14. Bea
14
Bea
Wow.
It takes everything in me not to watch Charlie walk away, the white towel wrapped around his cute butt straining.
It’s a good thing Charlie has been using laser death ray eyes on Kit. He was too focused on the hunk of small-town charm in the living room to catch me staring at him.
Charlie sure has grown up. Obviously I knew he was attractive. There’s a vast difference between the twenty-year-old Charlie of our breakup and the twenty-eight-year-old Charlie of now, but the changes that I’ve noticed have all been, well, pretty vague from the neck down. It’s not like we’re spending the holidays wearing bathing suits, and while I knew that Charlie had bulked out, I hadn’t realized the extent of it.
Charlie is ripped . His pecs are solid and firm, the soft-looking patch of chest hair between them is thicker, and he has a V-cut.
A V-cut.
What happened to the nerdy boy I fell in love with?
When I snapped out of my shock, I realized that Charlie was jealous. It wasn’t just stranger danger and concern for my well-being with an unknown man in the house. It was an Excuse me, she’s mine.
The moment I’d fallen into Kit’s arms I’d thought, Wow, he’s hot . It may not have been sexy or graceful on my part, but it was a fantasy come true. And now I have his number.
I should call Kit. This is exactly what I want, right? A small-town guy to sweep me off my feet?
And yet...
I hate myself for even thinking of it, but Charlie, even after breaking my heart all those years ago, still pulls me to him like a magnet.
And now that I’ve seen most of grown-up Charlie, I’m even more attracted to him than before.
I realize I’ve been staring into space with my headphones on and I haven’t even hit play yet on my audiobook. Charlie is thumping around upstairs, maybe throwing a tantrum, but that’s fine, whatever.
I hit play and pull up a game on my phone.
I make it through a few rounds of Sudoku on the hard level and another chapter of my audiobook in which the characters have a very hot round in the locker room shower before movement catches my gaze again. Charlie stalks through the living room, a determined glint in his eye. He’s dressed now, wearing jeans and a hoodie.
I pause my audiobook and sit up. “What are you doing?”
“You’ll see,” he says, disappearing into the kitchen, and a few seconds later the door to the backyard slams. I scramble to my feet and hop over to the big picture window, the one Kit was just looking out of to check on the firewood pile.
Charlie tugs his shoes on and walks out to the shed, opening the door and disappearing inside.
“What in the world?” I wonder under my breath.
Holding the door open, I shuffle out and onto the porch. I have a sweater on already, and it’s sunny out, so the nip of cold in the air is dulled.
Charlie reemerges from the shed with an axe.
My hands go to my hips. “What the hell are you doing?”
Charlie walks toward the pile of logs, points the axe and his gaze at me. “I’m going to chop you some wood.”
That intention in his eyes and the handling of the weapon make me shiver. Yowsa.
Except this is ridiculous. I shake myself and make my voice even sterner. “You are going to lose a finger. You’ve never chopped wood before in your life.”
There’s a big stump by the log pile, crisscrossed with notches from the axe. Charlie lifts his weapon and with a thunk drives it into the flat top.
My heart flutters.
“I watched some videos.”
I take a minute to parse the words. “You watched some videos . Charlie! This is ridiculous!”
He ignores me and picks up a log from one end of the woodpile. I hadn’t looked closely at it, but one side of the pile has big round logs, literally just chunks of tree, and the other has wedges of wood ready for a fireplace or pit.
So I guess this is happening. The log is on his shoulder and he takes a few steps and bends down to set it on the stump. It’s short and fat. Like, really thick. But, wait. It’s not as thick as the stump.
What is thick for a log? I don’t know! I’m a city girl!
Once the log is stable, Charlie grabs the handle of the axe, pulling it from the flat top, and hefts it over his shoulder with both hands. Before I can even blink, he’s swung the axe down and hit the log.
It, um, doesn’t do much. But it also doesn’t bounce off and hit his face or go wildly for left field into his femur, so that’s something.
His next swing is more confident. It goes further into the log, making an enormous crack. Then he doesn’t quite hit it right. But finally, the fourth swing splits the log in half and the force of Charlie wrenching the axe out causes the two halves to fall to the side.
He resets one and chops it. Then the other. Then he grabs a new log and starts over.
This is ridiculous. “I know what you’re doing. You’re jealous of Kit.”
He doesn’t answer.
“You know I’ve been with other people since you, right? Can your macho ego take that?”
After the next log is split, Charlie grunts. “I know you have. And I have too. But you aren’t sleeping with Kit.”
I cross my arms and glare at him. He doesn’t know that while I thought Kit was hot, I was much more distracted by Charlie.
If he knew that, he might stop chopping wood, some cavewoman part of my brain whispers.
“Why am I not sleeping with Kit? Afraid of a little competition? Worried he’ll do a better job than you did?”
Now that Charlie’s gotten the hang of it, he talks between swings.
“He would.” Grunt. “He’s probably got—” Grunt. “—better bedroom skills than I did at twenty.” Grunt. Charlie pauses, axe dug into a log, to stare at me. “But I’ve gotten better, and he won’t have the connection with you and you know it.”
My mouth gapes open. Charlie turns back to his work, wrenching the axe out.
That cavewoman part of my brain is stupefied too. We both watch Charlie chop another log, then—because there is a god and she enjoys the view—Charlie takes off his hoodie. He’s wearing a white T-shirt underneath that’s already damp from his sweat.
This went from ridiculous to hot too fast. My brain is still tripping on “the connection” as Charlie chops more wood.
I should turn around and go back inside. I should shut my mouth. Or, you know...even blinking my eyes would be good.
Finally, with a great crack, a log splits and Charlie leaves the axe buried in the stump.
His gaze meets mine. My unblinking eyes follow him as he walks toward me, and the smell of him hits me first. Clean sweat, snow, and freshly chopped wood, which I didn’t even know had a smell. His skin is sheened with perspiration, a drip of liquid runs down his cheek and he’s got chips of wood and splinters all over his body.
He stops so close to me that if I take a deep breath, my breasts would brush against his chest.
Holding my gaze, Charlie’s finger comes up and touches my chin, pushing my mouth closed with an audible click. But it doesn’t stop there. He keeps pressing, tilting my chin until we are breath to breath.
And there, under those smells of work and man and nature, there’s the smell of Charlie. A smell that finally makes my eyes flutter as fast as my heart, the rest of my body catching up to the realization that the years haven’t made me any less attracted to him than I was when we were together.
A beat passes, and then Charlie’s mouth comes crashing down on mine.