12. Charly
— ? —
Charly
The tea’s gone cold and I haven’t taken a single sip because I’ve been standing in this kitchen with my fingers on my lips for an embarrassing amount of time, replaying the car, replaying his breath on my mouth, replaying the exact second I pulled away and hating myself for having self-control.
Then the front door almost comes off its hinges.
Not knocking. Banging. Full fist, rattling the frame, the kind of banging that says whoever’s on the other side isn’t asking to come in.
“Charly, open the goddamn door!”
Adam.
Drunk Adam, by the sound of it. His voice is too loud and too loose and cracking at the edges, and my whole body goes cold because I know that voice. I spent three years learning what his voice does when it slips out of the charming register, and this is a different animal entirely.
The front door of the main house opens and Clarence’s footsteps hit the gravel, fast. I get to my door and open it and he’s already there, putting himself between me and his brother before I can say a word.
Adam is standing in the floodlight at the edge of the driveway.
His shirt is untucked. His eyes are red and swollen and he’s swaying on his feet, and the look on his face isn’t anger.
It’s worse. It’s a man who’s lost the last thing holding him together and came here to make sure everybody else feels it too.
“Get off my property, Adam.” Clarence’s voice is calm. Not the fake calm he does for other people. The real one, low and steady, the one that means he’s already decided how this ends.
“Your property.” Adam laughs and it comes out ugly. “Everything’s yours now, right? My girl. My life. My whole fucking family. You just waltzed in and took it all and you’re standing here acting like you earned it.”
“You need to go home. You need to go home and sleep this off and call me tomorrow when you can stand up straight.”
“Don’t tell me what I need. You’ve been telling me what I need my whole life, standing there with that look on your face, like you’re the one who has it all figured out.
” Adam’s voice goes louder, wilder, and I can see his hands shaking at his sides.
“You couldn’t just let me have one thing.
One. You had to insert yourself into every corner of my life until there was nothing left that didn’t have your fingerprints on it. ”
“Adam, this isn’t about me. Go home to your wife.”
“My wife.” The word cracks down the middle. “My wife is in bed crying because she lost the baby, Clarence. She lost the baby and you want to stand there and talk to me about going home?”
The air leaves my lungs.
Clarence goes still. Not the controlled still from the car. Stunned still, the kind where the body stops before the brain catches up.
“What did you just say?” My voice comes out of me before I’ve decided to speak.
Adam turns on me and his face is a wreck, tears and rage and alcohol all swimming together, and for one second underneath all of it there’s grief. Real grief, raw and ugly, and I almost reach for him on pure reflex before I remember who he is and what he’s done.
“She lost the baby. She started bleeding on the way home from the gala. Are you happy now? Is this what you both wanted?”
“Nobody wanted that, Adam. Don’t you dare stand here and act like anyone wanted that.”
“You didn’t even ask about her.” He wipes his face with the back of his hand, rough.
“You cut her off and you cut me off and you disappeared into his house and played the victim and my wife was eight months pregnant dealing with the stress of this whole disaster, and now the baby’s gone, and you’re over here playing house with my brother. ”
“That is not what happened and you know it.”
“What I know is that she was fine before you showed up at my wedding with him.” He points at Clarence without looking at him.
“She was fine before you two decided to put on a show in front of everyone we know. She was fine before you turned my whole family against me and left her to deal with the fallout.”
“She wasn’t fine because of you, Adam. Every bad thing in that woman’s life started the day she trusted you, and you know that better than I do.”
“Fuck you, Charly.”
“Hey.” Clarence steps forward and his voice drops into a register I haven’t heard before. “That’s enough. You can say whatever you want to me. You don’t talk to her like that.”
“Or what? You gonna hit me? Go ahead. Be the man you’ve been pretending to be this whole time. Show her who you really are.”
“I’m not hitting you. You’re drunk and you’re grieving and you came here to start a fight because fighting is easier than sitting with what happened. I get it. But you’re not doing it here.”
“You get it.” Adam’s laugh is gutted. “You get it. You don’t get a goddamn thing. You’ve never lost anything in your life because you’ve never had anything worth losing. You just wait around until somebody else builds a life and then you pick through the wreckage.”
“That’s your grief talking and I’m going to let that go.”
