Chapter 9 Charlie
Charlie
“What’s wrong with your face?”
I bite back my reluctant smile at Flossie’s demand. She’s spent all morning sending me suspicious glares, but it took her four hours before she finally broke.
“What do you mean?” I ask innocently.
“I mean,” she says slowly, “what’s wrong with your face?
” She turns to face me, pushing her glasses up on the bridge of her nose and cocking a hip out—all sass, all the time.
Most people who meet her think she’s a quiet bookworm, and they’re not wrong.
But when Flossie’s with her people, she’s a firecracker.
Must be the red hair.
“You never call in sick, and yet you missed two days of work. And now your face—” She lifts a hand, her nail barely missing my nose as she points a finger in my face.
I swat her away with a huff. “My face is normal.”
Flossie lifts her eyebrows. “If you say so.” She turns away, pulling a book out of a cardboard box and dropping it heavily onto the counter, her movements stilted and agitated.
I blow out a breath. “I’m not—It isn’t—” I go still when I stumble on my words. She keeps unpacking books, carefully not looking at me, waiting me out. “Dillon and I broke up.”
Flossie swivels her head like an owl, her mouth gaping and eyes wide behind her glasses. “What?” she gasps. “Why? What happened?”
I shake my head, my eyes burning. I’m not going to cry at work.
I’m not. I don’t think I’m actually physically capable of shedding more tears.
And I refuse to give in to the agony here.
“I don’t want to get into details, but it’s over over,” I murmur.
“I moved into my cousin’s place on Saturday.
It’s temporary. Just until I find somewhere else. ”
Flossi’s hand twitches toward me, like she wants to hug me, but thinks better of it. I appreciate that, because I don’t think I’ll be able to keep a lid on my emotions if she touches me.
“Are you okay?” she asks carefully.
I lift a shoulder and then shake my head.
“I will be.” The words come out more confident than I feel.
Flossie flicks a look of disbelief at me.
Before she can push, the rainstick goes off as someone steps into the shop—a woman pushing seventy and looking for a book about omegas and knots.
She claims it’s for her granddaughter, but the twinkle in her eye tells me she might be lying…
or reading the book before she hands it over.
The afternoon passes by fairly quickly. When it’s almost time to close up, my cheeks are aching from the customer service smile I’ve been forced to wear all day. All I want to do is go home—
Not home. I don’t have one of those. All I want to do is go to Kayla’s place and have a hot shower because there’s no tub in her apartment.
The rainstick goes up while I’m in the backroom, tidying everything up, and Flossie calls, “Charlie? Someone’s asking for you.”
My stomach swoops before logic can rush back in.
Flossie’s met Dillon more than once, and she would never sound so normal if he were the one out there.
There’s such a tangled knot of emotions in my gut, and I’ve got no idea how to loosen it, leaving me filled with dread at the idea of facing him again.
I’ve never loved anyone the way I loved Dillon, all my relationships before him dying fast and swift deaths after only a few months.
With him…I had hope for a future, one we were building together.
Apparently, we had been building it with straw, because all it took was one stiff wind, and it was gone—blown away like it was never even there to begin with.
Straightening my shoulders, I step through the door, plastering that stupid smile back on my face…But it falls away when I see Marisa standing on the other side of the counter. Her blue eyes are already on me, her smile small and uncomfortable as she gives a small wave.
“Hey, Charlie,” she says. “I was hoping we could talk.”
We wind up at a little boutique cafe about two blocks away from Spellbound Books—a place that has been my go-to for coffee and food ever since I started at the bookshop.
Beans & Bolts is a quaint little place that shares a building, a mechanic’s garage taking up the other half.
Both are owned by a husband and wife who manage their own businesses.
I follow Marisa to a table in front of the main window, a server appearing less than a minute later with our coffees—cappuccino for me, and a latte for Marisa.
She smiles up at the young girl right before her mouth parts. “Wow! I’m loving the blue in your hair! It does crazy things for your eyes.”
The server flushes prettily, stammering out a quiet, “Thank you” as she reaches up to pat her hair. She hovers there for another second, just enough time passing for it to grow awkward, and then she rushes away, disappearing through a door past the counter.
