Book Lovers

7

HOW ABOUT,” CHARLIE says, “a game of pool. If I win, you tell me why you’re really here, and if you do, I’ll tell you about my day.”

I snort and look away, hiding my lying dimple as I tuck my phone into my bag, having confirmed Libby made it home safely. “I don’t play.”

Or I haven’t since college, when my roommate and I used to shark frat boys weekly.

“Darts?” Charlie suggests.

I arch a brow. “You want to hand me a weapon after the turn my night has taken?”

He leans close, eyes shining in the dim bar lighting. “I’ll play left-handed.”

“Maybe I don’t want to hand you a weapon either,” I say.

His eye roll is subtle, more of a twitch of some key face muscles. “Left-handed pool, then.”

I study him. Neither of us blinks. We’re basically having a sixth-grade-style staring contest, and the longer it goes on, the more the air seems to thrum with some metaphysical buildup of energy.

I slink off my stool and drain my second beer. “Fine.”

We make our way back to the only open table. It’s darker on this side of the restaurant, the floor stickier with spilled booze, and the smell of beer emanates from the walls. Charlie grabs a pool cue and a rack and starts gathering the balls in the center of the felt table. “You know the rules?” he asks, peering up at me as he leans across the green surface.

“One of us is stripes and one of us is solids?” I say.

He takes the blue chalk cube from the edge of the table and works it over the pool cue. “You want to go first?”

“You’re going to teach me, right?” I’m trying to look innocent, to look like Libby batting her eyelashes.

Charlie stares at me. “I really wonder what you think your face is doing right now, Stephens.”

I narrow my eyes; he narrows his back exaggeratedly.

“Why do you care why I’m here?” I ask.

“Morbid curiosity. Why do you care about my bad day?”

“Always helpful to know your opponent’s weaknesses.”

He holds the cue out. “You first.”

I take the stick, flop it onto the edge of the table, and look over my shoulder. “Isn’t now the part where you’re supposed to put your arms around me and show me how to do it?”

His mouth curves. “That depends. Are you carrying any weapons?”

“The sharpest thing on me is my teeth.” I settle over the cue, holding it like I’ve not only never played pool before but have quite possibly only just discovered my own hands.

Charlie’s smell — warm and uncannily familiar — invades my nose as he positions himself behind me, barely touching. I can feel the front of his sweater graze my bare spine, my skin tingling at the friction, and his arms fold around mine as his mouth drops beside my ear.

“Loosen your grip.” His low voice vibrates through me, his breath warm on my jaw as he pries my fingers from the cue and readjusts them. “The front hand’s for aiming. You’re not going to move it. The momentum”—his palm scrapes down my elbow until he catches my wrist and drags it back along the cue toward my hip—“will come from here. You just want to keep the stick straight when you’re starting out. And aim as if you’re lining up perfectly with the ball you want to sink.”

“Got it,” I say.

His hands slide clear of me, and I will the goose bumps on my skin to settle as I line up my shot. “One thing I forgot to mention”—I snap the stick into the cue ball, sending the solid blue one across the table into the pocket—“is that I did used to play.”

I walk past Charlie to line up my next shot.

“And here I thought I was just a really good teacher,” he says flatly.

I pocket the green ball next, and then miss the burgundy one. When I chance a glance at him, he looks not only unsurprised but downright smug. Like I’ve proven a point.

He pulls the cue from my hands and circles the table, eyeing several options for his first shot before choosing the green-striped ball and getting into position. “And I guess I should’ve mentioned”—he taps the cue ball, which sends the green-striped ball into a pocket, the purple-striped ball sinking right behind it—“I’m left-handed.”

I jam my mouth closed when he looks at me on his way to line up his next shot. This time, he pockets the orange-striped ball, then the burgundy one, before finally missing on his next turn.

He sticks his lip out like I did when I teased him about bad memories. “Would it help the sting if I bought you another beer?”

I yank the stick from his hand. “Make it a martini, and get yourself one too. You’re going to need it.”

Charlie wins the first game, so one game becomes two. I win that one, and he’s unwilling to tie, so we play a third. When he wins, he pulls the cue out of my reach before I can demand a fourth match.

“Nora,” he says, “we had a deal.”

“I never agreed to it.”

“You played,” he says.

I tip my head back, groaning.

“If it helps,” he says with his signature dryness, “I’m willing to sign an NDA before you tell me about whatever deep, dark, twisted fantasy brought you here.”

I slit my eyes.

