Chapter 21
21
CHARLIE
“Charles!”
I stop halfway down the street and walk backward until I can peer around the corner toward Ink & Wild, Nessa hanging over the railing with a stack of papers shoved under her arm. It’s not the Porter sibling I was hoping for, and I try not to let my disappointment show.
Have I been milling about downtown Inglewild for the better part of an hour hoping to see Nova? Maybe. I checked in with Mabel on floral arrangements for the harvest festival just so I had an alibi in case anyone bothered to ask, but I have no excuse for the aimless wandering I’ve been doing since then. I got a coffee from Ms. Beatrice’s. I talked to Matty about his pasta sauce. I did three laps around the fountain in the town square. I fed some ducks.
I have things I should be doing, but I’m crossing the street toward Ink & Wild trying not to look through the windows like an asshole for a peek of blond hair and a sarcastic smile. I wave to Vanessa, but she’s too busy trying to lock the door with a mountain of crap in her arms.
I pluck a stack of files out of her grip, and she blows out a sigh of relief. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” I glance at the papers and then at the top of Nessa’s head. “Did I catch you breaking and entering?”
“Would I shout your name across the street if I was?”
“You know, Ness, you probably would.” Of all the Porter siblings, she’s the true wild card. The last time someone was stupid enough to leave us alone at a party together, we almost burned the entire place to the ground.
Coincidentally, we have not been invited back to the bingo hall.
She grins at me and pushes some hair out of her face. “You flatter me, Chuck. I need you to take those to Nova.” She finishes locking up the door and tucks the keys in my breast pocket. “She asked that I stop by and grab them, but I’ve got somewhere I need to be.”
I frown. “Why did she request files she can get herself?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where do you have to be?”
“None of your business.”
Nessa pulls out another file she wedged into the top of her bag and shoves it in my hand. The top part is bent back. “Just do as you’re told, Charlie.” She pats me on the shoulder as she rushes past me, hip-checking me into the railing. “Oops, sorry!” she calls, hand raised above her head. “I’ll owe you one!”
She’s gone before I can so much as say, You’re welcome , rushing around the corner of the studio with her gargantuan bag slipping off one shoulder. As I’m frowning at the place she used to be, I swear something moves in the window of the duckpin bowling alley. I study the empty window, the blinds rocking gently back and forth.
“Fucking phone tree,” I mutter to myself. Everyone keeps playing dumb, but I know there’s something going on. I haven’t heard anything in weeks.
I’ve done enough meddling to know when I’m being meddled with. But joke’s on the phone tree, or Nessa, or whoever orchestrated this particular scenario, because I want to see Nova. They could not have picked a more willing participant.
I make my way over to her house and hop up the front steps. I want some of the chocolate-covered peanut butter pretzels she’s started to keep at the top of her pantry. She keeps telling me they’re on sale when she goes to the grocery store, but I’ve been to the grocery store, and they have never once been on sale. She buys them for me, and it’s adorable that she feels the need to lie about it.
I knock on the door. No one answers. I knock again.
“Nova,” I call. “I’ve got the files you asked for.”
My phone buzzes in my back pocket. I frown when I see her name.
NOVA: plch
That’s it. Nothing else. I wait for a second to see if another message comes through, but it doesn’t.
I entertain her preferred method of communication, even though I can see her boots stacked by the door and her keys on the table by the window. I know she’s in there somewhere.
CHARLIE: What?
Her response is slow coming, the three dots at the bottom of my phone an exercise in patience I have never once possessed.
NOVA: Leve them onnnnn pfch.
CHARLIE: Are you drunk?
I rap my knuckles against the door again, harder this time. My phone stays silent and so does the house. Unease tugs at my shoulders and I stare at the tiny pot of lavender on the corner of the porch. The likelihood of Nova actually listening to me and moving the key after Beckett used it is slim to none. I tip up the planter with my foot and sigh at the glint of silver metal.
“Stubborn,” I mutter to myself, slipping it into the lock and letting myself in. I’m going to melt this damn key down and make her a necklace with it. I’m going to toss it into the abyss.
I shut the door behind me.
“Nova?”
There’s a heavy thump from somewhere upstairs. I hang my jacket next to hers on a hook shaped like a cat’s ass and stack the files on the table. The stairs creak as I walk up, my heart somewhere in my throat. Nova’s house is usually bursting with sound and light and color. It’s too still in here. Too dark.
