Chapter 6
I swing the door open to the dark, cool interior. I stand in the doorway for a moment, allowing my eyes to adjust to the lack of light. I blink a few times. Leather booths line the wall on my right, and on my left a long dark bar stretches back with brass fixtures that gleam under the overhead lighting.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in.”
I recognize the deep, masculine voice right away. Charlie Bond is sitting in a booth, his laptop open in front of him, a half-eaten sandwich by his side with a glass of iced tea. I approach him slowly, apprehensive after my intuition’s abject failure last night. He’s wearing an easy smile that says he’s happy to see me.
“You rely a lot on scripted lines, you know that?” I say.
He stretches his arms up over his head, arching his back and shaking out his shoulders, like he’s been here for a while. His white Oxford tightens around his biceps. The shirtsleeves are rolled up in that way men do, blithely unaware of what effect that has on women.
“It’s all part of my charm. Take a seat.” He motions to the bench across from him.
“What are you doing here?” I ask as I sit on the red leather. I drop my bag next to me and resist the urge to slump.
He sweeps his hand in front of him, because it’s obvious he’s working. “No rest for the weary.”
When he sees the look on my face, his smile falters. “What’s wrong?”
I must look pretty torn up for him to have noticed in this light. No point in mincing words. There’s something so disarming about Charlie. Maybe it’s the knowledge that he isn’t interested that’s letting me relax around him. Whatever the reason, I tell him the truth. “I just saw my ex-fiancé and his new girlfriend.”
Realization dawns on Charlie’s face, his eyebrows raising in understanding.
“Ooh, so that’s the thing I was sensing last night. You’re seeing your ex at this wedding.”
If only that was the whole problem. If that were all, I think I could handle it.
“Indeed.” I nod and gratefully accept a glass of water from the server. “And she’s stunning. I mean, really, really beautiful.”
Charlie gives me a skeptical look and closes his computer, sliding it into his laptop case. “That might be the case, Daisy, but so what?”
“What do you mean so what? She’s my replacement. He upgraded.” I set about dabbing at my stain with a wet napkin.
Charlie shakes his head and gives a rueful chuckle, resting his elbows on the table in front of him as he leans in. “Women compare themselves to each other too much.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask in an offended voice, looking up at him, napkin still pressed to the linen.
“It means,” he says, “that this guy proposed to you, did he not?”
“Yeah. And?”
“So, he must think you’re beautiful too. It doesn’t matter what the new girlfriend looks like.” He leans back, like he just closed a case.
I huff, “It just doesn’t make it any easier, you know? If he’d come dragging a troll behind him I might have felt less… inadequate.” I’m starting to make progress on this stain. The red has lightened to a diluted pink.
“Don’t call women trolls,” Charlie scolds me lightly. “And don’t feel inadequate.” Like it’s just that easy.
I squint at him. “Have you ever actually spoken with a woman before, Beamer? I mean, are we a completely alien species to you? Inadequacy is baked into us. Well, maybe not Gabby because legs that long don’t come without a lifetime of praise, but for the rest of us, we’re introduced to our insecurities when we’re practically still in the cradle.”
He leans forward again, and this time he plants his hands on the table. Large hands, with fingers pressed into the wood so that the tips turn white. He looks at me with dark eyes. “Daisy. I mean this in the most appropriate way possible. As your friend who has actively been trying to get your goat for at least twenty-four hours, you have nothing to feel inadequate about.” He shakes his head. “Just the opposite, in fact.”
Goosebumps wash down my arms, and all memory of Rob or Gabby evaporates on the spot. “Really?” I say in a small voice that sounds too much like myself. Too shy, too needy. I might as well be jumping up and down like a circus dog, asking for praise.
“Yes.”
I sigh and abandon my wet napkin and take a drink of water through the straw. “Well, I have to have dinner with them tonight, and it’s going to be awful.”
He nods. “I’m sure it won’t be your favorite part of your mom’s wedding. But you’re going to get through it, and you’ll be just fine.”
