Chapter 19
19
NOVA
“Do you think everyone sees the same colors?”
I lean my head out of the bathroom and look at Charlie. He’s spread out in the middle of my bed in nothing but his black Calvin Klein boxer briefs, a bowl of chocolate-covered peanut butter pretzels resting in the middle of his chest. He digs one hand in the bowl and pulls out a single pretzel, holding it above his face as he stares at the ceiling.
I drag a towel through my wet hair. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, like, your walls are painted pink, right?”
I glance at my bedroom wall and then back to his prone body against my disheveled sheets. We actually made it to the bed this time, a rare occurrence despite how often Charlie has been in my bedroom over the past two weeks. He stopped by with some blank tax forms, spent thirty seconds pretending like he was here for a legitimate reason, then scooped me up, carried me up the steps, and tossed me on the bed. He made me come twice, then bent me over and took his own pleasure with both hands braced on my hips. I have three little bruises in the shape of his fingers against the curve of my waist. I think I like them more than my tattoos.
“They’re more of a blush than a pink.”
He leans up on his elbows and tosses a pretzel up in the air. He catches it in his mouth with a loud crunch. I have no idea why, but some part of me finds that wildly attractive. The part of me that’s still blissed out and boneless, apparently.
Charlie notices my staring and winks. “All right. Blush. How do we know we’re both seeing blush ?”
I look at the wall and then back to him. “Because it’s…blush?”
“But how do we know? Because we both describe that color as blush, right? But what if the blush I see is different from the blush you see?”
I toss my towel over the edge of the door and shuffle my way over to him, the back of my hand pressed to my mouth. “Is this what your brain does all the time?”
He grins at me, bright and boyish. “You’d be surprised.”
I doubt that. Charlie is almost alarmingly transparent. He thinks he hides himself away, but I can read the lines of his body now. He sets his bowl to the side as I get closer and reaches for me. His hands open and close in a grabbing motion. Come closer , he’s saying. Come here.
He cups his hands around my thighs and squeezes, tugging until I’m perched in his lap. I drag my fingers through his hair and yawn again, right in his face.
He frowns at me. “You’re tired.”
“I am.”
“I’m taking up too much of your time.”
“You’re not,” I argue. These stolen moments with Charlie might be my favorite way I’ve been spending my time lately. Everything else is deadlines and rushing and paperwork and crossing items off my list. But when we’re together like this my brain is only focused on Charlie’s warm body beneath mine and the delicious ache in my muscles. Unplugged.
I yawn again and Charlie sinks his hands into my hair. He rubs at the base of my skull, and I let out a deep, ugly moan. He snickers and circles his arm around my back, tipping me over into my bedding.
“You like that move,” I grumble, my face half buried in a pillow.
He snorts a laugh. “You seem to like it too, Nova girl.” He slips off the edge of the bed and tugs at the blankets trapped beneath my legs. I stare at the stretch and pull of the muscles in his torso and do absolutely nothing to help. He grunts and tries to yank at a blanket. It rolls me sideways and my legs go flailing.
“Easy,” he says, dodging my foot. “I’m trying to burrito you the way you like.”
“You are not doing a very good job.”
“I’m doing a great job.” He slaps at my knee and tries to pry a fuzzy gray blanket out from beneath my hips. “You’re not exactly being helpful.”
I snicker. “How so?”
“You’re in my way.”
A laugh bursts out of me, incredulous. “Oh, excuse me, Charlie. I didn’t realize I was in your way as you try to swaddle me.”
“Thank you.” He manages to free my fuzzy blanket and he wraps it around my shoulders. “Apology accepted.”
I stare at him as he fusses with the material, tucking it just right so it’s under my chin. He is entirely focused on getting me cozy. I watch his face as he wraps the rest of the blanket over my shoulders. I guess he’s been paying attention when I roll myself in my blankets every night.
My smile is half hidden behind a blanket that has tiny cats all over it. It’s nice to be taken care of.