I push open her bedroom door with the palm of my hand. There’s a lump in the middle of her bed, her blond hair on the pillow. She twists beneath her heavy comforter.
“Nova girl?”
She shifts beneath the blanket again. In the muted light I can see her face scrunched up in pain, tension in the lines by her eyes and her shoulders hunched up to her ears. She’s curled in a tiny ball, like the smaller she makes herself, the easier it’ll be.
“Charlie?” she rasps.
My heart squeezes like someone’s got their fist wrapped around it.
I sit down on the edge of her bed and rub my hand up and down her thigh through the blanket. The little line between her eyebrows eases. “You got a migraine, baby?”
“Yeah,” she whispers, eyes still shut tight. “Told Nessa to leave the files. What’re you—” She makes a tiny, frustrated sound. “What’re you doing here?”
I don’t answer her question. “You didn’t tell her you were hurting, did you?”
Nova blinks open her eyes, half lidded and heavy. Her lashes brush against the apples of her cheeks with every extended blink. She’s not looking directly at me, but somewhere over my shoulder. “No,” she whispers. “I didn’t.”
Of course she didn’t. Because Nova is stubborn and doesn’t do a damn thing she’s told and would rather suffer alone than bother anyone for help. I blow out a breath and run my hand over the length of her thigh again. She shifts closer and all my frustration slips away when she carefully tips her forehead to my knee, like that tiny point of contact makes her feel better.
I stare at her hands fisted in the blanket. Her small form curled tight.
“What do you need?” I ask quietly.
“I’m okay.”
“Nova.”
“I’m fi—”
“If you say you’re fine, I’m gonna lose my shit. And you know how dramatic I can be.”
She huffs a laugh as I squeeze her thigh.
“My medicine,” she finally manages after three heavy swallows. “I—”
I give her the space to let her try to find her words, but she doesn’t finish her sentence.
“You, what?”
“I’m having trouble seeing,” she tells me in a whisper. “I can’t…I don’t think I can do it by myself.”
I know how hard it is for her to say those words and to trust me enough to hear them. I rub at the curve of her hip. “That’s all right. I can help.”
She mumbles the name of her prescription, and I go searching in her bathroom. It’s already sitting out on the counter with two other orange bottles, like she couldn’t tell which was the right one before she gave up and climbed into bed. I read the tiny instructions and shake a pill into the palm of my hand, then fill up a mug in the shape of a strawberry with water from the tap.
She’s propped up against the pillows when I find my way back to her, hair tangled over one shoulder. I hand her the pill, but her hands are shaking too bad to manage the mug.
“Easy,” I tell her, tucking my hands around hers. She scrunches her nose as she sips, bleary eyes blinking over the rim. Cute as all fucking hell, even when she’s trying her best to be intimidating. A kitten without her claws.
Her pinky inches out to loop over mine.
“What else do you need?”
“M’okay,” she mumbles, halfway to unconscious already, tugging the blankets until they’re over her shoulders. She’s so different like this, a dulled version of her usual bursting brightness. All of her edges soft and weary.
I sit on her bed and watch her as she falls into an uneasy sleep, her face still pinched and her shoulders hunched. I brush my fingertips over her forehead, and I rearrange her blankets until she’s tucked just the way she likes, then stand and pick up the pieces of herself she must have unwrapped as she came into the room. I fold her chunky sweater and drape it over the back of a chair. I collect a black skirt and set it on the dresser. I find her thigh-high tight things sticking out from beneath her comforter and tug them free. I grab an extra blanket and tuck it around her curtains, something like satisfaction in my chest when she lets out a grateful sigh at the added darkness. I go to leave, but her voice holds me at the door.
“Do you think—” she whispers, slurred and slow. She releases a deep breath and her fingers twitch on top of the blankets. “Do you think you could stay?”
I trace her form in the middle of her bed, her hand in the place I just was. Resolve tightens my jaw. I’ve never had someone to take care of before. I’m not sure I’ll be any good at it, but I’m going to do my best. For Nova.
“Yeah, of course.” I watch her for another second, a lump in my throat. I try to swallow around it, but the feeling shoves deeper. That fist around my heart tug, tug, tugs. “I’ll stay as long as you want me to, Nova girl.”
