Chapter 6
6
NOVA
I turn around and walk out.
I don’t need my phone. There’s a hookup for a landline at the new studio. I’ll get a rotary phone and call it a day. Who needs email access in the palm of their hand? Not me.
Charlie is still here. In Inglewild. Why is Charlie still here? He’s supposed to be back in New York, doing whatever it is he does in those fancy suits. And my phone was supposed to be left on the counter next to the register.
Not in his right hand as he fumbles his way out the front door behind me, the bell almost ripping from the little red string Layla keeps it on. I ignore him, storming through the trees that surround the bakehouse.
Maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll trip over a root. Land on his face like the big dumb idiot he is.
“Nova, wait a second. Would you just—” He reaches for my arm, but I shrug him off, still walking. I do not want to have this conversation with him. I don’t want to have any conversation with him. I asked him to come home with me, he said no, and I’d like to ignore him for the rest of my life. I hear him sigh and match my pace, trailing three feet behind. “This isn’t pretending like it didn’t happen, you know.”
I stop abruptly. He almost crashes into me, pulling himself to a stop at the last possible second. He’s wearing a flannel today. Something that looks buttery soft and warm, sleeves rolled to his forearms. A mix of pale blue and cobalt that matches his eyes. Damn it. I don’t want to be noticing his eyes.
“Give me my phone, please.”
He clasps his hands behind his back. “No.”
“No?”
“Mm-hmm. My answer is no.”
I resist the urge to stomp my foot. Charlie reduces me to the most reactionary version of myself. “Why is your answer no?”
“Because I want to talk to you, and if I give you your phone, you’re going to run off through the trees. Again.”
He’s right. But he’s also wrong. Because I don’t need my phone to run away. I spin on my heel, prepared to do just that, when he curls his fingers around my elbow, gentle this time.
“Nova,” he says, exasperated. “Wait a second.”
I keep my eyes on our shoes. “I already told you, I don’t want to talk about it.”
Two days of clarity didn’t change that for me. It’s only made the burn of embarrassment worse. My cheeks flame with heat the longer I think about it, the band around my lungs pulled tight. I want to forget it ever happened, and I can’t do that if Charlie keeps bringing it up.
“We need to talk about it,” he insists.
Resigned, I tip my head back and meet his eyes. He looks serious, if not confused, dark eyebrows furrowed in concentration. He lifts his hand and taps his thumb to the edge of my frown.
“What’s this face for?”
I push his hand away. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I say again.
“Why not?”
“Because I don’t want—” I huff out a breath. “I don’t want to be a joke.”
It comes out more vulnerable than I’d like, a wobble at the edges that frustrates me. His lips twist down in a frown to match mine.
“Who said you’re a joke?”
He did. When he laughed in my face.
“I’m sorry, okay?” I kick at the loose rocks by my feet. “I shouldn’t have asked you for…what I asked you for. I was caught up in the moment, and I misread the signs between us. I’m sorry I shocked your delicate sensibilities, or whatever, but I don’t want you to dangle it over my head. It makes me feel stupid and I hate feeling stupid. So, let’s just…agree to move on.”
He stares at me for the stretch of three heartbeats, his face unreadable. “You think I’m making fun of you?”
“Aren’t you?”
“No,” he says simply. He combs his fingers through his dark hair, dragging his hand over the back of his head to squeeze his neck. “No, I’m really not.”
“You said no,” I supply quietly. “You laughed at me.”
“I didn’t—Nova. You gave me twenty seconds to respond before you tried to take it back. And I didn’t laugh at you.”
“You told me to ask you again.”
His eyes flare, a comet streak across midnight-blue skies. He takes one step closer to me, the toes of his boots pressed up against my Converse. I have to tilt my head back to keep staring at his face. Sometimes I forget how tall he is. Besides our dance through the trees, I’m not sure we’ve ever stood this close to one another.
“Because if that’s something you want, that’s what I need to hear from you. I’m not laughing at you. I’m not making fun of you. I need you to be sure. I need to know that it’s me you want and not a random roll in the sheets.”