“Let it go? You let everything go. That’s your whole move. Stand there, say nothing, take nothing, and somehow end up with everything, and now you’re doing it with her.” His eyes cut to me. “He doesn’t feel things the way normal people do, Charly. He just collects them.”
“You need to stop talking.” My voice is steady and I’m surprised by it because my hands aren’t. “Rebecca just lost a baby and you’re standing here screaming at your brother instead of being at home with her. What is wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with me is that my brother has spent the last few months convincing the woman I loved that I’m the villain, and now I’m standing here watching him steal my life and nobody cares.
Nobody has ever cared what Adam loses because Clarence is so goddamn noble, isn’t he?
Clarence is the good one. Clarence is the one everybody trusts.
And I’m just the fuckup who keeps ruining things. ”
“You are ruining things. Right now. In real time. Go home to your wife.”
“She doesn’t want me there!” The words rip out of him and the grief underneath is so raw it hits me in the chest. “She’s lying in bed and she won’t talk to me and she won’t eat and she won’t let me touch her and I don’t know what to do with any of it, and the only thing I can think about is that six months ago I had everything and now I have nothing, and the person standing in the middle of all of it is him! ”
Clarence says nothing. The patience in his stillness is the kind that only makes a desperate man more desperate.
Adam swings.
No warning, no wind-up, just his whole body throwing itself forward and his fist connecting with Clarence’s mouth before either of us can react. The sound is awful, bone on skin, and Clarence’s head snaps sideways and blood opens up on his bottom lip.
He doesn’t swing back.
Adam staggers from the momentum of his own punch, and Clarence straightens up slow, touches his lip, looks at the blood on his fingers, and then looks at his brother with an expression that’s sadder than anything Adam’s said all night.
“Feel better?”
“Fuck you.”
“Yeah.” Clarence wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “I figured.”
Adam cocks his arm again and I’m already moving, already pulling my phone out. “I’m calling the police. Right now. You can leave on your own or they can drag you out, but you are done.”
“You’re calling the cops on me? On me?”
“You just hit him in the face, Adam. Yes, I’m calling the cops. This is not a debate.”
“This is my brother’s house!”
“And your brother’s bleeding. So yeah, the cops are coming, and you can either get in your car and go home to your wife who needs you, or you can stand here and explain to two officers why you showed up drunk and violent. Pick one.”
The fight goes out of him. Not all at once, but in pieces, the fist unclenching, the shoulders dropping, the rage collapsing into the grief it was built on top of.
He stands there in the floodlight with blood on his knuckles and looks at both of us, and for a second he’s just a man whose baby died, and I hate that my heart does a thing for him that he doesn’t deserve.
“She was so close. But the stress…” His voice breaks. “We’d picked a name.”
Nobody speaks.
“I can’t go home. I can’t sit in that apartment and look at the room we painted and I can’t. I just can’t do it.”
“Then go to your mother’s house.” Clarence says it quiet. No edge. “Go to Mom’s and let her take care of you tonight. But you can’t be here.”
Adam looks at him. Looks at me. Wipes his face one more time with his wrist.
He walks to his car. The engine starts. The headlights sweep across us and then he’s gone, taillights disappearing down the road, and the night folds back into quiet.
I stand there for a second longer than I should, watching the dark where his car was, holding the phone I never had to use.
Clarence is leaning against the porch railing with his hand pressed to his mouth.
Blood is running down his chin and he’s not doing anything about it.
Just standing there, looking at the gravel where his brother was, and whatever’s going through his head he’s keeping it behind his teeth the way he always does.
“Get inside. Let me look at that.”
“It’s fine.”
“Your lip is split open and you’re dripping blood on your own porch. It’s not fine. Get inside.”
He goes inside. I follow him to the kitchen, and the overhead light is too bright after all that dark, and everything feels strange and charged and fragile.
“Sit on the counter.”
“I can stand.”
“Sit on the counter so I can reach your face without standing on my toes. I’m not a giraffe.”
He sits. I step between his knees to get close enough, and the position puts us at the same height, eye to eye, and I realize about two seconds too late that this was a bad idea because now we’re close.
Too close. The kind of close where I can feel the warmth coming off his chest and his knees are on either side of my hips and his breath is on my face.
