Peak District, One Year Earlier #2
“Yeah, it was nowhere near grand enough—‘alive’ needed caps lock, a distant stare, some gesticulating at the very least,” Fearne said, twisting in her seat. “Did we not order cakes?”
“You didn’t say you wanted cake,” Charlie pointed out, already knowing this was not going to matter.
“Millionaire shortbread!” Fearne yelled as she headed to the till.
Oliver and Charlie watched her go.
“She’s going to come back with something else,” Charlie said.
“Oh, I know.” Oliver gave Charlie a little secret smile. “Hi,” he said. “Thanks for coming today.”
“Of course!”
They kept smiling at each other for a while, Charlie’s wide and goofy, Oliver’s small and smoldering. He really was gorgeous. And hers.
“You look cute in the mornings,” Oliver said.
“No, I don’t,” she said. “I look headachy and cross. It’s not my fault, it’s just how my face wakes up. I’ve tried a silk pillow, but there’s nothing doing.”
“Muffins!” Fearne said, plopping back into her chair and plonking a large tray of baked goods in the middle of the table. “I got every kind. Even the oaty one. Though I don’t want that one. Looks bird foody. Oh my God, Oliver, what’s that you’re wearing?”
Oliver blinked at her with the patience of a man who had been friends with Fearne long enough to expect this sort of treatment.
“Oh, it’s an air of celebrity!” Fearne said, with a cackle.
Charlie grinned into her coffee cup, good mood blooming. Screw three a.m. Charlie—these two glorious humans were surely all she would ever need. Who was she to long for more?
—
The next weekend, Charlie was hauling spare bike wheels into the boot of her car and examining her face idly in the window of her downstairs neighbor’s flat. Mornings definitely didn’t suit her.
“Best girlfriend ever,” Oliver said, kissing her on the cheek as he passed her his bag. “First prize. Every time.”
Charlie glowed. Oliver had never learned to drive, and since they’d gotten together, she had taken charge of ferrying him to competitions across the country.
Oliver competed at a higher level than Fearne—he had a sponsorship deal now with an energy drink company, and talked about giving up temping in pubs and going full-time—so there were quite a few of these races, but Charlie didn’t mind.
She tended to stay in the car, watching the setup through the window.
She would bring a thermos of her special coffee from home and a library book, with its fingerprinted, laminated cover, the serrated edges digging into her palms.
“Did you get any sleep last night?” Oliver asked as they settled into the car.
She shook her head, starting the engine. “Some,” she said. “It was all right.”
Charlie’s sleeping patterns had been a major point of conflict with Berty.
During her spells of insomnia, she would feel almost stiflingly claustrophobic, lying there still as a corpse with her eyes wide open.
But if she allowed herself to roam, she’d wake him, and he’d huff about it.
Oliver was so chilled out, in contrast—he’d just head back to his place if she was struggling to sleep. He made everything easy.
“You binge-watch Grey’s Anatomy again?” he asked, with one of his tiny smiles.
“Absolutely,” Charlie said, though actually she couldn’t even remember what she had watched—sleepless nights tended to turn blurry the next day. “I’m basically a doctor now.”
She reached for her thermos, then glanced down, fumbling fingers unable to find it in the drink holder.
“Charlie!”
Her head whipped back to the road just in time to catch a white car in the lane beside her with its signal on—she was in their blind spot. She braked hard, eyes flying to the rearview mirror. The white car switched lanes, the driver holding up a hand in apology.
“Oh my God,” Charlie breathed, pressing a hand to her chest. Her heart had already been thundering—now she could feel its beat right down to her toes on the pedal.
Oliver let out a trembling breath. “Are you OK?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, no biggie.”
He said nothing. She glanced at him.
“What?” she said.
“That was quite a close shave,” he said carefully, after a moment.
“Not my fault, though.”
“No, but I just…I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a little while about…You’re not always that careful? With yourself, I mean.”
“Careful with myself? What does that even mean?”
“Like yesterday, on the stairs at my place…”
Charlie frowned, bewildered. Oh, yes, she’d tripped—but she’d always been clumsy. They joked about it: she was the classic rom-com heroine, destined to stumble into some charming man’s lap or spill her drink down the back of his shirt.
“And you trapped your finger in the door, too? Last week. The tiredness doesn’t help, but I do wonder if we need to talk about it,” Oliver said. “The—the accidents. Your concentration always seems to be—”
“Interrupted by my boyfriend? This is our junction, please just let me get in the lane.”
Oliver went quiet, startled into silence, perhaps. She’d snapped more than she’d meant to, but Oliver had never talked to her like this before, and it was making her hot and panicked. She could feel an argument brewing—they never argued, and it felt even nastier for being new.
Charlie drove with aggressive care, indicating loudly and early, checking her mirrors as though she was taking her driving test. Then she stopped doing that, because it felt odd, and actually made it a lot harder to drive.
What did her trapping her finger have to do with someone pulling into her lane unexpectedly?
She simmered resentfully as the satnav’s voice filled the car.
“I’m sorry,” Oliver said, a little wretchedly. He didn’t like conflict, either. “I really didn’t want to upset you, just to say that you seem quite distractible at the moment, and—”
“I am not distractible!”
In fact, when Charlie set her sights on something, nothing distracted her.
She’d been this way with the shop. For months, all she had talked about was retail costs, rent prices, Pinterest boards of decor inspiration.
She’d driven everyone mad with it, even Fearne.
The trouble was, her fixations didn’t usually quite reach completion, which then made the whole business seem less like focused productivity and more like whimsy.
She loved to plan, but actual execution was so much harder.
“I mean distractible like…struggling to concentrate,” Oliver said.
“I’m not trying to be critical, honestly, Charlie, you know I think you’re amazing.
I’m just trying to say I’m a bit worried about you.
” He took a deep breath, turning to look at her properly.
“I wonder if you should go to the doctor.”
“The doctor? What would I say, my boyfriend thinks I’m pathologically scatty?”
“I’d say you’re sleeping worse than when we first got together, and you’re forgetful, less coordinated…”
“I’m just tired! And I’ve always had patches of bad sleep when things are stressful, you know this.”
“What if it’s a brain thing?”
“What brain thing?” Charlie said, eyes wide. “Being a busy woman, that brain thing?”
“No, like…a tumor.”
“What?” Charlie said, with an incredulous laugh. “Where is this coming from? I’m fine. If there was something wrong with me, don’t you think I’d want to fix it?”
“I don’t know. You’re not really a thinking-about-the-future kind of girl,” he said, voice soft, as though the sentence already held the apology he knew would need to follow it.
Charlie blinked in shock. Is that how he saw her?
Nobody, surely, could live in the moment less than Charlie Jones.
She thought constantly of the family she wanted; she built and rebuilt her future a thousand times a day.
Why did he think she had those Google Alerts set about the Isle of Ormer?
Why did he think she talked so much about her childhood, how unloved she had felt, the cruelty in how her adoptive parents had handled the death of her birth parents?
Her eyes pricked with tears. She had not had to explain these things to Berty.
He had known her for so long, and so deeply.
It was exhausting trying to start a life over with someone new—like finding yourself logged out of everything, with no clue to your passwords.
“Believe me, Oliver,” she said, voice sharp now, “if anything threatened the future I want for myself, I wouldn’t hesitate to deal with it.”