The Charlie Method (Campus Diaries #3)

Chapter Twenty-Seven Beckett

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

BECKETT

Just lie and tell the lady she looks radiant

M Y PARENTS HAVE BEEN FIGHTING FROM THE MOMENT THEY PICKED ME UP at the airport. They showed up together, then proceeded to spend the entire drive home bickering and haven’t stopped since. At least they’re still arguing at regular volume. Get two Australians drunk, and they can get pretty loud. Right now, though, they’re only a drink or two in.

We have no family here—everyone else is back in Australia—but over the past decade, my mum has cobbled together a nice little found family, which consists of two families on our street who are also immigrants with their bigger clans abroad and a retired couple, the Walkers. Helen Walker has been flirting with me from the moment she walked in. She’s had me refill her wineglass at least five times. This old lady is bombed.

Meanwhile, Mum and Dad haven’t been able to keep their bickering to themselves. I’ll blame Dad for this one. For some reason, he decided it would be a good idea to share the news of his job offer at Thanksgiving with all their friends. All their very opinionated friends.

Not all of them are on Mum’s side either. Mrs. Aghari even tells Mum that if she had the chance to return to Delhi with a good job and a good house, she’d take it in a heartbeat. “I miss my parents and sisters,” she admits.

And while Mum acknowledges she misses her own parents and extended family, she repeats the same thing she keeps telling Dad: “We’ve built a life here.”

“Meghan,” Dad sighs when the topic comes up again.

“No, James. I’m not uprooting my entire life again.”

I try to focus on the mashed potatoes on my plate instead of the rising tension between my parents. Mum is fiddling with her wineglass and avoiding eye contact with Dad, who stares at the turkey like it personally offended him.

“So how are your classes?” Mr. Aghari asks me.

I glance at him in relief. Mr. Aghari with the save. “Tough but I’m managing.”

At that, the conversation finally shifts to neutral topics like the weather and Mrs. D’Agostino’s charity work.

“Beckett, dear.” Helen taps her wineglass.

I hide a grin and push my chair back, heading for the built-in bar across the room. I love this house. I get why Mum doesn’t want to leave it, this big, sprawling spread in the suburbs, with a massive yard and a garden she spent more than a decade literally building from the ground up. But…

It’s not home . Indianapolis doesn’t have the Gold Coast. It doesn’t have the surf breaks of Byron Bay. Doesn’t have my cousins. It doesn’t have the same air. The air smells different down there. If I were Mum, I’d jump on this opportunity in a heartbeat.

“She’s going hard on you, huh?” I murmur when my dad comes up beside me to grab another beer.

“Yup. I might need to tag you in later, buddy. Get you to plead our case.”

“I don’t know if that’s gonna help. She really doesn’t want this.”

“No, she doesn’t.”

I give him a sidelong glance. “What’s more important to you? Happy wife or happy you?”

“Ah, the age-old question of navigating any marriage. You’ll find out one day.”

“Maybe.” My tone remains noncommittal.

“Oh, are we still sticking to the vow?”

I snicker. “It wasn’t a vow. It was just drunk talk. You caught me on a bad day.”

Although I have to admit, there were a lot of bad days after everything that happened with Shannon. I remember the one he’s talking about. I got loaded with some teammates after the last game of a weekend exhibition. Dad caught me as I was sneaking in at four a.m. and trying to tiptoe up the stairs with all the finesse of a bull in a china shop. When he asked if I’d been out with a girl—I think he was hoping I was—I delivered a whole drunken tirade about how I would never love again or get married because “all that love stuff” only ends in crushing heartache.

“I was eighteen,” I remind him. “I was very dramatic.”

“One of the few times I saw you lose your chill,” he says quietly.

“I thought I would marry her.” Shrugging, I refocus my attention on pouring Helen Walker’s wine.

“And that didn’t pan out. But we heal, Beck. We heal, and we move on, and we put the broken pieces back together.”

“And we enjoy our bachelorhood,” I say lightly. “In my case anyway. In your case, you need to start sucking up to your wife, old man.”

I give him a good-natured clap on the shoulder, then return to the table and hope I didn’t appear too eager to leave that conversation.

By nine o’clock, the Agharis and D’Agostinos are gone, leaving me alone with my parents and the Walkers.

I don’t know how I got roped into this. A twenty-one-year-old man nursing a beer, watching football, and listening to two couples bicker. One of them is in their eighties, the other in their forties, yet they’re both acting like they’re in their teens.

The Walkers were only trying to help at first. Mum had started sniping at Dad again, and Albert made the mistake of bringing up a prior marital fight between him and Helen as a lesson for my parents about how to resolve conflict. Turns out the Walkers’ fight is not resolved, because now they’re arguing about it.

Fun times.

“Are we really going to rehash this?” Albert grumbles. “Now? We put this fight to rest, Helen!”

As much as I don’t want to enable their behavior, curiosity gets the best of me. “What was the fight about?”

“Yes, Al. What was the fight about?” Helen’s voice drips with a sweetness that makes my stomach tighten. “Why don’t you tell everyone what you said to that woman?”

“That woman?” I echo. I can’t look at Dad because I know we’ll both bust out laughing.

“Tell them what you said,” taunts Helen.

Albert growls under his breath. “How the hell am I supposed to remember what I said? It was twenty years ago!”

I nearly choke on my beer. Dad is trying to distract himself by cutting another slice of pie. I glance at Mum, whose lips are pressed together to contain her laughter.