Something about his words sends warmth straight to my chest. It’s the pep talk I would have gotten if Cara had been here, and I didn’t realize how sorely I needed it until I was standing in that lobby looking at Rob’s tormented face. I thought I was ready, but I just wasn’t.
“When is this dinner planned for?” he asks.
I check my phone for the time. “In five hours. And counting.”
He narrows his eyes at me. “And were you just planning on sitting here, drinking away your sorrows during that whole time?”
“ Maaaybe ,” I say, fiddling with the straw in my drink, moving the ice cubes around so that they bob and bounce together against the glass.
“So you can say all the things you really don’t want to say out loud, but your filter will be gone so you’ll definitely say them?
I look up and sigh. “You have a point.”
He slaps his hand down on the table, “I know what you need, Daisy.”
“The same pill that lady on the plane took?”
“If it were an option? Possibly. We could tell them all you slipped into an unexpected coma. But since it’s not, you need a tour. And you’re lucky, because I happen to be an excellent tour guide.”
His use of the word we does something to me. Like he, who has known me for little more than a day, is in my corner for whatever reason. And it feels good.
Ten minutes later, we’re sitting in the back of a yellow cab and Charlie is directing the driver towards the waterfront.
The dark linoleum seats stick to the backs of my legs, and I wiggle a bit, adjusting to the heat. The driver is playing a funk station that’s barely muffled by the plastic barrier between him and us. Charlie rolls the windows down so the smudged glass doesn’t mar the view.
“Is this your first time in the city?”
I nod, gazing out the window as we leave Georgetown.
“Excellent. I’ve got you as a virgin.”
I wince at his word choice and can’t help but laugh. “You’re here a lot?”
“All the time. Half of my clients are in DC.” He points out the window. “This is Dupont Circle. They mention it a lot in the movie The American President .”
“The one about the president who’s dating? You know that one?”
“I do,” he says happily.
My curiosity is genuinely piqued. “Do you watch a lot of romantic comedies?”
He grins. “They happen to be among my favorites. And down here we are going to get to K Street, and that’s where the bad guys work.
The taxi driver must have heard him because he barks a laugh from the front seat.
“Politicians?” I ask.
“Worse.”
“The mafia?”
“Lobbyists,” he answers in an ominous voice.
“Oh no!” I say in mock horror. “Is that where your clients live?”
He sighs, running his hand through his messy hair. “Some of them. But most of my work happens after the lobbyists have done their jobs.”
The street widens, and the buildings grow taller. The sidewalks are full of people in work attire, hustling to meetings. There’s enough space here for café patrons to spill out onto the sidewalks. Tables with parasols host young couples and bunches of friends, and a group of enviably slender, athletic types spill out of a SoulCycle studio.
The traffic crawls along. Cars honk whenever someone tries to change lanes, huffing their fumes like frustrated bulls, and pedestrians jaywalk with impunity.
“There’s a piece of policy I’ve been working on for ages,” I tell him. “There’s a company trying to purchase a giant piece of land in an area near Matchless Mountain that’s been set aside for conservation for decades. The owner died, and now the heirs are selling it to a developer. They want to mow it all down and build yet another ski resort.”
“Is that so?” Charlie says, looking out the window. I can’t tell if he’s uninterested or just distracted.
“We wanted to get the governor to designate it as protected land, but no such luck.”
Charlie doesn’t look at all uninterested now. His eyes pierce me. “What kind of work have you been doing on that project?”
I look down from his sharp gaze and pick at my nails. “It was the first project that I was the lead on, actually. I was the one who took notice of the situation and presented it to my boss, and she let me take the ball and run with it.” I look up to meet his gaze again. “I was so determined to save that land. I seriously thought we could do it.” I look down again, reminding myself not to get too worked up. “But it’s over now. The developers win, we lose, and so it goes. The cycle continues.”
My attempt to sound cool isn’t fooling him at all.
“You sound pretty crushed.” His eyebrows have dipped over his intense eyes, furrowing his brow.
