Chapter 7
MYLES
Under my eyelids has that gritty, scratchy feel they get after a red-eye flight. I never sleep when I’m flying.
And I sure as hell didn’t sleep last night.
It’s been thirteen hours and counting since I sent Charlie that email. Damn thing took me two and a half hours of writing and rewriting, and then, the moment I’d sent it, I’d wanted it back so I could rewrite it all over again.
I’d said I too much.
Fuck, this wasn’t supposed to be about me. It was supposed to be about him.
I scrub my hand over my face and back through my hair, winding up with my fingers wrapped around the back of my neck, trying to rub away the tension that just won’t let up.
I’ve gotta have refreshed my inbox a thousand times to check for a reply since I parked myself at the desk in my office.
And that’s got nothing on all the times I checked on my phone before I’d dragged my sorry ass to the school, just so I can spend the day knowing the one person in the world I’d give anything to see is here. One hallway away…
Hold my breath. Hit refresh.
Nothing.
Not that I think he’s going to respond to my email.
Except… There was just one part of what I wrote to him that was a lie. Kind of.
I’d told him that if I were him, I wouldn’t want to talk to me either.
That’s not the same as saying that, if our roles were reversed and it had been him that had dropped off the face of the earth that summer, only to reappear in my life now, I wouldn’t want anything to do with him, but it’s close enough that I’d felt the lie when I’d typed out the words.
Easy as it is to throw around meaningless hypotheticals, I know in my gut that there’s no question of whether I’d at least want to hear what Charlie had to say for himself.
Hell, even if the answer were as plain and brutal as, I was an asshole then but I’m sorry now, I still wouldn’t be able to write him off.
I’d wanted, no, needed to give him an out though. It’s his right to decide what, if anything, he does with the fact that the two of us have somehow ended up back in Riverside at the same moment, in the same damn building where we’d first met, no pressure from me.
Ten and a half years ago, I made the mistake of trying to guess how Charlie felt and deciding what was best for him based on that guess alone.
Instead of talking to him and giving him a chance to tell me how he actually felt and what I could do to be the best friend I could for him, I’d fucked everything up by choosing for him.
It was the worst thing I could have done, even if I was right and he really did have—
“Hey.”
Doesn’t matter that the word’s practically a whisper.
The sound of that voice is enough to have my head snapping up so fast and hard I crick my neck.
On instinct, because it hurts like hell, my hand’s at the base of my skull in an instant.
Not that it wouldn’t be there anyway, because nervous doesn’t even begin to cover how I’m feeling at the moment.
“Hey.”
I’m on my feet, up out of my chair, rasping out that inadequate single word before I can think, but then I just sort of freeze. What am I even planning to do?
Against my will, maybe because it’s easier than trying to make eye contact, my eyes rake over him, down his body, taking in the way his slim-cut slacks—like the ones I just knew he was wearing yesterday—and carefully tucked button-up stop just shy of hugging tight against his body.
I know what I want to do. I want to take the five steps it would take for me to cross the room and hug him. I want to erase every last day of the ten and a half years that have passed since I ruined everything between us and go back to how things used to be. I want our friendship back.
I want him back.
I want him to be my person again. Because to me, he never stopped being that, and it hurts.
And yeah, I’m fully aware that I deserve precisely none of this.
Calm the fuck down. Eyes on his face.
It’s strange seeing Charlie up and around without his glasses.
That’s the random thought my mind snags on as I wait, trying to get myself to focus on thinking of what to say to him and hoping like hell that he’ll go first, just to give me some sense of where this is going and how I should act.
I’ve gone over it in my head about as many times as I’ve checked and rechecked my email since sending him that message, and all I can come up with to explain how I didn’t know it was him from the moment I spotted him at his desk yesterday is that my brain couldn’t make sense out of seeing him without his glasses.
Even when I’d slept over at his house—all weekend most weeks and pretty much every night during school breaks—he’d have them on unless he was sleeping. Charlie’s blind as a bat without them. That he’s without them now means he’s gotta have gotten contacts.
He looks…good.
Last time I saw him, not counting yesterday, when he’d bolted out of the room before I’d even gotten close to processing the fact that I was really seeing him, not just hallucinating his face onto other people, Charlie had been way shorter than me.
