11. Charly #3
“I know I don’t have any right to an explanation,” I say to the windshield.
“We’re not together. You don’t owe me your history.
But you’re my friend, Clarence. You’re the only friend I’ve got right now who hasn’t lied to me, and I need that to stay true.
” I turn my head toward him. “So can you just tell me honestly what happened?”
He stares straight ahead for a long time. His thumb taps the steering wheel twice, then stops.
“Elena Flax. Junior year.” He says it the way you say a thing you’ve kept locked up for years and forgot how to hold.
“Adam brought her home for Thanksgiving. She was smart. Funny. She’d read an obscure book and bring it up at dinner just to see who’d keep up.
Nobody ever kept up. Adam didn’t even try. ”
He pauses. I don’t fill it.
“I liked her.” He says it plain. No spin, no softening. “I liked her from the first night. I sat across from her at my mother’s table and she argued with me about a book for forty-five minutes and I went to bed thinking about it. About her.”
My chest does a whole complicated thing. Not jealousy. Closer to recognition. He’s handing me a piece of himself he doesn’t show people and I can feel the cost of it in real time.
“But she was his,” he says. “So I didn’t say anything. Didn’t act on it. Didn’t let it show. I just kept my distance and swallowed it, because that’s what you do when your brother brings a girl home. You respect it.”
“But Adam knew.”
“Adam always knows.” His jaw works. “He’s lazy about everything except reading people. He saw the way I looked at her and he filed it away. Ammunition for later.”
“What happened?”
“They fought that whole weekend. He was seeing somebody else on the side, she didn’t know yet but she could feel it. You know how that works.” His voice drops. “You can always feel it before you know it.”
I do know. I know it in my bones.
“She came and found me on the back porch Saturday night. She was crying and she didn’t want his parents to hear.
So I sat with her. She told me what she was afraid of and I told her she wasn’t crazy for feeling it.
I told her she deserved a person who didn’t make her question herself every other day.
” He stops. Swallows. “And that was it. That was the whole thing. One conversation on a cold porch. I never touched her. I never told her how I felt. I just sat with a girl who was hurting and said the things a person should’ve said to her a long time ago. ”
“And Adam came outside.”
“Adam came outside.” His knuckles go white on the steering wheel.
“Saw the two of us sitting together in the dark. And he didn’t even need the truth to be bad, because the truth was enough.
He knew I had feelings for her. He knew I’d been decent to her, which was more than he’d managed.
So he told the whole family I’d made a move.
Told Elena I’d been talking about her for weeks, obsessing, waiting for a crack in the door.
He took the one thing I’d done right, keeping my mouth shut, respecting the line, and he made it sound the opposite. ”
“She believed him.”
“She was confused and humiliated and twenty-one years old and my brother can sell anything to anyone when he needs to. She drove home that night.” A muscle moves in his cheek.
“I never saw her again. Never got to tell her he was lying. Never got to explain that the reason I stayed up talking to her on that porch wasn’t because I was scheming.
It was because being near her was the best I’d felt in months and I couldn’t bring myself to go inside. ”
The car is very quiet. His breathing is a little uneven. Saying all of that cost him a thing he doesn’t know how to get back.
“Your family believed him.”
“My mother believed him. That’s the only vote that ever counted in that house.
” He finally looks at me. “I was twenty years old. My brother went around telling everyone I’d tried to steal his girlfriend.
And the worst part isn’t that they believed him.
The worst part is he was half right. I did want her.
I just never would’ve done anything about it.
The wanting was mine. I kept it to myself, kept it clean.
And he took it and turned it into the ugliest thing he could come up with. ”
I look at him across the dark car. His bow tie is loose and his hair’s wrecked from running his hands through it and his eyes are wide open for once, no wall, no distance, no careful mask.
I’ve never seen his face bare. He just handed me the last thing he keeps locked, and he doesn’t know what to do now that it’s out.
