Chapter 20
twenty
I ran my fingers through Charlie’s wet hair as I rested my head against his big pillows. Somehow, he’d moved in his sleep and was now using my stomach as his pillow, but I didn’t push him away. I would take any excuse I had to be closer to this boy.
I looked around his room, taking in all the decorations.
This was one of the few times I’d ever actually been in here and, until now, I’d never really appreciated what it told me about Charlie.
His blue comforter and overflowing bookshelves and strangely organized desk…
all little pieces of the boy I loved. Moving as gently as I could to avoid jostling him too much, I grabbed my phone from where it had been discarded on the nightstand earlier.
I used my free hand to pop the case off and pull the note out, looking at it again for the first time since I’d shown it to him at the lake.
“What are you doing?” Charlie asked sleepily.
“Shhh,” I whispered. I brushed a thumb across his cheek. “Go to sleep.”
We’d come up here to nap after going for a swim but that plan hadn’t gone perfectly. He shook his head and moved so his chin was against my stomach and he was looking up at me.
“Did you really carry that paper around for two years?”
I giggled a little. From embarrassment or not, I wasn’t sure. “Yeah. I did.”
“Did you look at it a lot?” he asked.
“Almost every day.” My chest tightened as I thought about the pain I’d felt over the past two years, re-reading that note and wondering whether what I’d written on the back would be true.
In the end, it wasn’t... but could Charlie and I survive that?
Charlie gently pulled the paper from my hand so he could read over it himself, a smile growing on his face as he did so.
“My turn for a question,” I said. His gaze flew back to mine.
“What do you want to know?”
“Was I really the best kiss of your life?”
He smirked. “You really think I would lie to you?”
“Well, you didn’t know it was me,” I said. “So I couldn’t say for certain.”
“Well, I wasn’t lying,” he said. He kissed my thumb. “I promise.”
“Did you ever suspect it was me?”
“At the time? The thought never even crossed my mind. I couldn’t think about you that way... if Matt even suspected I was thinking about you that way, then, well...” He brushed a hand across his face, which was still healing from the fight.
“But?”
“But when I kissed you at the lake—for what I thought was the first time—it felt familiar. And I knew it couldn’t be, not really, because we’d never... When you told me, everything just fell into place. Like my world somehow righted itself.”
I took a deep breath. The scent of his cologne overwhelmed me, taking me back to the night in the closet. So long ago, yet it felt like it could have been yesterday.
“And now?” I asked. “Am I still the best kiss of your life?”
Charlie shifted, moving his way up until his head was beside mine on the pillow. He tucked a hair behind my ear, then leaned forward and pressed a gentle kiss to my mouth. Such a soft, sweet gesture... yet one that meant so much.
“Oh, Mads...” he whispered. “Every time I get to kiss you is the best moment of my life.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Charlie asked as we walked into the house. “I don’t think Matthew wants anything to do with me right now.”
“This isn’t going to be solved by you two just avoiding each other,” I said. “You need to sit down. Talk. Forgive.”
“Might I remind you that I’m not the one you need to be saying this to,” Charlie said. “I don’t have a problem with him.”
“Sit,” I said, gesturing to the kitchen table. “And wait here.”
I walked to the bottom of the stairs and cupped my hands around my mouth. “Matthew, can you come down here for a sec?”
“Why?” he yelled back.
“I need a favor,” I said. He didn’t respond, but I could hear his bedroom floor squeaking like he was walking. I rushed back over to the kitchen. “Okay, he’s coming. Stay calm.”
Charlie looked up, unimpressed. “Are you talking to yourself or me?”
I sat down in the chair next to him and kissed him quickly. “I think both.”
“What do you need, Madison? Because I…” Matthew’s voice faltered to a stop as he came into the kitchen and saw Charlie sitting there. His face turned into a glare. “What are you doing here? I told you to stay away.”
“Matthew,” I said. “Please just sit. Hear us out.” He stared at me, face hard and unyielding. “Please.”
Matthew sighed and sat down. “You have five minutes.”
I took a deep breath and looked at Charlie, who nodded encouragingly.
“Matthew,” I said. “I know you don’t like the idea of me dating your friends.”
“Really?” Matthew asked. “What was your first clue?”
“However,” I continued as if he hadn’t interrupted, “sometimes things don’t go to plan. Two years ago, I was randomly pulled into a game of Seven Minutes in Heaven that wasn’t supposed to mean anything… and instead, I kissed the one boy that I wanted more than anything.”
Matthew made a strange sound. “You already liked him before that?”
“I’ve liked Charlie for as long as I can remember,” I said honestly.
“And I know what you’re going to say—that I’ve dated so many other boys since then, that I shouldn’t care about him…
but the truth is, the reason none of those relationships ever worked out was because I knew I couldn’t love them.
Not like I loved Charlie. So… I know you don’t like it.
I know it isn’t ideal. But the simple fact of the matter here is that it doesn’t really matter if you approve or not because it’s not going to stop Charlie and me from dating.
All it will do is ruin a lifelong friendship. ”
Matthew stared at us for a long minute, eyes shifting between my face, Charlie’s face, and our intertwined hands on the table.
“Do you love her?” Matthew demanded. Charlie squeezed my hand and looked at me lovingly.
“I do,” he said. Honesty was written all over his face. I looked to Matthew again, whose angry facade had seemed to crumble.
“If you ever hurt her...” he said.
“You’ll kill me,” Charlie finished for him. He rubbed a hand along the side of his jaw, where his bruises were only now starting to fade. “Yeah. I don’t doubt it.”
Matthew turned to me next. “I guess out of all my friends... You picked a good one.”
I smiled. “I couldn’t agree more.”
I had no idea what would happen from here or how Charlie and I would turn out, but at least our biggest obstacle was out of our way now. I had fallen in love with my brother’s best friend and had somehow lived to tell the tale.
Now, I just had one final battle: explaining the whole situation to Violet without admitting that she had been right all along—that Charlie was in love with me too and that somehow, against all odds, we had made it work.