Not anymore though. In the years since he left Riverside, he’s shot up to be nearly as tall as I am.
And, totally opposite of how things used to be, now I’m the one that’s wider and thicker than him.
Growing up, I was that skinny, tall kid. A head above everyone else in my class, all angles and arms and legs and always tripping over everything. Why my dad still thought I was going to be the football legend he never got to be beats me, but whatever.
Charlie though? He was always one of the shortest kids in our class.
Back then, he’d also been round and kind of pudgy in a soft, comfy sort of way that made me want to just pull him into a hug and squeeze him.
Which, ever since I lost my right to ever do it again, I’ve known I should have done when I’d had the chance. Way more than I ever did.
Something—my dad’s genetics I’m guessing—finally caught up with me partway through junior year of high school and I filled out.
Other than hiking and being generally active (and now, working on Dad’s house), I don’t work out, so I’m not crazily built like Dad was, under his beer gut I mean, but I definitely filled out with enough muscle that scrawny’s the last word anyone’s going to use to describe me.
It’s not the word for Charlie now either, even though he’s slimmed down so that I can tell that, underneath his overdressed clothes, his body is tight and lean…which is a weird thing to think.
My heart kicks against my ribs and a ripple of nervous tension runs through me, hot and prickling over my skin.
Fuck, what should I say to him?
Even with the way he’s slimmed down, Charlie’s face is as round and soft looking as I remember it, and even though I know they’d be too faint to see from across the room, I’d bet anything he still has those tiny freckles sprinkled across his nose and the tops of his cheeks.
He still wears his hair pretty much the same as when we were fifteen, and it works for him.
Shortish on the sides and longer on the top.
It’s a touch darker than it used to be. Now, instead of dark blonde, it’s this kind of golden-brown color—sort of like caramel?
It makes his changeable eyes look even greener than I remember.
Or maybe that’s his shirt. For all that he’s too dressed up for Riverside, the pale blue-green is definitely a good look on him.
The back of my neck feels hot under my hand.
Weird. So fucking weird.
This is all weird.
Charlie being here. How neither of us have said a damn thing—my fault, not his.
How my pulse is racing and my head’s spinning like suddenly there’s not enough air in the room that, out of the blue, has gotten almost too hot to stand.
The way I can’t stop staring at him, thinking random, weird things about how he looks instead of thinking of what I should be saying—
“I got your email.”
Oh thank god, he’s talking.
The hard pound of my heart against my ribs kicks up a notch.
“Thank you.”
It’s not much, but hearing his thanks loosens some of the tightness that’s been living in my chest so long, I didn’t even realize how much it was suffocating me, and I can breathe.
The words are stiff and he’s so obviously uncomfortable, I can feel it all the way across the room from him, but his voice sounds… soft. Like he means what he’s saying.
And I still can’t make myself say a damn thing. Only maybe that’s a good thing, because like the email, this isn’t about me.
“I don’t want you to worry about this,” he waves his hand around at my office.
“Us working together, I mean. It doesn’t have to be awkward.
We were kids, Myles. Things happen.” The shrug he gives looks casual, but the way his eyebrows pull together and the downward tic of his lips aches like a physical blow, squeezing that tight band right back around my chest. “I’m not going to hold any of it against you. ”
Like a goddamn idiot, I nod.
It’s not that I can’t think of anything to say now. Complete opposite, really. There’s so much, it’s like it’s all tangled up in my throat, all fighting to get out at once.
Charlie flashes me a twitch of a smile, and like it’s pulled free one of those too many things, I gasp out, “Thank you.”
It’s not quite the right thing to say, and I realize belatedly that, in this horrible, stiff interaction, all I’ve done is echo back things he’s already said, but if it’s all I’ve got, at least I’m talking.
Thank god I emailed him everything I had to say rather than trying to make myself say it out loud somehow.
That would have been a fucking fiasco, if right now’s anything to go by.
Another tiny smile as he turns to go.
Fuck, I don’t want him to leave—
“Charlie.”
“Yeah?”
My heart gives another weird little kick at how fast he turns back to me.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Me too, Myles.” Just a whisper, and then he’s gone.