I blink at him standing above me and try to weigh the truth of his statement. I sift through the cloud of my embarrassment and look at our dance together from another angle. I wanted it to be easy, something quick and fun to crack loose all the brittle parts of myself, and I didn’t—I didn’t give Charlie much of a chance, did I?
I asked, and Charlie tripped over his own feet. He asked me to clarify, and I thought the very worst of him. And then I—
Well, I ran away.
“Oh,” I say, at a loss for anything else.
We stand together, watching each other in the small alcove of trees. It smells like pine and sap and something warm and delicious from Layla’s bakery. Charlie’s aftershave and my coconut conditioner. At some point, he looped his fingers around my elbow again, his thumb tracing over the worn leather of my jacket.
“I thought you were making fun of me ,” he explains quietly, eyes on mine. All I hear in his voice is honest sincerity, a touch of bashful restraint. A smile twitches at the corner of his mouth, a shallow dimple flashing in his cheek.
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t think that was something you wanted from me,” he answers simply. “I thought you were—” He coughs on the edge of a laugh. “I thought you were making some sort of commentary on my love life, not extending an invitation. I am—honestly, Nova. Of course I’m interested. Very enthusiastic, actually. Flags, confetti. Exclamation point.” He closes the space between us, dipping his head to hold my eyes. “But the ball’s in your court here, yeah? You ask me again if that’s what you want.”
“I’m not looking for a relationship.”
He shrugs. “Neither am I. But that’s not what we’re talking about, is it?”
“To be honest, Charlie, I’m not really sure what we’re talking about.”
A slow smile unfurls across his mouth. His eyes slip to my mouth and hold. “You keep telling yourself that.”
Yeah, I know what we’re talking about. His big body pressed tight to mine. Grasping hands and sweat-slicked skin. The want hasn’t faded from the other night. I thought it might, buried as it was beneath the burn of my embarrassment. But it’s still there. A low buzz. A gentle but insistent hum.
I want Charlie.
I tilt my head to the side and consider. “Why don’t you ask me?”
“Because I want you to do the asking,” he says again. I’m not used to seeing this shade of Charlie. The arch of his eyebrow. The gentle but serious patience in every line of his face. The flannel. He wants me to make the decision. “Like I said, you can think on it. I’m not going anywhere.”
He takes two steps back, widening the distance between us. He reaches for my hand and curls his fingers around my wrist. He opens my palm and drops my phone in it. I notice he’s given me a new wallpaper photo. A close-up picture of his face, smile lines by his eyes, cup of coffee to his mouth. He must have taken it as soon as he got home from the wedding, those damn suspenders in the very edge of the shot.
“For your viewing pleasure,” he explains. “I went back and forth between that and me shirtless in front of the mirror, but this felt more appropriate.”
I roll my eyes and slip my phone in my back pocket. “Thank you.”
“I can send you that shirtless picture, if you want.”
“Noted.”
He grins, back to the aloof version of himself that I’m used to. “I also have this.” He dangles a white paper bag in front of my face.
“What is it?”
“A cupcake.”
“I don’t want a cupcake.”
He sighs and thrusts the bag into my chest. “Layla told me to upsell the cupcakes, so you’re getting a cupcake.”
“But this isn’t you selling it. This is you giving it to me.”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“I don’t want the cupcake.”
His jaw clenches and releases. I like it probably too much. “Take the cupcake. The cupcake is here for you. You asked for the cupcake before, remember? But the cupcake was being stupid and didn’t say the right things.”
A laugh bursts out of me, loud in the stillness of the trees. What an absolutely ridiculous situation I’ve managed to put myself in. Charlie blinks, his shoulders finally relaxing with a slow exhale. His lips quirk at the corners.
“Okay, I’ll take the cupcake.” I close my hand around the top of the bag, and the band around my chest loosens. I peek inside. Chocolate hazelnut. I hope it has a ganache filling too. “What are you doing here anyway?” I ask into the bag.
“Are you asking me or the cupcake?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Oh.” He messes with the cuff of his flannel, fingers rubbing over the soft material. “I wanted to talk to you.”