?She sleeps for hours, until the sun is burning orange through the window above her kitchen sink. I left briefly to grab my computer and some things from the grocery store—pocketing her not-so-secret planter key while I was at it—but for the most part, I’ve been here. Sitting in her kitchen, waiting.
I hear movement upstairs. The soft thud of feet moving across her bedroom and the whine of the squeaky hinges on her bathroom door. Her stairs creak as she makes her way down and then Nova appears in the doorway of her kitchen, the back of her hand trying to contain her yawn and a fluffy pink robe wrapped around her middle.
She looks comfortable. Cozy. I’ve never seen this robe before, three sizes too big and perpetually slipping down one shoulder. I wonder where she’s been keeping it.
“How’re you feeling?”
She answers with a shriek, her eyes snapping open and her back hitting the frame of the door. She reaches for the closest projectile, a small wooden figure of a cat that I’d bet my nonexistent Rolex Beckett whittled on his back porch. She whips it across the kitchen, and it smacks me in the middle of my forehead.
We stare at each other across the length of her kitchen, her palm pressed flat to her chest.
“You’re still here,” she breathes.
I frown and rub my fingertips against what I’m sure will be an impressive bruise. I guess I should be thankful she didn’t hit my eye. “You asked me to stay.”
“I did?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
I mean, I left, but that was to get her some fruit and Gatorade. I don’t know what she likes when she has a migraine. I wanted her to have options.
She keeps staring at me, like she’s trying to piece together why I’m sitting at her kitchen table with my laptop and the rest of the peanut butter pretzels. She has lines from her pillow on her cheek and her hair is an absolute mess. She passes her hand over it like that’ll do anything to help, and I have to duck my face behind my laptop screen to hide my grin. Fuck, she’s adorable. Even as she shuffles her way to the sink, still silent, reaching for a glass and filling it from the tap, shooting glances at me out of the corner of her eye like I can’t see exactly what she’s doing.
“I thought that was a dream,” she says after another extended beat of silence.
“Oh. I, uh—” Does she want me to leave? Have I overstepped, staying here in the kitchen? Stealing her key? I go to twist my wristwatch that isn’t there. An old nervous habit. “I can leave,” I offer.
She shakes her head. “No.”
All right. “I cut up some fruit for you. It’s in the fridge.” I stare hard at the top of my computer. I don’t know why, but I thought cantaloupe would be a good idea. She probably doesn’t even like cantaloupe. Is this how you take care of someone? I have no idea. “Didn’t know if you’d be hungry or not,” I tack on lamely.
When I look up, she’s studying me with her back pressed against the sink, one arm wrapped around her middle.
She still doesn’t say anything.
“What?” I ask.
“You cut up fruit?”
It’s a question that doesn’t sound like a question. “Yes?”
I won’t tell her that I also started a load of towels and rearranged her magazine collection. Or that I bought her a pumpkin and put it on her front step because it looked festive. I know she’s been too busy to put up her decorations. I was about another hour away from carving the damn thing.
She takes a sip of her water. “What sort of fruit?”
“What?”
“What sort of fruit did you get me?”
“Strawberries,” I answer. I saw them in her fridge two nights ago, only three left in the bottom of the carton. She wanders her way to the fridge and cracks it open, peering inside. “I got you some cantaloupe and grapes too.”
She ducks farther into the fridge. “Did you cut the grapes?”
I did. I saw a video while I was scrolling endlessly on my phone about how to cut grapes into tiny hearts. I wish I could go ahead and take that back though.
“They came like that.”
She glances at me over her shoulder. “Did they?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Interesting.” She grabs the fruit tray from the bottom shelf and sets it on the table, then drops into the chair next to me and stretches out her legs with a groan. She picks up a piece of strawberry and bites into it.
I can’t stop looking at her.
“How are you feeling?”
She shrugs and pokes at another piece of fruit. A piece of cantaloupe I cut into a star. “Okay. Fuzzy. It always takes some time for me to come back online after a migraine.”
“Any pain?”
She pops the star into her mouth and chews slowly.
“Some,” she says quietly. “But it’ll pass.”
