20. Charlie
CHAPTER 20
CHARLIE
C harlie stared at the screen of his phone, at the two new voicemails notification that had been there for the past week and a half.
It was no surprise that Olivia had tried to reach him. It was time to list the house, and Charlie had been avoiding her — not taking her calls, not reaching out to her. He had checked online and had seen that the house was not yet on the market, so he knew that she was waiting for him to tell her to pull the trigger.
He couldn’t do it.
There was no excuse for the fact that he hadn’t been able to do it. This had always been the plan, and Charlie knew it. He was supposed to tell her to sell the house the day it became legal to do so. That had happened. They would no longer be violating the terms of the will. If the house sold now, they would get the money, and then?—
And then they would divorce and go their separate ways. That was the thing Charlie hadn’t been able to face.
He hated himself for it. How could he have allowed these feelings to develop? How could he spend every day wondering what she was doing, and every night fantasizing about the scent of her hair and the look in her eyes in the moment before he’d kissed her? How could he fall asleep each night thinking about the way her skin had felt against his?
I can’t have those things again. I can’t.
He couldn’t, and yet he knew that the moment they sold the house, it would become official that he never would. That would be the moment things truly ended between the two of them.
So he had gone to Boston. He had hidden there for the past month so that he wouldn’t have to face reality. She couldn’t sell the house without his consent, which meant that their marriage wouldn’t end. It meant that, even though he knew there was no future for the two of them, the thread wouldn’t be cut.
This is pathetic. I’m pathetic .
He drove back into the Old Prescott city limits for the first time in weeks. The one thing that had managed to get him back here — his meeting with Rogan — could not be avoided. He had to attend, and that was going to mean seeing Olivia — that was, if she bothered to show up.
He had to admit that he wouldn’t have been able to blame her for not coming. After the way he had acted, she really didn’t owe him anything.
But she was there, standing outside Rogan’s office building, and for a moment, she took Charlie’s breath away. She wore her hair loose today instead of in her usual sensible ponytail or bun. It fell in waves around her shoulders, and he couldn’t help but think that she had done this on purpose — that she had deliberately chosen a hairstyle that would punch him in the gut when he saw her.
That was nonsense, of course. She couldn’t have known how he would be affected. She couldn’t have predicted that seeing her like this would throw him back to the moment they had first fallen into bed together, when he had seen her hair billow out like a cloud on the white sheets, when her face had flushed with desire and she had reached up to pull him down on top of her. She probably wasn’t thinking about any of those things.
In fact, she didn’t even look at him for more than the moment it took her to acknowledge his presence. “Your siblings are already inside,” she said.
“We should go in, then.”
She hesitated. “I haven’t spoken to Cait.”
“Why would you have?”
Now she gave him an appraising look. “No reason,” she said at last. “You’re right. Let’s go in.”
He caught her arm. Just the act of touching her made him feel a jolt of electricity. She looked up at him, shock on her face, and Charlie knew she hadn’t expected this.
He hadn’t expected it either. He hadn’t dreamed that he would be this incapable of self-restraint. He had known that it would be hard to see her again, but he had also known how important it was that he keep it together. That was a big part of the reason he had gone off to Boston — he simply didn’t trust himself to be around her.
It seemed like he was right not to have trusted himself. Just a moment in her presence and he was already giving in to his desires.
He released her quickly. “I think we should talk before we go in,” he said.
“Now you want to talk?” Her eyebrows shot up. “Charlie, you do know that I’ve been trying to get in touch with you, don’t you?”
“I know,” he said.
“And you decided that you didn’t want to return my calls or reach out to me in any way.”
There was nothing he could say to that, so he simply nodded. “I know.”
“And now you waltz back into town and you tell me you think we should talk.”
“Well, I do think we should.”
“If you wanted to talk to me, you could have answered my phone calls. You could have called me back. You could have, I don’t know, not run off to Boston. Especially at a time when you knew we had things to discuss. I don’t know what to say to you right now, Charlie. I hate the fact that you’re coming back here and telling me you want to talk to me as if that was your idea when you and I both know that I’ve been trying to talk to you for weeks. As if you think you have to try to talk me into a conversation, because I’m the one who’s been stubborn and withholding! I don’t know how you can even imply that. I’ve been nothing but cooperative this whole time, and you’re the one who ran away.”
She waited.
“You’re right,” Charlie said.
“You’re not even going to deny it.”