“Can I say a thing?” I ask.
“I’m not sure I could stop you.” The corner of his mouth lifts, tired.
“That’s the most honest anyone’s been with me in months.
” I undo my seatbelt and turn toward him properly, one knee pulled up on the seat.
“Not just the story. The part where you admitted you had feelings for her and still didn’t cross the line.
Do you know how rare that is? Most people would’ve just said I comforted her, end of story, and left out the part that makes them vulnerable. ”
“I’m tired of leaving things out.” He says it rough. “I’ve been leaving things out my whole life. With her, with my family, with you. I’m done with it.”
“With me?”
“Especially with you.” He holds my eyes when he says it.
The air in the car shifts. Same way it shifted in the bathroom when his fingers were on my zipper. Same way it shifted on the porch the night Adam sent that photo. Charged. Close. Nowhere left to hide from it.
“Clarence, wait.” It comes out unsteady.
“I know.” He says it low. Bracing.
“No, listen.” I reach across the console and put my hand on his jaw, and his whole body goes still. Not frozen. Held. My thumb traces along his cheekbone, and his eyes close, and the breath that comes out of him sounds weeks overdue.
“Thank you,” I say. “For telling me the truth. For not hiding behind the easy version. For trusting me with the real one.”
His eyes open. Right there, close enough that his breath is warm on my mouth.
“You’re making it very hard to be your friend right now,” he says. Barely a whisper.
“I know.” I don’t pull my hand back.
“If I kiss you tonight, it’s not because of Adam.
It’s not because of anything except the fact that I’ve been thinking about it since the porch, and the bathroom, and every morning you walked into my kitchen with your hair still wet, and I need you to know that before anything happens. I need you to know it’s you. Just you.”
My heart is pounding so hard I can feel it in my fingertips where they’re resting on his face. His hand comes up and covers mine, pressing my palm flat against his cheek, and his thumb traces over my knuckles the same way it did that first night on the steps.
I lean in. Close the gap to almost nothing. His lips are right there, a breath away, and every part of me is pulling toward him.
And I stop.
Not because I don’t want it. Because I want it so much it terrifies me, and the last time I wanted anything this badly it was a ring on my finger and a man who swore he’d never hurt me.
“I can’t.” It comes out broken. “Not yet. Not because I don’t want to, because trust me, I really, really want to.
But if I kiss you right now I need to know it’s because I’m choosing it, not because tonight was intense and you’re here and you said all the right things.
” I press my forehead to his. “You deserve better than that. And I refuse to be careless with you.”
His hand stays over mine on his face. His thumb keeps moving over my knuckles.
“Okay. I can do that,” he says. No hurt in it. Just patience, the real kind, the kind you can’t rehearse. “Whenever you’re ready.”
I pull back. Let my hand drop. The cold fills the gap between us and I hate it, and he sees me hate it, and neither of us says a word about it.
I grab my clutch and get out of the car and walk toward the guest house without looking back, because looking back is going back, and going back is not stopping at a kiss.
The door closes behind me and I press both hands flat to my chest and just stand there in the dark, breathing, my pulse banging around in my ribs.
I almost kissed him. I almost kissed Clarence Carrington in the front seat of his car with his whole heart cracked open for me, and the only reason I didn’t is because I’m terrified of how much I wanted to.
That’s not the problem though.
The problem is I’m standing here in the dark replaying the exact weight of his breath on my mouth, and I already know I’m going to think about it when I get into bed, and I already know I’m not going to sleep, and I already know that tomorrow morning I’m going to walk into his kitchen for coffee and look at him across the counter and pretend none of this is happening while every nerve in my body screams at me to finish what I started.
That’s the problem.
Because I can talk myself out of a kiss. I’ve done it before. But I don’t know how to talk myself out of the fact that when he said it’s just you, a lock turned somewhere inside me, quiet and permanent, a door I didn’t even know I’d been standing in front of.
And that door doesn’t close back.