“Maybe just a little bit crushed.” I give him a small smile. “It really hurt when I found out the land was being sold, but you have to develop a pretty thick skin in my field. There’s more losing than winning, unfortunately.” I sigh. “I think you just get used to the understanding that we’re fighting a losing battle, you know? Every year it feels like we lose ground, and the bears lose habitat.”
If it weren’t for the fact that Charlie looks interested I would have already stopped talking. But he’s still, watching me and listening, so I continue.
“Bear-to-human conflict keeps increasing, and the pressure on the remaining wilderness keeps going up, but for humans, there just doesn’t seem to be an upper limit to the concept of enough.”
“I could never do that,” he remarks.
“Lose all the time? Of course you can’t, you’re a lawyer. I’m guessing you have a competitive streak a mile wide.”
“I do, but that’s not what I meant. I meant seeing things I care about being destroyed like that. Not being able to protect them. Wanting to stop something so badly and being forced to watch it disappear.”
He has a look that makes me think he might be speaking from experience.
“Yeah, it’s not fun. I used to cry after work, almost every day,” I answer.
I have never told anyone this truth. I don’t know why I’m letting it out now. But maybe it’s the fact that Charlie has become my vacation friend—the sort of person you bump into while traveling and have a short-lived connection with, free from the entanglements of real life, and then you get to part ways, carrying each other’s stories and secrets, and they vanish into the ether, or into the internet, where you occasionally look them up, just to make sure they’re still alive. It’s low-commitment honesty.
“Is your workplace at least supportive of you all? The staff?” he asks. “I mean, in terms of mental health and all that?”
“They are.”
My boss is an extremely laid-back woman named Donna who brings her wife and son to every office party and encourages us to bring our partners along as well. She likes for us to be friends. She encourages a live-and-let-live attitude, and she is extremely competent. She rules over an office composed almost entirely of women, and because the work is so emotionally taxing, she keeps a bottle of bourbon in her desk (strictly for special occasions) but also lets us slack off in between the big pushes.
We just lost one, so she’s giving us all a break, letting us take days off and work remotely, until she decides it’s time to buckle down again. While she’s an understanding, granola-eating, vegetarian reformed hippie, she gets shit done, and she’s damned good at her job. I think half the reason most of us accept our terrible salaries is because we get to work for Donna. I’m able to go to an excessively long wedding celebration because I put the hours in and poured my passion into my work, and she knows that when it’s time for me to be on my A-game next time, I’ll be there, no questions asked.
In response to my remark, Charlie presses his lips together and looks back out the window. The hot air ruffles his dark hair and makes him look tousled and free in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to imagine when I saw him for the first time yesterday.
“How did you get so interested in conservation work?” he asks me.
I rifle through my purse for a moment, hunting for a ChapStick, as I answer him. “When I went to college, I went camping for the first time, and it was just unbelievable.”
“Camping was?” he asks.
“It really was.” I nod enthusiastically. “I’ve always lived in cities. I’d never seen the stars the way they look without city lights, or heard the sound of the forest at night. I just became sort of obsessed with it, and with wanting to protect it.” I laugh a little, self-deprecating. As though the fact that my mom’s opinion that my work isn’t “serious” has seeped into my bones, and I need to stave off criticism before it comes my way.
“That sounds incredible,” Charlie answers sincerely. “It must be wonderful doing something so fulfilling.”
“Do you really work for the bad guys, Charlie?”
He puts his hands up, as if to show that he is unarmed. “I just take orders. But yes, sometimes I have to work for people I’m not terribly fond of.”
“Is it hard? Doing that?”
I can’t imagine doing something I’m not passionate about, but I also have the unbelievable good fortune of knowing that, should something ever go horribly, tragically wrong in my life, there is money someplace that would save me.
“It can be.” The car turns, and then he points ahead of us where the Capitol building looms, large and imposing with its tall cupola. It’s a building I’ve seen a thousand times on the news, but seeing it in person makes it look more grand, more important. “Look, the other bad guys!” he says.