He moves my glass off the cocktail napkin and feels around in his pockets until he finds a Pilot G2, admittedly my own pen of choice, though I always use black ink and he’s got the traditional editor red. He leans over and scribbles:

I, Charles Lastra, of sound mind, do swear I will keep Nora Stephens’s dark, dirty, twisted secret under penalty of law or five million dollars, whichever comes first.

“Okay, you’ve absolutely never seen a contract,” I say. “Maybe never been in the same room as one.”

He finishes signing and drops the pen. “That’s a fine fucking contract.”

“Poor uninformed book editors, with their whimsical notions of how agreements are made.” I pat his head.

He swats my arm away. “What could possibly be so bad, Nora? Are you on the run? Did you rob a bank?” In the dark, the gold of his eyes looks strangely light against his oversized pupils. “Did you fire your pregnant assistant?” he teases, voice low. The allusion is a shock to my system, a jolt of electricity from head to toe.

Miraculously, I’d forgotten about Dusty’s pages. Now here Nadine is again, taunting me.

“What’s so wrong with being in control anyway?” I demand, of the universe at large.

“Beats me.”

“And what, just because I don’t want kids, I would supposedly punish a pregnant woman for making a different decision than me? My favorite person’s a pregnant woman! And I’m obsessed with my nieces. Not every decision a woman makes is some grand indictment on other women’s lives.”

“Nora,” Charlie says. “It’s a novel. Fiction.”

“You don’t get it, because you’re . . . you.” I wave a hand at him.

“Me?” he says.

“You can afford to be all surly and sharp and people will admire you for it. The rules are different for women. You have to strike this perfect balance to be taken seriously but not seen as bitchy. It’s a constant effort. People don’t want to work with sharky women—”

“I do,” he says.

“And even men exactly like us don’t want to be with us. I mean, sure, some of them think they do, but next thing you know, they’re dumping you in a four-minute phone call because they’ve never seen you cry and moving across the country to marry a Christmas tree heiress!”

Charlie’s full lips press into a knot, his eyes squinting. “. . . What?”

“Nothing,” I grumble.

“A very specific ‘nothing.’ ”

“Forget it.”

“Not likely,” he says. “I’m going to be up all night making diagrams and charts, trying to figure out what you just said.”

“I’m cursed,” I say. “That’s all.”

“Oh,” he says. “Sure. Got it.”

“I am,” I insist.

“I’m an editor, Stephens,” he says. “I’m going to need more details to buy into this narrative.”

“It’s my literary stock character,” I say. “I’m the cold-blooded, overly ambitious city slicker who exists as a foil to the Good Woman. I’m the one who gets dumped for the girl who’s prettier without makeup and loves barbecue and somehow makes destroying a karaoke standard seem adorable!”

And for some reason (my low alcohol tolerance), it doesn’t stop there. It comes spilling out. Like I’m just puking up embarrassing history onto the peanut-shell-littered floor for everyone to see.

Aaron dumping me for Prince Edward Island (and, confirmed via light social media stalking, a redhead named Adeline). Grant breaking up with me for Chastity and her parents’ little inn. Luca and his wife and their cherry farm in Michigan.

When I reach patient zero, Jakob the novelist-turned-rancher, I cut myself off. What happened between him and me doesn’t belong at the end of a list; it belongs where I left it, in the smoking crater that changed my life forever. “You get the idea.”

His eyes slit, an amused tilt to his lips. “. . . Do I though?”

“Tropes and clichés have to come from somewhere, right?” I say. “Women like me have clearly always existed. So it’s either a very specific kind of self-sabotage or an ancient curse. Come to think of it, maybe it started with Lilith. Too weird to be coincidence.”

“You know,” Charlie says, “I’d say Dusty writing a whole-ass book about my hometown and then me running into her agent in said town is too weird to be a coincidence, but as we’ve already established, you’re ‘not stalking me,’ so coincidences do occasionally happen, Nora.”

“But this? Four relationships ending because my boyfriends decided to walk off into the wilderness and never come back?”

He’s fighting a smirk but losing the battle.

“I’m not ridiculous!” I say, laughing despite myself. Okay, because of myself.

“Exactly what a not-ridiculous person would say,” Charlie allows with a nod. “Look, I’m still trying to figure out how your shitty Jack London — wannabe ex-boyfriends factor in to why you’re here.”

“My sister’s . . .” I consider for a moment, then settle on, “Things have been kind of off between us for the last few months, and she wanted to get away for a while. Plus she reads too many small-town romance novels and is convinced the answer to our problems is having our own transformative experiences, like my exes did. In a place like this.”

