Book Lovers

21

CHARLIE’S LAPTOP BAG slides to the floor as he comes toward me. “Nora?” he says one more time.

When I can’t get any sound out, he pulls me toward him, cupping my jaw, thumbs moving in soothing strokes against my skin. “What happened?” he murmurs.

His hands root me through the floor, the room stilling. “Sorry. I just needed . . .”

His eyes search mine, thumbs still sweeping in that gentle rhythm. “A nap?” he teases softly, tentatively. “A fantasy novel? A competitively fast oil change?”

The block of ice in my chest cracks. “How do you do that?”

His brow furrows. “Do what?”

“Say the right thing.”

The corner of his mouth quirks. “No one thinks that.”

“I do.”

His lashes splay across his cheeks as his gaze drops. “Maybe I just say the right thing for you.”

“I felt like I was suffocating.” My voice breaks on the word, and his hands slide into my hair, his eyes rising to mine again. “Like — like everyone was looking at me, and they could all see what’s wrong with me. And I’m used to feeling like . . . like I’m the wrong kind of woman, but with Libby it’s always been different. She’s the only person I’ve ever really felt like myself with, since my mom died. But it turns out Dusty was right about me. That’s who I am, even to my sister. The wrong kind of woman.”

“Hey.” He tips my face up to his. “Your sister loves you.”

“She said I have no life.”

“Nora.” He just barely smiles. “You’re in books. Of course you don’t have a life. None of us do. There’s always something too good to read.”

A weak half laugh whisks out of me, but the feeling doesn’t last. “She thinks I don’t care about anything except my job. That’s what everyone thinks. That I have no feelings. Maybe they’re right.” I laugh roughly. “I haven’t cried in a fucking decade. That’s not normal.”

Charlie considers for a moment. His arms slide around my waist to lock against the small of my back, and the contact cannonballs directly into my thoughts, sending them zinging away from the impact. I don’t remember doing it, but my arms are around him too, our stomachs flush, heat gathering between us. “You know what I think?”

Touching him feels so good, so strangely uncomplicated, like he’s the exception to every rule. “What?”

“I think you love your job,” he says softly. “I think you work that hard because you care ten times more than the average person.”

“About work,” I say.

“About everything.” His arms tighten around me. “Your sister. Your clients. Their books. You don’t do anything you’re not going to do one hundred percent. You don’t start anything you can’t finish.

“You’re not the person who buys the stationary bike as part of a New Year’s resolution, then uses it as a coatrack for three years. You’re not the kind of woman who only works hard when it feels good, or only shows up when it’s convenient. If someone insults one of your clients, those fancy kid gloves of yours come off, and you carry your own pen at all times, because if you’re going to have to write anything, it might as well look good. You read the last page of books first — don’t make that face, Stephens.” He cracks a smile in one corner of his mouth. “I’ve seen you — even when you’re shelving, you sometimes check the last page, like you’re constantly looking for all the information, trying to make the absolute best decisions.”

“And by you’ve seen me,” I say, “you mean you’ve watched me.”

“Of course I fucking do,” he says in a low, rough voice. “I can’t stop. I’m always aware of where you are, even if I don’t look, but it’s impossible not to. I want to see your face get stern when you’re emailing a client’s editor, being a hard-ass, and I want to see your legs when you’re so excited about something you just read that you can’t stop crossing and uncrossing them. And when someone pisses you off, you get these red splotches.” His fingers brush my throat. “Right here.”

My nipples pinch, my thighs squeezing and skin shivering. The tension in his hands makes his fingers curl against the curve in the small of my back, gathering the fabric there like he’s talking himself out of ripping it.

“You’re a fighter,” he says. “When you care about something, you won’t let anything fucking touch it. I’ve never met anyone who cares as much as you do. Do you know what most people would give to have someone like that in their life?” His eyes are dark, probing, his heartbeat fast. “Do you know how fucking lucky anyone you care about is? You know . . .”