“Do you want me to deny it? We both know it’s true. I’m not going to insult your intelligence by pretending otherwise,” Charlie said. “Look, it sucks what I did, Olivia. I get that. I should never have?—”
“God help me, Charlie, if the next words out of your mouth are any version of I should never have slept with you , I am going to get in my car and drive away and the hell with this meeting and the hell with your house. There’s only so many times you can make me feel like an idiot.”
He fell silent. She had him pegged — that was exactly what he had been planning to say.
“I don’t want to hear it,” she told him. “I don’t want to hear what a mistake it was or how much you regret it. I feel stupid enough about the whole thing as it is. It was a mistake on my part as much as it was on yours. I regret it too. But you don’t see me running off to Boston or anywhere else about it. You don’t see me abandoning my responsibilities. I didn’t have to show up here today, you know. I could have hung you out to dry, and I didn’t. You should keep that in mind the next time you get the idea to treat me like garbage.”
“You’re right,” Charlie said.
“What do you mean, I’m right ?”
He turned away. He couldn’t face her while he said the words. “I shouldn’t have taken off, all right? I get it. But I couldn’t help it.”
“Of course you could help it,” she said. “If that’s the best you can do, I’m done with this conversation.”
“So you won’t even talk to me?”
She sighed. “Actually, I do need to talk to you,” she said. “I don’t want to, but there’s something we have to discuss. But after the meeting. I want to get this out of the way.”
She turned and led the way into the office without looking back to determine whether he was following or not. After a moment, of course, he did follow. The sooner they got this over with, the sooner he could retreat back to Boston.
Even though to do so would be to extend his cowardice, he didn’t think he could handle anything else.
Cait, Scott, and John were standing around the outer walls of the room.
“About time you showed up,” Cait snapped as he came into the room. “Why didn’t you two arrive together today?”
“Oh, knock off the interrogations,” Olivia barked back at her. “We don’t have to prove anything to you.”
Cait’s eyebrows shot up — she clearly hadn’t been prepared for Olivia’s response. The truth was, neither had Charlie. He’d seen her lose her temper before, of course, but she had never done it in this room. She had always been perfectly composed, even charming, when they had come to these meetings.
But something had changed. Olivia looked as if she’d had enough of it all.
Charlie didn’t blame her for that. She must have been furious at the fact that she was seeing him for the first time in weeks under these circumstances. He counted himself lucky that she hadn’t just come out and told everyone the truth about their arrangement.
She wouldn’t do that, would she?
He hoped not. But he didn’t know for sure.
If this was ruined now, he knew he’d have only himself to blame.
Olivia marched up to one of the chairs facing Rogan and dropped into it. “Can we get this over with?” she asked him. “I have things to do today.”
“You don’t seem yourself,” Rogan noted.
“She seems like someone not necessarily in love with her husband,” Cait observed.
“Can we make her shut up?” Olivia asked Rogan, ignoring Cait. “Bad enough that she has to be here every time we do this. You know, I’ve tried to be polite. I’ve tried to make friends with her. She has no interest in that. And that’s fine. But do I really have to put up with these pointed comments every time I come to these meetings that I’m required to be at? It’s not my aunt who put this silly stipulation in her will. I have done nothing but cooperate, and still I get her sniping at me every time I’m here.”
Rogan’s expression softened slightly. “I really have no control over what people say and do,” he said. “Everyone in this room is entitled to express themselves. But I understand that you’re in a difficult situation. We’ll try to finish this up quickly.”
Charlie couldn’t help wishing that Rogan would take his time. Even though he’d said he wanted to talk to Olivia, he dreaded the conversation. She had been more angry with him than he had anticipated, though he supposed he should have expected it under the circumstances, and he couldn’t begin to guess what she might want to talk to him about. She seemed to think there was something very important they needed to discuss, and he could tell it was going to be something more than just the sale of the house. If that was all it was, she would have just told him.
Whatever was coming next, he had a feeling he wasn’t going to like it.
So he found himself hoping that the meeting today would drag on, that they would be here for a long time. He even half-hoped that Cait would continue to interrupt things with her usual smart remarks. Maybe having a common enemy would serve to get him and Olivia back on the same side somehow.
I shouldn’t have stayed away so long.
He had done serious damage to their relationship — whatever the nature of that relationship might turn out to be — and he could only hope that he wasn’t too late to manage some small measure of repair. Because now that he saw her again, he knew one thing for sure.
He did not want to lose her.