“Oh no.” I feign a shudder. “Should I cover my eyes?”
“You may want to. Old white guys in rumpled suits everywhere.”
I grimace theatrically. “Maybe we should skip this sight.”
Finally, we emerge at the National Mall, and he pays the cabbie while I hop out and dust myself off.
We walk south, across the hot expanse of thin, scraggly grass and gravel. Hot dog vendors pull wet plastic bottles of water from chest coolers to sell to exhausted tourists, pink-cheeked and soaked in sweat. The sun is still high, and its rays threaten to smother us until we become listless, limp-bodied victims of heat stroke.
Charlie points out the museums of the Smithsonian—the American History Museum, the Natural History Museum, the Air and Space Museum. At the far end of the mall, the Washington Monument rises, tall and proud.
“Do you see the color halfway up? How it changes?”
I squint at it in the distance. “Yeah.”
“They had to stop building it at one point, and when they finally finished, they used stone from a different quarry, so it’s not quite the same,” he explains.
“Well, aren’t you just full of facts?”
“I told you I’m a great tour guide. Stick with me, kid, and you’ll be an expert in no time.”
When we reach the water of the Potomac the air is blessedly cooler, and a breeze lifts Charlie’s hair and makes it dance about. Joggers pass us, and a section of volleyball courts host groups of people playing, picnicking, drinking out of plastic cups. We walk along the water with the sort of casual swaying motion of people who aren’t really going for a walk as much as doing something to occupy their bodies while they talk.
“These are the famous cherry trees,” he says. “It’s beautiful in the spring. The whole city goes crazy for them.”
The trees are lush and full, and some of their branches hang out over the water. I imagine it must be lovely when they are in bloom.
“What’s that?” I point across the water.
“The Jefferson Memorial.”
The white, round building rises on the opposite bank, reflecting in the blue of the river. It looks serene. Like something picked right up out of Athens and placed there.
“I love it,” I say.
He nods, his hands in his pockets as he strolls. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, displaying those beautifully lean and strong forearms, and I spend too long looking at them and not enough time on the scenery. “It’s my favorite of the monuments,” he says. “It really is stunning.”
I think about this city of politics, and my bleeding heart. I think about my mom, and her fixation on wealth, and how she needs me, even when she pretends she doesn’t, and the fact that for most of my life, she was all I had. I think about the rift that has grown between us. I hate it.
The truth is, I miss my mom. I miss feeling like I came in first place for her, even when I didn’t. She never made me feel like a burden, or like she wished she was free. When I was in high school, she took me out for pedicures and to lunch at nice restaurants, and she told me she’d been waiting for years to get to do these things with me. That she had been so happy when she found out she was having a girl, because it meant she would have a baby, and then she would have a friend for life. And then I grew up and went to college and decided to stay in Colorado, and I’m not sure she’s ever really forgiven me for choosing a different sort of life from hers.
The sun is lower in the sky, and I need to get back.
“I have to shower and change for dinner.”
“Where are you eating?” Charlie asks casually.
“It’s going to be a busy week, so we’re just eating in the hotel tonight. Keeping it low-key.”
He nods. “Just wear that, then.” He motions to my stained and wrinkled dress.
“I can’t wear this!” I protest. “I look disgusting. I look like I spent the day finger-painting with kindergartners.” I point at the pink smear, and then realize I’m point directly at my crotch and drop my hand.
Charlie stops walking and turns to look at me. “Daisy, you couldn’t look disgusting even if I tossed you in that muddy bank over there, so stop putting yourself down, okay? Please?”
Something passes between us. His intensity when he looks at me tells every cell of my body that it’s time for him to touch me. But we’re friends. I have lots of handsome guy friends. So why does the way he looks at me send heat down to the pit of my stomach and between my legs, and why do I want to touch his lips so badly?
I break the gaze and start walking back up towards the street. “You’re right. Girl power. All women are beautiful. Got it.”