She sits and eats her fruit, and I sit and watch her, a single beam of golden light traveling slowly across the hardwood floor of the kitchen. She seems to like the silence, her knee nudging mine beneath the table. After a few moments where she doesn’t ask me to leave, I open my laptop again and scroll through my work email, answering the more obnoxious ones and putting together a list for the week.
It’s quiet and still in a way I don’t usually allow myself to be. She extends her leg so her ankle is crossed over mine beneath the table, and I try not to smile at an email about interest rates.
“Charlie,” she says, after all the grapes are gone and half the strawberries. She’s saving the cantaloupe for last, I notice. Mentally I’m doing a victory lap.
“Hmm?”
“Could you open that for me?” She nods her head toward the window above the sink. “I like the fresh air.”
“?’Course I can.” I stride across the kitchen and open the window two inches, evening air that smells like dried leaves rolling into her kitchen. Her shoulders relax another half inch, and I reclaim the chair next to her.
“Thank you,” she says when I sit.
“Careful there, Nova girl.” I scoot my chair in and her legs tangle around mine again. “All this polite talk and I might start to think you like me.”
She rolls her eyes, a smile ticking up the corner of her mouth. With her messy hair and that ridiculous robe, it’s lacking its usual heat.
“I do like you,” she says simply.
Warmth ping-pongs around in my chest. A bright, ferocious burst of it. It’s a stupid reaction. We’ve been sleeping together for weeks. I should hope she likes me, at least a little. But here, like this, with the sunset painting her hair lavender and her socked feet tucked between mine, it feels more like a shared secret.
“I like you too.”
She pops another piece of fruit into her mouth, watching me with her chin in her hand. “Do you like me enough to kiss me?”
“Are you…well enough for that?”
She snorts. “I don’t have consumption, Charlie. I can manage a kiss.”
“Consumption. Listen to you, Doc Holliday.”
She rolls her eyes. “If you don’t want to kiss me, you can just say so.”
“I think I’ve proven that I like kissing you just fine.” I stand from my chair, the legs making an obnoxious sound against the kitchen floor. She flinches and I want to pitch the damn thing out the window.
“See.” It takes a monumental effort not to point in her face. “I’m not going to be kissing you if you’re still hurting.”
She pouts. Lips turned down at the corners, a jut to her bottom lip, Nova pouts at me.
I stop and look at her.
Sick Nova is soft in ways that Sarcastic Everyday Nova would be rolling her eyes at. Maybe it’s how she normally is when she wakes up after a migraine or maybe it’s…maybe this is how she is with me now. A version of herself that she doesn’t get to be anywhere else. The idea of it makes me want to fucking glow, a warmth creeping into my chest the longer I look at her.
“I think a kiss would make me feel better,” she says, still staring up at me.
“Well,” I say, one hand on the back of her chair and the other cupped around the side of her face. I trace the line of her jaw with my thumb, back and forth. “I can’t argue with that.”
She tilts her face to mine and tugs at the front of my shirt. “I thought you’d agree.”
“Shut up.”
“You shut u—”
I cut her off with my mouth against hers. I hold myself there in the chaste beginnings of a kiss, and let myself breathe her in. Fresh autumn air and the barely there smell of her shampoo. The lavender dryer sheets she uses and…Nova. I’d know her taste anywhere. Blindfolded and in my sleep. Half standing in the middle of her kitchen. I kiss her again and again and again, light brushes of our mouths together until her fingers walk their way up my chest, palms cupped around either side of my neck. My hand on the back of her chair flexes as I move my mouth against hers, gentle and slow, groaning when her tongue swipes at my bottom lip. I open my mouth for her and let her set the pace, let her take what she needs, another sound from the base of my throat when our tongues slide together.
She tastes like sunshine. Like strawberries cut into tiny, ridiculous shapes and…toothpaste?
I lean back, our noses brushing. “Did you brush your teeth before you came down the stairs?”
She pinches at my chest, quick and sharp. “Were you going to kiss me with nap breath?”
I grin. “Were you planning for a kiss?”
Her cheeks pink.
“You said you didn’t know I was here.”
“I didn’t know you were here,” she mumbles.
“Were you hoping I was here, Nova girl?”
“Shut up, Charlie.” She tugs my mouth back to hers.
“Yes, Nova,” I mumble against her mouth, and I kiss her in the melting light of her kitchen, a half-empty bowl of fruit on the table in front of her.