This fight happened twenty years ago? The way Helen’s been going on, it sounded like this mistake that almost destroyed their marriage only occurred the other week.

“You know damn well what you said,” Helen clucks. She looks at my mother, as if requiring female solidarity for this part. “We were at our friends’ anniversary party, and he told Donna Henderson she looked ‘radiant.’”

I stare down at my pie.

My father clears his throat. “Sounds like it was a long time ago, Helen. Perhaps—”

“Oh, no, no, no,” she cuts in, waving her hand. “It’s not too late for Albert to explain himself, is it?” She turns back to her husband. “Well, Al? I’m all ears.”

Poor Albert looks like he’d rather fight off a rabid ostrich. “Helen. I was only being polite. She was the hostess.”

“You never told me I looked radiant.”

“I tell you you’re beautiful all the time!” he protests, glancing around the room for backup.

None of us dare to meet his eyes. Helen isn’t hideous, but I wouldn’t exactly call her beautiful. More like…not displeasing.

Helen’s face turns red. “You called me ‘decent’ last Christmas, Albert.”

A strangled sound escapes my lips. Oh, Jesus Christ.

You stupid bastard, Al. Decent? Just lie and tell the lady she looks radiant.

Dad’s about to keel over from the effort of restraining his laughter.

My mum, bless her, tries to step in. “Helen, would you like some more coffee?”

“Don’t change the subject, dear.” Helen’s on a mission now. “Radiant! Who even uses that word? I’ve spent two decades wondering what exactly you meant by it.”

I tremble with silent laughter.

Mum, still trying to steer the conversation back to safer waters, chuckles nervously. “I’m sure Albert didn’t mean anything by it. Right, love?”

She’s looking at me.

Why am I being dragged into this shit show?

“Uh, yeah. Maybe he just meant she looked good in her dress? You know, some people just have that radiant glow.”

Helen shoots me a look that could curdle milk. “I bet you’re one of those boys who tells every girl she’s special just to see how far you can get, aren’t you?”

So much for her crush.

Albert sighs, clearly defeated. “Sweetheart, if I could go back and change it, I would. But it was just a word. It didn’t mean anything.”

His wife sits back, arms crossed, looking triumphant. “Well, I’m glad we cleared that up. But let this be a lesson to you, Albert. Think before you speak.”

We all sit in awkward silence after that, and when my phone lights up and I see Will trying to FaceTime me, I practically jump out of my chair.

“One of my teammates—I gotta take this.” I hold up the phone and point to it like this is the most important call ever received. The White House is on the line. Everyone has died, and I am the designated survivor. I am the new president of the United States. Even though I can’t be because I wasn’t born here. But still.

Making my escape, I take the stairs two at a time and stumble into my old bedroom. “Jesus fuck,” I groan when the call connects. “Thank you.”

Will’s face grins back at me. “That bad, huh?”

“You have no idea what you just rescued me from, mate.”

“And here I thought the Dunne family was always sunshine and rainbows.”

“Not tonight, we ain’t.” I quickly fill him in on Dad’s new job and how Mum doesn’t want him to take it.

“If it makes you feel better,” Will says, “things aren’t any better over here.”

He turns his phone to show me the scene behind him: a very formal Thanksgiving gathering. The Larsens must eat their dinner later than we do because the long dining room table is still perfectly set. In fact, the entire room is impeccably arranged, like something out of a magazine. Yet it feels colder than a Canadian winter.

Will passes an arched doorway that looks like it has about thirty people beyond it. Loud chatter echoes through the video for a moment. He enters a different room and closes the door, and the noise dies.

“That’s a lot of people,” I remark.

“Dad needs the photo op. We’ve got all the cousins here. And there was a journalist here this morning from some architecture magazine. This is brutal. I can’t wait to get back tomorrow.”

The hockey season doesn’t typically stop for the holidays. It just happened to work out that Thanksgiving Day got us a two-day break. But we have a game tomorrow against UConn.

“Me too,” I admit, rubbing my temples. “My folks never argue. It’s stressful watching them do it. And then we get back to Briar just in time for finals and the playoffs hunt. Christ, mate. I need to get preemptively laid to get ahead of the stress.”

“Dude. Same.”

And I know we’re both thinking about Charlie now. How good she tasted. How warm and soft she felt in my arms. My dick swells, pressing against my zipper.

“Have you spoken to her?” I ask.

His expression clouds over. “No. You?”

“Nothing since I saw her at Malone’s.”

AKA the night she made me feel like absolute dirt for making her feel like dirt.

My hard-on deflates at the memory.

That ravaged, mortified look in her big brown eyes.

She has nothing to be ashamed of. But I get it. There’s a life script. There are rules. There are things you do and things you don’t do. People like Will and Charlotte freak out when they go off script. It took Larsen a long time to be able to accept that sometimes it’s okay to ad-lib. Charlie’s not there yet. Our girl’s not ready to improvise. She might never be.

“You have her number, right?”

“Yes.” He gives me a warning look. “But I’m not abusing the privilege. I promised her I’d only use it for class.”

“I know. I just… Fuck, man. What she said at Malone’s that night—I can’t get it out of my head. I want to send her a message telling her she’s got nothing to be ashamed of. She can ignore it if she wants, but…one message, Larsen. Please?”

Will falls silent. Several seconds tick by, until finally I see his finger swiping at his phone.

A moment later, Charlotte’s contact info appears on my screen.