“Oh.” Marisa’s eyes widen as she looks at me. “I didn’t mean to embarrass her.”
“I don’t think she was embarrassed,” I murmur. “You do that so easily.” I pick up my cappuccino, sipping at the chocolate-sprinkled froth with relish.
“Do what?” she asks bemusedly, her own cup at her lips as she watches me over the rim.
“Make someone’s day.”
Her eyebrows, just a shade darker than her white-blonde hair, tip down. “I didn’t really do anything. All I did was tell her how awesome her hair is. And she must get that all the time.”
I look back at the doors, where the server still hasn’t reappeared.
“That reaction was not from someone who’s often complimented.
You made her day,” I repeat, swiping a bit of froth off my lip with my finger.
“She might have been having the worst day ever. You know, the kind where absolutely everything that can go wrong, does. What you just did…”
As I trail off, the server reappears, carefully keeping her gaze from sliding our way. But when she walks behind the counter, there’s a little skip to her step that wasn’t there before—a perfect match for the secret smile playing on her lips.
I watch her for a bit before looking away. “I’m not sure how to do that,” I admit, a little shamefaced.
Marisa’s expression creases with confusion. “You can’t compliment someone?”
I sigh, fingers fidgeting with the handle of my cup.
“I want to. I think about it, practice what I would say over and over in my head. But then…the moment passes. The person is gone, or the subject has changed, or something happens, and if I let the words spill out, it would just be awkward. The idea of making someone uncomfortable is enough to have me breaking out in an itchy rash.”
Marisa bites back a smile. “That makes a weird kind of sense, I guess. What happens when someone does it to you?”
My nose twitches. “Does what?”
She sighs in exasperation. “Compliments you. What do you do when someone says something nice about you?”
I don’t blink as I work through what I should say. There’s nothing, really, that won’t make me sound as if I’m fishing for compliments or like some kind of pick-me girl, so I clamp my lips shut. After a beat or two of silence, she sets her cup down, spearing me with a firm look.
“Charlie, what happened on Friday night?” There’s a softness to the question that has me ducking my head.
“What do you know?” I hedge.
“I know that you never came back from the bathroom,” she tells me honestly. “And I think I know why, although no one else is talking.”
I stare across at Marisa, unable to help thinking about everything I overheard and realizing how much Dillon kept from me about his history with her. She’s elegant—the perfect size for what society considers to be beautiful, and her makeup is subtle, her clothes stylish but still casual.
Next to her, I feel frumpy and less. I already felt that way, but now, knowing that she and Dillon have seen each other naked—and fucked—no matter how long ago it was, makes it all so much worse.
He kept this huge secret from me for almost two years, and Marisa was complicit in it, no matter how nice she might seem. And now, I don’t want to think about how I was just a placeholder—someone to keep Dillon’s bed warm while he waited for who he truly wanted.
I smile, thin and wobbly, but going off the look on her face, it might be more of a grimace. “I don’t really want to talk about Friday night.” My voice is stiff. “So, if that’s what this is about—”
“You heard them,” Marisa interrupts gently.
“Right?” She’s searching my face, and whatever she sees has her mouth pinching into a tight line.
“Just because someone says something doesn’t automatically make it true.
They were being assholes, Charlie. All of them.
Bliss is—” Her mouth purses until it looks like she’s sucking on a lemon.
“Bliss has issues. I’m not trying to defend her because what she did was inexcusable. ”
Her cheeks flush pink, something a lot like guilt pinching her expression.
“She wasn’t always like this…or maybe I was just better at ignoring it.
” Marisa’s tone is full of self-deprecating anger that she sweeps away, focusing on me earnestly.
“You can’t take what she said on, Charlie.
You can’t let someone like Bliss drag you down, especially because she was wrong. ”
I slick my tongue over my front teeth, feeling that small gap, before admitting, “It’s not just about that night.
” My shoulders lift in a shrug. “That didn’t help, I’m not gonna lie.
It was…awful. But I’ve also been hearing different versions of the same conversation all my life.
If only I ate better, ate less. If only I knew how to do my hair or dress for my body. ” If only, if only, if only…
“I don’t understand,” Marisa whispers. “Who said all that?”