I unroll the top of the bag from where he crushed it with his hand and slip my fingers inside, swiping through the top of the cupcake. I pop my thumb in my mouth and chocolatey-hazelnut goodness explodes on my tongue. I make a faint sound. Charlie’s eyes go hazy. He sways to the side.
“I meant here. On the farm. What are you doing on the farm?”
“What?” he asks, voice somewhere far away.
“Charlie.”
“What?” he asks again, yelling a little bit.
I fold the top of the bag over again. I’ll eat the cupcake later. “What are you doing at Lovelight? I thought you were supposed to be back in New York.”
“Oh.” He hitches his thumb over his shoulder, still looking a little dazed. “I work here now.”
“At…the bakehouse?”
He tips his head back and forth. “Kind of all over, I guess. Wherever Layla and Beckett need me. I’m taking over for Stella while she’s on her honeymoon.”
I didn’t realize she was going on a honeymoon. Last I heard, she and Luka were planning on sticking around for the harvest and holiday season before doing something together in the spring.
“Wedding present,” Charlie explains, seeing the question on my face.
“That was generous of you.”
He kicks a loose pebble with the toe of his boot. It goes bouncing down the path. Somewhere on the other side of the trees, two ladies laugh, voices drifting closer to the bakehouse.
“She deserves it. Deserves more than that, but this is a good start.”
“And New York is okay with you being here?”
“My work is fine with it.” He closes the space between us again, and I shuffle backward until a pine tree branch pokes at the space between my shoulder blades. “I’m more interested in what you have to say about it.”
“I’m fine with it.” I clutch my cupcake to my chest. “Why wouldn’t I be fine with it?”
“Because,” he says, his hand reaching so he can toy with the zipper of my jacket. He tugs it up and then down. Up again. “Now you can’t avoid me like you were planning to.”
“I wasn’t planning on avoiding you.” I lie through my teeth.
“Mm-hmm. That’s why you sprinted from the bakehouse as soon as you saw me.”
“I didn’t sprint.”
I walked at a very brisk pace. There’s a difference.
He hums, amused. “Well. Get used to looking at this pretty face, Nova. I’ve got a feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of one another.”
?I have thirty-four emails and sixty-two text messages waiting for me when I finally check my notifications. Charlie’s smiling face stares up at me from my screen, and I have to swipe my thumb along his jaw to unlock the device.
It feels like a personal attack every time.
I prop my feet up on the corner of my desk in the back of the empty tattoo studio and look through my messages. Most of them are from my family the night of the wedding, trying to figure where I wandered off to. Some are automated messages from a few job boards I have listings on. And twenty-seven are from Charlie, starting around the same time I found Nessa in the trees.
No shirtless pictures though.
Unfortunately.
CHARLIE: Nova, come back.
CHARLIE: Don’t use this as an excuse to never talk to me again. I can be persistent. You know that.
I snort a laugh and scroll some more.
A note that he found my phone in the field. A stupid joke about Montgomery’s dancing at the reception. A hello in the morning when he woke up the next day and a grainy, blurry photo of a coffee cup on his kitchen counter. A description of the bagel he had for breakfast. Another photo of two different kinds of flannels laid out on top of his bed.
CHARLIE: I know I have your phone and you won’t see these until later, but which one do you think brings out my eyes?
All the reasons I wanted to take him home in the first place come roaring back. He’s funny. He doesn’t take himself too seriously. He makes me feel wanted and he…he’s hot as hell. Pressed chinos notwithstanding.
I could set the terms and he would respect them. I know he would. It would be convenient, certainly. Especially since he’s staying in town. I could use the outlet.
And if the attraction spinning between us in a thick syrupy haze is any indication, it would be good. Better than good. Maybe with Charlie out of my system, I’ll be able to focus on the things I should be focused on.
All I need to do is ask him again.
CHARLIE: Did I tell you how beautiful you looked in that silver dress? I can’t remember.
CHARLIE: Sometimes I think you’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.
I bite my bottom lip and tap my thumbnail against the edge of my phone case.
CHARLIE: Also, one hundo percent down for a night of hot, passionate sex. For the record.
CHARLIE: With you. If that wasn’t clear.
CHARLIE: Ready when you are, Nova girl.