“Your exes,” he says bluntly. “Who gave up their careers and moved to the wilderness.”

“Yes, those ones.”

“So, what?” he says. “You’re supposed to find happiness here and ditch New York? Quit publishing?”

“Of course not,” I say. “She just wants to have fun, before the baby comes. Take a break from our usual lives and do something new. We have a list.”

“A list?”

“A bunch of things from the books.” And this is why I don’t drink two martinis. Because even at five eleven, my body is incapable of processing alcohol, as evidenced by the fact that I start listing, “Wear flannel, bake something from scratch, get small-town makeovers, build something, date some locals—”

Charlie laughs brusquely. “She’s trying to marry you off to a pig farmer, Stephens.”

“She is not.”

“You said she’s trying to give you your own small-town romance novel,” he says wryly. “You know how those books end, don’t you, Nora? With a big wedding inside of a barn, or an epilogue involving babies.”

I scoff. Of course I know how they end. Not only have I watched my exes live them, but when Libby and I still shared an apartment, I’d read the final pages of her books almost compulsively. That never really tempted me to turn back to page one.

“Look, Lastra,” I say. “My sister and I are here to spend time together. You probably didn’t learn this in whatever lab spawned you, but vacations are a fairly typical way for loved ones to bond and relax.”

“Yes, because if anything’s going to relax a person like you,” he says, “it’s spending time in a town conveniently situated between two equidistant Dressbarns.”

“You know, I’m not as much of an uptight control freak as either you or Dusty seem to think. I could have a perfectly nice time on a date with a pig farmer. And you know what? Maybe it’s a good idea. It’s not like I’ve had any luck with New Yorkers. Maybe I have been fishing in the wrong pond. Or, like, the wrong stream of nuclear waste runoff.”

“You,” he says, “are so much weirder than I thought.”

“Well, for what it’s worth, before tonight, I assumed you went into a broom closet and entered power saving mode whenever you weren’t at work, so I guess we’re both surprised.”

“Now you’re being ridiculous,” he says. “When I’m not at work, I’m in my coffin in the basement of an old Victorian mansion.”

I snort into my glass, which makes him crack a real, human smile. It lives, I think.

“Stephens,” he says, tone dry once more, “if you’re the villain in someone else’s love story, then I’m the devil.”

“You said it, not me,” I reply.

He lifts a brow. “You’re scrappy tonight.”

“I’m always scrappy,” I say. “Tonight I’m just not bothering to hide it.”

“Good.” He leans in, dropping his voice, and an electric current charges through me. “I’ve always preferred to have things out in the open. Though the pig farmers of Sunshine Falls might not feel the same way.”

His gaze flicks sidelong toward mine, his scent vaguely spicy and familiar. An unwelcome heaviness settles between my thighs. I really hope my chin divot hasn’t found a way to announce that I’m turned on.

“I already told you,” I say. “I’m here for my sister.”

And as much anxiety as I feel being away from home, the truth is, I spend the length of Libby’s pregnancies in a low-grade panic anyway. At least this way I can keep an eye on her.

I never dreamed of having my own kids, but the way I felt during Libby’s first pregnancy really sealed the deal. There are just too many things that can go wrong, too many ways to fail.

I pitch myself onto a stool at the corner of the bar and almost fall over in the process.

Charlie catches my arms and steadies me. “How about some water?” he says, sliding onto the empty stool beside mine, that suppressed smirk/pout/what-even-is-this tugging his full lips slightly to one side as he signals to the bartender.

I square my shoulders, trying for dignified. “You’re not going to distract me.”

His brow lifts. “From?”

“I won one of those games. You owe me information.” Especially given the horrifying amount I just blurted out.

His head tilts, and he peers down his face at me. “What do you want to know?”

Our lunch two years ago pops into my head, Charlie’s irritated glance at his watch. “You said you were trying to catch a flight the day we met. Why?”

He scratches at his collar, his brow furrowing, jaw etched with tension. “The same reason I’m here now.”

“Intriguing.”

“I promise it’s not.” Waters have appeared on the bar. He turns one in place, his jaw tensing. “My dad had a stroke. One back then, and another a few months ago. I’m here to help.”

“Shit. I — wow.” Immediately, my vision clears and sharpens on him, my buzz burning off. “You were so . . . together.”

“I made a commitment to be there,” he says, with a defensive edge, “and I didn’t see how talking about it would be productive.”

“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.”