His phone buzzes across my dresser, and he sighs, shoulders slumping. I wiggle in my blanket cocoon and nudge him with my foot.
“Your dad again?”
He makes a vague noise of agreement. “Yep.”
“Do you want to answer it?”
“Nope.”
I frown at him. He sighs and yanks my blanket around me tighter. “I’m a grown man. I don’t need to talk to my father if I don’t want to.” The ringing on the dresser stops, and Charlie lets out a sigh of relief. “This is just a thing he does when he feels like he’s not getting an appropriate amount of attention. It’s been worse since—”
He lets the rest of that sentence drift off.
“Worse since what?”
He scratches at the back of his head and ducks down, peering at me. “You really want to talk about this?”
The way he asks the question—disbelieving and a little unsure—raps against the hollow in the center of my chest. Does he truly think I wouldn’t care?
“I do.”
He nods and collapses on the bed next to me. I go tilting to the side in the blankets, but he slips his arm around my back, holding me up. His hand squeezes at my hip, then slips down and gives the curve of my ass an affectionate pat through three layers of fleece.
“Since the divorce was finalized,” he finishes with a sigh. His phone starts buzzing across the dresser again, and I can feel it this time, the wave of tension that makes his body pull tight. “I think he’s lonely, but he’s got a shit way of trying to connect with me.”
Yeah, I’ve overheard some of their conversations. The first time I heard him talking to his father on the phone, I thought I was eavesdropping on a business meeting. There was no affection. No warmth.
“You don’t deserve that,” I tell him quietly, the words feeling clumsy on my tongue. I’m not good at comforting people, but I wish I was. I wish I could make the look on his face disappear.
Charlie rubs his hand across his jaw, keeping his face angled away from mine. “It is what it is,” he says. He blows out a breath. “I can’t be too hard on him.”
“Why not?”
He shrugs and his phone finally stops that incessant rumble across the top of my dresser. We both stare at it, waiting for it to start up again. “I crave attention. I think I’m—” He swallows. “I think I’m more like my dad than I like to admit.”
“No, you’re not.” The words tumble out of me before I can even register them as a thought. Charlie looks at me with amusement lighting his tired eyes.
“You don’t even know my dad,” he says.
“But I know you.”
Charlie doesn’t harass. He doesn’t make people feel small to boost his own confidence. He might be loud and borderline obnoxious, but he’s also kind. Thoughtful. He remembers things. He sees the details. He volunteered to work two full-time jobs so his sister could go on a honeymoon. He brought me printed tax forms in the middle of the afternoon because he knew I’d probably forget to fill them out.
I’m starting to think the jokes and the comments and the ridiculousness he wraps himself in is compensation for something else. A way to hide.
I wiggle closer, frustrated by the inability to use my arms. I suddenly hate this blanket burrito. “You’re a good person, Charlie.”
“That’s all the orgasms talking,” Charlie murmurs, nudging me with his shoulder.
“It’s not,” I argue. He turns his face toward mine and arches an eyebrow. “Okay, maybe a little bit. You give good orgasms, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re also a good person.” I knew it before we ever started sleeping together, and I know it better now. He huffs a laugh and my lips twist. “Do I need to list all of your positive qualities?”
A smile tugs at one side of his mouth. “It wouldn’t hurt.”
I wiggle one hand out from where it’s trapped against my side. I flick up one finger. “You have excellent taste in watches.” I lift another. “You have excellent taste in women.”
“Both of those things are true.” His half smile tumbles into a grin. “I am also smoking hot.”
“Reasonably attractive, I’d say.” I tuck my arm back in my blanket. I dip my chin until only my eyes are peering out of the top. “You’re kind. You’re invested. You’re easy to talk to, and you go out of your way to help others. Why is it so hard for you to believe that you’re a good person beneath all of that custom tailoring?”
“Because,” he sighs, scratching his hand through his hair. He glances around my room, looking for inspiration in the large canvas print that takes up a majority of my wall. Wildflowers in bold strokes of color. A bright blue, cloudless sky. Charlie sighs. “I’m just pretending.”
