobacco, probably. You still passed old drying barns on the back roads.
Out past the highway was the Connecticut River, a black snake curling around Mount Tom until it shed its skin and became the Chicopee River, then the Swift River, and finally the Quabbin Reservoir. Charlie remembered walking around there when she was a kid on a field trip at school. They went to see a fish hatchery and then climbed the observation tower. Charlie had stood at the top and looked down into the water, wondering if she could see the drowned buildings beneath the waves.
The Quabbin was a human-made reservoir, created by flooding four towns. And while the residents had relocated, their homes, shops, and halls remained. They were still down there, with whatever had been left inside. Secret, unless you knew where to look, and how.
She thought of shadows moving in the dark, as impossible to spot as drowned towns.
“You ready?” Vince asked, the door closing heavily behind him. She jumped, surprised.
His eyes looked eerie in the porch light. Silver.
“No thruple?” she asked after a moment.
He frowned at her in the same confused way he had when she’d read the French phrase off her phone. She wished she could make him tell her what he was thinking. Of course, it was possible he was just thinking that he was tired, annoyed with her friends, and wanted to go home.
Or it was possible that he was thinking there was something seriously wrong with her.
“Never mind.” She got up from the swing and dusted off her pants.
Charlie needed to stop looking for trouble where there was none. She needed to stop looking for trouble, period.
* * *
At home, she got ready for bed, washing her face and putting on a t-shirt. She moved to climb over Vince to her side of the mattress when he put his hand on her hip. She paused, straddling his chest.
Outside their window, the moon was a bright silver coin in the black sky, lighting the room well enough to see the intensity of his gaze. He reached up to thread his fingers through her hair.
“Your friends are nice.” His mouth curved up on one side. “Mostly.”
She wondered if he was going to ask her about Ian. “You were a hit.”
“Because I brought ice,” he said, clearly not believing her. “Everyone loves the guy who brings ice.”
She could have explained how bad the previous guys she’d brought around were, and how great Vince seemed by comparison, but that didn’t reflect well on either one of them. “I certainly do,” she said, before realizing what that meant. She’d intended to be funny, to imply I love ice, not I love you.
But he didn’t seem alarmed, and after a moment the sharp spike of panic faded. She was just drunk. Drunk people said stupid things.
“Come a little closer,” he told her.
As she bent toward him, his thumb went to her cheekbone, brushing lightly over her skin. Her hair fell around them in a canopy.
He levered up to kiss her, mouth careful, as though she was something fragile and precious. Spun sugar. The wing of a butterfly. Someone who wasn’t a human callus. Or a rock ready to be thrown through a window. Someone who wasn’t Charlie Hall.
Maybe that was how he thought he was supposed to kiss girls, the way he’d kissed the girl whose picture was in his wallet. Maybe he wanted to be respectful. But every time he did it, Charlie couldn’t help thinking of it as a challenge.
She reached down, hand on his chest, fingers sliding beneath the waistband of his sleep pants. She loved how his breath caught, went uneven. Loved the way that when he kissed her again, his mouth was looser, his tongue dirtier.
Pulling away, she squirmed out of her panties, kicking them to one side of the bed, not bothering to take off her shirt. Then she crawled back, on her hands and knees. He bent over her, covering her body with his. His mouth went to her throat, to her shoulder, his fingers tracing over the part of her breast just above her heart.
When pleasure hit at the base of her spine, she let it carry her past all regrets.