He hesitates, teeth sinking into his lip, eyes low, fingers loosening but not removing themselves from my vertebrae. “When Carina and I were kids, my dad had to work a lot. We didn’t have much money, and then my mom’s mother passed, and — the bookstore started hemorrhaging money.

“My mom isn’t a businessperson. She isn’t even really a person who keeps a schedule. So the shop’s hours were totally unpredictable. Some artist talk would get scheduled for the middle of the week in Georgia, and she’d take me and Carina out of school to go to it, without notice. Or she’d get caught up with a painting and not only miss the workday, but forget to pick us up from school. Carina was always more like my parents, laid-back, but I was anxious. Maybe because I’d had such a hard time when I first started school, or maybe just because I finally actually liked it, but I hated missing class, and on top of that—”

He draws a breath. My arms have been twisting into the back of his shirt, keeping him close, connected to me at all times.

“—people didn’t approve of my family,” he goes on. “My dad was already engaged when he and my mom got together, and she was already three months pregnant with me.”

My mouth opens and closes. “Oh. Clint’s not . . .”

He shakes his head. “My biological father’s an art curator, back in New York, actually. We’ve exchanged a couple emails, and that was enough for us. As far as I’m concerned, Clint’s the only dad I’ve ever had or needed, but as far back as I can remember, I knew I wasn’t like him. Didn’t look like him. Didn’t like the same things as him.”

The warm gold and inky dark of his eyes lift to mine again, and a painful wanting blooms behind my solar plexus. “I was in fifth grade when I found out the truth. From some kids at school.”

The ragged edge of his voice knocks the wind out of me. I fight the impulse to rein in my shock, and then it all clicks, the bits of Charlie I’ve been collecting like puzzle pieces becoming a full picture. Not the Darcy trope. Not the self-important, dour academic I met for one very unpleasant lunch. A man who craves complete honesty, the realist who doesn’t always understand when he’s not seeing realism. Charlie, who wants to understand the world but has learned not to trust it.

“I’m so sorry, Charlie,” I whisper.

He swallows. “I know he just didn’t want me to think I was anything but his son,” he says. “But it was a bad way to find out. Everyone in town was more or less nice to my parents’ faces, but those first few years of school were hell. My mom’s approach was to kill them with kindness, and it worked. She won the whole fucking town over. But I couldn’t do it. I can’t make small talk with people I know hate me. I can’t play nice with people I think are assholes. Carina was in third grade the first time someone told her she was probably born with an STD because our mom was such a whore.”

“Holy shit, Charlie.” I unknot my arms from his back and take his face between my hands, feeling like my lungs are on fire, like there are feelings my vocabulary isn’t advanced enough to put into words. I want to drape myself over him like chain mail, or swallow some gasoline, go downstairs, and spit it out as fire.

“I spent half of middle school in the library and the other half in the principal’s office for getting into fights, and honestly those were the only two places I felt like I had any control over my life.” He shakes his head, like he’s clearing it. “My point is, being that ‘magic free spirit’ you think is this mythical perfect woman? It comes with its own problems. Just because not everyone gets you doesn’t mean you’re wrong. You’re someone people can count on. Really count on. And that doesn’t make you cold or boring. It makes you the most . . .” He trails off, shakes his head. “You and your sister might have your differences, and she might not totally understand you, but you’re never going to lose her, Nora. You don’t have to worry about that.”

“How can you be so sure?” I ask.

Now his eyes are all liquid caramel, his hands tender, moving back and forth over my hips, a tide that draws us together, apart, together, each brush more intense than the last.

“Because,” he says quietly, “Libby’s smart enough to know what she has.”

I want to pull him down into the ridiculous car bed and wrap myself in the smell of his shampoo, to feel the pressure of his fingers grow frantic on me, for the warm, hard press of his stomach and our steady rocking together and drawing apart to mount.

“Until you got here,” he rasps, “all this place had ever been was a reminder of the ways I was a disappointment, and now you’re here, and — I don’t know. I feel like I’m okay. So if you’re the ‘wrong kind of woman,’ then I’m the wrong kind of man.”