“Pretending what?”
“Everything.” He swallows. “That I’m not a selfish person.”
I snort and roll my eyes. “I don’t believe you.”
Charlie doesn’t laugh. “You don’t have to believe it. It’s the truth. You think I came to Inglewild and volunteered to watch over Lovelight out of the goodness of my heart, but that’s not true. I’m doing it for me. Because I wanted an excuse to be here.”
I blink at him. “Wanting something doesn’t make you selfish, Charlie.”
“What about taking it?” His eyes drag to my lips and hold. His voice is a rasp when he asks, “If I take the things that I want, doesn’t that make me selfish?”
I shake my head. We’re not talking about the farm anymore.
“Not if it’s willingly given,” I whisper back.
A different sort of electricity flickers between us. Like plugging in a strand of lights that’s been shoved in a box in the back of the attic only to find every bulb works. Bright and brilliant. Glowing gold.
Charlie’s eyes flick back and forth between mine, a question in there somewhere. “Nova, I—”
A knock sounds at my door, quick and sharp. It cracks through my room, and my body goes tipping to the side again with a little bounce. Charlie steadies me with a palm at my side, frowning into the dark of my hallway.
“Did you order food?” he asks.
“No.” I shake my head. “Did you?”
The door rattles with another impatient knock. A voice yells, muffled through the wood. “Nova!” Beckett calls. “I’ve had enough of you ignoring me. Open the door.”
We both freeze, heads turned in the direction of my brother’s voice.
“Tell me you moved the key under the welcome mat,” Charlie whispers.
“I moved the key under my welcome mat.”
A deep breath rattles out of him from somewhere in his chest. Relief, swift and sudden. I wince.
“I moved it underneath the potted plant on the other side of the porch,” I rush to explain. “I give him three minutes before he finds it.”
Charlie launches himself from the bed. “I thought I told you to move it.”
My arms struggle with the blanket wrapped around me. “Just because you tell me to do something doesn’t mean I’m going to do it.”
“I guess not,” he snaps. My front door rattles again, and Charlie drops to his knees, reaching under my bed for his discarded clothes. I don’t even know how they got under there. It happens every time. My room almost consistently looks like it survived a bomb blast these days. “I’m not wearing pants, Nova.”
I finally manage to free my arms from the blanket. “Then I suggest you put some on.”
We collapse into a flurry of frantic movement and whispered arguing. I trip over the edge of the blanket and slam into the dresser. Charlie almost tears the arm of his shirt punching his hands through the sleeves. I listen for the door as best I can while Charlie mutters a string of obscenities under his breath.
He army crawls from beneath the bed again with his belt in one hand and his jeans in the other. His chest is still mostly bare, his shirt unbuttoned, a line of hickeys worked across his ribs in the shape of the little dipper. I was feeling creative earlier but now all I’m feeling is bone-deep frustration that I don’t have a chain and lock on my front door. Maybe I’ll start wedging a chair beneath the handle like I did in high school when my siblings lacked boundaries.
I hear the unmistakable sound of a key sliding into the lock. They still lack boundaries, apparently. I toss Charlie his sweater and it smacks him right in the face.
“Hide,” I whisper.
“I’m a grown-ass man, Nova.” Charlie strides across the room to my window with his jeans unbuttoned. “I’m not hiding.”
“What are you doing?”
He yanks the window up with one hand.
“You can’t climb out the window,” I whisper, sounding hysterical.
“I can absolutely climb out this window,” he whisper-yells back. “I don’t want to die tonight.”
“You said you’re a grown-ass man.”
“A grown-ass man who is terrified of your brother, yes.”
“You might die when you fall out of my window.”
Charlie winks at me, one leg thrown over my windowsill. Behind him, the moon hangs heavy in the night sky.
His lips tilt up at the edges. “But soft, what light through yonder window—”
“Oh my god,” I mutter, spinning on my heel and leaving the room. I slam my bedroom door behind me. There’s a shuffling at the door and then it opens.