“That’s the spirit, Mini.”
We walk back up towards the street to hail a cab, but something occurs to me, and I stop and spin on my heel to face Charlie.
“Wait!” I say.
His body stiffens in alarm. “What is it?”
“I need a spoon!”
His face twists into one of confusion. “You need…a spoon?”
I nod eagerly. “You know those little silver souvenir spoons? I need to get one.”
“Daisy. Why do you need a little silver spoon? Do you have a grandmother back in Denver that you didn’t mention?”
“No.” I laugh. “I collect them.”
He slaps a head to his forehead. “Of course you do. I can’t believe I almost forgot that you’re a secret grandma.”
“Har har. I’ve been collecting them since I was a kid, and I don’t have a DC spoon yet.”
Charlie walks up next to me and flings an arm over my shoulder, like we’ve been friends for years. “Alright, Mini, let’s get you a spoon.”
The feeling of his arm around me, relaxed and casual but noticeably firm, sets the butterflies in my stomach to work, flapping madly.
We trudge across the ungodly hot National Mall, which I am starting to appreciate less and less.
“Instead of monuments, this thing should be mounted with fans,” I say through panted breaths.
He points at the Air and Space Museum. “I bet they have some jet engines in there. We could put in a suggestion.”
“I wish I had enough time to actually see all of these museums,” I say wistfully.
We cross Constitution Avenue, and leave the mall behind us. It’s Friday afternoon, and the tourists wielding selfie sticks give way to actual Washingtonians walking at fast clips, in and out of rotating glass doors, in dark suits and shoes that click on the pavement. A man swinging a briefcase passes us, giving my shoulder a shove with his own as he goes, talking into his cellphone in an angry, staccato voice.
“Charming people,” I say.
“You weren’t familiar with DC’s famous reputation as the friendliest town in America?” Charlie places a hand at the small of my back, just like last night, guiding me forward through the pedestrians. The easy, casual way he touches me isn’t off-putting at all. It feels natural and protective, and a sensation like melting ice cream runs down my back as I relax into this feeling, even as the zip of attraction I've been fighting almost makes me shiver.
A store called AMERICA! sits on the corner ahead of us. The storefront is decorated in big white stars over blue draping.
“Do you think this place will have your silver spoon?” Charlie asks.
The aisles of the shop are filled with political kitsch of every variety. On one side there’s a section clearly designated for Republicans, while the other side caters to Democrats, and in the center the shelves are filled with politically neutral merchandise.
“What do you think? Too much?” Charlie holds up a T-Shirt that says Home Of The Brave in bold red letters over a man in overalls carrying two machine guns, sitting on top of a cartoon pickup truck.
“Just the opposite,” I answer. “I think you should wear that to your next meeting.”
Charlie’s head falls back in laughter as I mosey towards the back of the store, suppressing my own smile.
I’ve been collecting these little silver spoons since I was a girl. I have a shelf full of them at home. My mom bought one for me when we left New York, and in every city after that, I would buy one and bring it with me when we left. It was the sort of souvenir my mother approved of, and the metaphor of the silver spoon does not escape me. Nevertheless, any time I visit a new place, I get one to add to my collection.
Before we catch a cab back to the hotel, Charlie grips my shoulders and looks at me in the face. He’s not as tall as Rob, but he still has to lean down to reach my eye level.
“You got this, Mini Cooper. Don’t let the girl with the long legs scare you, and don’t let Rob think you regret him, because he’s clearly an idiot for losing you, and he probably knows it.”
He looks so earnest, so sincere, that it startles me. From this vantage point, I can see the gold flecks in his eyes against the green, and the shadow of his beard coming in. His face is not the hard one I thought it was when I saw him frowning at his phone yesterday. When he’s not concentrating, it’s warm. And despite his square jaw, it’s gentle. We’ve been sweating all afternoon, but he still smells good. Like his natural smell is pleasant, regardless of cologne or spray or any other grooming product.
I nod mutely at him, lost for words. “Alright,” is all I manage.