I can see all of the shades of him at once. Quiet, unfocused boy. Precocious, resentful preteen. Broody high schooler desperate to get out. Sharp-edged man trying to fit himself back into a place he never belonged to begin with.

That’s the thing about being an adult standing beside your childhood race car bed. Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.

“You’re not a disappointment.” It comes out faint. “You’re not wrong.”

Charlie’s eyes sweep down my face. His fingers brush the smooth spot at the right corner of my mouth, his jaw tightening. When his eyes lift to mine again, they’re blazing, a trick of the warm light coming from the bedside lamp, but I still I feel heat rising off of him.

“And all those people who made you feel like you were,” he says huskily, “have fucking terrible taste.” The affection in his voice rushes me like a warm tide, filling a million tiny tide pools in my chest.

We really are two opposing magnets, incapable of being in the same room without drawing together. I want to scrape my fingers through his hair and kiss him until he forgets where we are, and everything and everyone that ever made him feel like he was a disappointment. And he’s looking at me like I could, like there’s an ache in him only I could soothe.

I want to tell him, You are someone who looks for a reason for everything.

Or, You are the person who pulls things apart and figures out how they work instead of simply accepting them. You’re someone who would rather have the truth than a convenient lie.

Or even, You’re the person who only has five outfits, but each of them is perfect, carefully chosen.

“I think,” I whisper, “you’re one of the least disappointing people I’ve ever met.”

The line beneath his bottom lip shadows as his lips part, and his warm, minty breath is light against my mouth. For a second, we’re caught in a push and pull, tasting the space between us. It feels like there’s no air left in the room, but what I really want anyway is to breathe him in.

All my reasons for keeping those walls up between us seem suddenly inconsequential. Because the wall isn’t up. It’s not. Charlie sees me. He’s touching me. And for the first time in so long — maybe even since we lost Mom — I feel like I’m not outside the scene, watching through glass, longing so badly to find a way in.

My phone chirps, and all that warm heaviness evaporates as Charlie straightens, jolted back to reality, to his own reasons for trying to build a barricade between us.

He turns to face the shelves, and my throat goes dry when I realize he’s adjusting himself.

Everything in me aches to touch him again, but I don’t. My feelings may have changed, but there’s still Charlie’s end of things: This can’t be anything. Things are complicated.

My mind goes straight to Amaya, and guilt, jealousy, and hurt wriggle together in the pit of my stomach.

Another message comes in from Libby, and another.

Where are you??

When you’re done introverting in a dark corner, I found us a ride home.

HELLO? U alive????

“It’s Libby.”

Behind me, Charlie clears his throat, says hoarsely, “You should rescue her before the knitting club recruits her. They’re the Sunshine Falls equivalent of the Mafia.”

I nod. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Good night, Stephens.”

I almost collide with Sally at the bottom of the stairs.

“I was just looking for your sister!” she says. “I dug up the number she asked for — could you pass it along?”

I accept the scrap of paper, and before I can ask for clarification, Sally’s scurrying after a woman with very thoroughly sprayed bangs.

I text a picture of the phone number to Libby. From Sally. Also: where are you?

Out front, she says. Hurry! Gertie Park the Anarchist Barista is giving us a ride home!

Libby is acting normal, but in the back of Gertie’s heavily bumper-stickered hatchback, I sift through the last few weeks like it’s all shredded paper.

What Libby said about Mom, about me. Brendan’s strange texts, and Libby’s reaction to them. The argument outside the bookstore, the list, the way she disappears and reappears mysteriously, how her fatigue and paleness seem to come and go.

I organize it all into piles, into solvable problems, into scenarios from which I can devise escape plans. I am back in the thick of it, gazing out across the chessboard and trying to mitigate whatever happens next.

But for a minute, upstairs, with Charlie’s arms tight across my back, everything was okay.

I was okay.

Drifting in a comforting, bodiless dark, where nothing needed to be fixed and I could just — I think of Sally’s arms lifting at her sides—settle.