I focus on the lip. Wet a cloth, press it to the split, gentle.
“Hold still.”
“I am holding still.”
“You’re breathing on me and it’s distracting.”
“You’d prefer I stop breathing?”
“I’d prefer you stop being a smartass while I’m trying to help you.”
His mouth twitches under the cloth. Even with a split lip, even bleeding, even after everything that just happened, the bastard is almost smiling.
I dab the blood away and the cut is small, surface level, nothing that needs stitches. My thumb moves along the edge of his bottom lip where the skin is broken, checking the depth, and his breath changes.
My thumb stops moving but doesn’t pull away.
His hand comes up and catches my wrist. Not grabbing. Just holding. His fingers wrap around the thin part of my wrist and his thumb presses against my pulse point and I know he can feel how fast it’s going.
“Tell me to stop.” Low and quiet and he means it as a real question.
I look at his mouth. At the blood still beading on his lip. At his eyes, dark and wide open and asking me with everything he’s got.
“No. Don’t stop.”
His other hand slides to the back of my neck and he pulls me in and his mouth finds mine and the taste is copper and warmth and him, and my hands go to his jaw, both of them, holding his face while he kisses me, and the sound I make against his lips is one I’ve never heard from myself before.
It isn’t soft. It isn’t sweet. It’s weeks of almost and nearly and not yet all catching fire at the same time.
His teeth catch my bottom lip and I press into him harder, and his hand fists in the back of my shirt and pulls me flush against his chest. My nipples harden against the fabric as they brush his shirt with every breath.
My fingers drag down his neck to his shoulders, gripping, pulling him closer, and his mouth drops from my lips to my jaw to that spot below my ear that makes my whole body go liquid.
A noise comes out of me that I’ll be embarrassed about later and right now I couldn’t care less. Heat pools between my thighs as his tongue traces the skin there.
His hands find the hem of my shirt. His fingers press against the bare skin of my waist and heat flares low in my belly, and none of it matters because his mouth is on my collarbone and my hand is in his hair and every nerve ending I have is screaming.
His palm slides up my side, cupping the underside of my breast through my bra, thumb circling the peak until it tightens further under his touch.
“We should stop,” I manage, and it comes out wrecked. “We should probably stop.”
“Probably.” His mouth moves against my skin. “You want me to?”
“No. But we should.”
“For tonight.”
“For tonight.” The corner of his mouth lifts. Careful, gentle, bruised. “That means there’s more nights.”
“Don’t push your luck. You’re still bleeding.”
“Worth it.”
“Shut up.”
But I’m smiling, and he’s smiling, and my hands are still on his chest and his hands are still on my waist and neither of us moves for a long time, just breathing, just being in the same space without pretending it doesn’t matter.
I step back first. Press the cloth to his lip one more time, gentle.
“Keep pressure on that.”
“Yes, nurse.”
“Don’t call me nurse. At home, I’m just Charly.”
“At home.” He says it back to me, quiet, and the corner of his mouth lifts on the side that isn’t split.
“Don’t make it weird.”
“I’m not making it weird. I’m just glad you feel that way.” His eyes hold mine for a beat longer than casual. “Took you long enough.”
He laughs and then winces because the lip, and I laugh at the wince, and for a second we’re just two people in a too-bright kitchen with blood on the cloth and heat still humming in the air between us, and it’s the closest to normal anything has felt in months.
I leave the cloth on the counter and I walk toward the guest house and my legs are unsteady and my lips are swollen and my whole body is vibrating at a frequency I’d forgotten it could reach.
But the thing that follows me through the door isn’t his mouth or his hands or any of it.
It’s Adam’s voice. Breaking apart in the driveway, grief pouring through every crack he usually keeps sealed shut.
Rebecca is lying in bed alone right now. In an apartment with a room they painted for a baby who isn’t coming. She won’t eat. She won’t talk.
Her husband drove drunk to his brother’s house to throw punches instead of staying with her, and her twin sister hasn’t spoken to her in weeks, and the one person in the world who shares her face and would know exactly how to sit with her in the dark isn’t there.
I’m not there.
My phone is on the nightstand. I pick it up and stare at her name on the blocked list and my thumb hovers there, and every wall I’ve built since the altar tells me to put the phone down.
I don’t put it down.