Chapter 14
Charlie
Mateo is brooding, and I’m so turned on by it I might burst into flames.
The man is pissed off about something, his brow furrowed and arms crossed over his chest, and fuck me, it’s hotter than hell.
He’s been this way all afternoon.
“I’ll trade you three lumber for one ore,” Shaun offers, and like every other time, Jett and Mateo turn down his trade.
They’ll trade with Sofía and Vivian, but if Shaun asks, the answer is always no.
“That’s more than a fair trade,” Vivian says, her head bouncing between Mateo and Shaun.
Jett flicks through their cards and hums. “Look, dude”—he shrugs—“we don’t need any lumber.”
Mateo stretches his arms over his head, leans back in his chair, and glares at Shaun like he’s the singular cause of climate change.
What the fuck is his problem, and why am I physically responding to his pissy behavior?
Shaun sighs, then rolls the dice .
“I didn’t expect such harsh competition.” He chuckles. “I was hoping to impress you by winning.”
Impress me?
Oh my god…is he flirting with me?
My brain flies through past events. The offer to play board games but excluding Mateo. Sitting close to me at dinner. Offering me a drink and demanding I be his partner.
Shaun fixates on my lips, and my jaw slackens.
Holy shit, he is flirting with me.
The realization forces my attention to Mateo, whose scowl deepens, and I jerk away from Shaun, increasing the space between us. A tingle ripples along my arm from the intense glare on Mateo’s face.
No man has any business looking this sexy with a scowl. The fabric of his ivory button-down pulls taut against his broad chest and his fists flex open and closed as he surveys the board.
I squirm in my seat.
Mateo’s once-infuriating competitive nature is now doing absurd things to my brain chemistry, creating the impulse to maul him with my mouth.
It’s a highly concerning urge.
The game ends, and to no one’s surprise, Jett and Mateo win by a landslide.
“Catan Kings,” Jett yells. “Get this on film, Doug.”
Doug moves around the table, recording the board and Jett’s celebration, before returning to his laptop. The gloating winners clean up the board as Vivian shakes her head in amusement.
“I knew that goober was going to win,” she says, leaning back and running her fingers through her short pixie cut. “My girlfriend, Amber, loves his channel. She’s jealous that I get to spend three weeks with him. ”
A shadow falls over me, and I peer up at Shaun, who hovers beside my chair. “I was going to watch the sunset on the deck, if you want to join.”
The words are a suggestive whisper, an invitation to spend time alone, but my stomach roils as I clock Mateo with an incorrigible frown. With a shake of his head, he disappears, and I want to chase him down.
I can’t shake the feeling I’m the cause of his anger, only I don’t know what I did.
There’s been no teasing today, no back-and-forth.
The morning was productive, the two of us working in a comfortable silence until I earned a piece of chocolate.
But something shifted this evening, and while it was hot, now I’m in my head. What did I do to upset him?
I shake my head. “I’m going to head to bed, but thank you for the offer.”
“Next time,” he says, his hand brushing my shoulder, and I wiggle off his touch when he’s out of sight. I wait with bated breath for Mateo’s return, but when it’s clear he’s not coming back, my anxiety takes over.
With a quick goodbye to Sofía and Vivian, I search for Mateo, hoping his mood has nothing to do with me.
My fingers stiffen as my anxiety rages while I wait for Mateo to exit the bathroom. The minutes tick by, and my rogue emotion stake over, tears pressing against my eyelids.
When it all becomes too much, my body short-circuits and I cry. It’s horrifying.
The door finally creaks open and Mateo appears, his shorts slung low on his waist, revealing the sculpted expanse of his chest and a soft peppering of chest hair between his pecs.
When he notices me sitting on the edge of the bed, his jaw clenches.
I ignore the pang beneath my diaphragm.
“I thought you’d be with Shaun,” he mumbles, moving around the room with a storm cloud over his head.
“Why would I be with Shaun?”
Mateo lets out a disbelieving, bitter laugh. “I thought you liked him.”
“He’s nice.” I shrug, then blurt out, “Are you mad at me?”
I never thought I cared about his opinion of me, but maybe it’s the opposite, because as Mateo silently moves around the room, I’m embarrassed by how deeply I want him to like me.
“No.”
So, yes.
The tears I tried to banish spring back as I choke out, “I-I thought we were…changing.”
I don’t have another word to explain the shift between us or to describe how I feel around him.
When he’s around, my chest bangs with a sensation similar to the anticipatory fall of a roller coaster.
It’s terrifying, the power he holds over me, and I want to hide from it and chase it simultaneously.
“Do you see me, Charlie?”
When the silence stretches and morphs, anguish flares in his eyes, but I don’t understand—the question or why he’s looking at me with despair and resignation.
“I—I don’t know what you mean.”
He nods, clicking his tongue. “I didn’t think so.”
My heart squeezes as the room falls quiet.
“I’m tired,” he says, fluffing the pillow wall and sliding into bed. My body is rigid and disconnected from my brain as I mindlessly shuffle around the room. Mateo clicks the light off, and I slip into my pajamas, emotion clogging my throat.
“Do you want to watch TikToks?” I ask in the darkness, feeling bold enough to speak.
We’ve watched them together every night since we arrived, and right now, when my emotions are volatile, I need a sense of normalcy.
“Not tonight.” He pushes against the pillows, securing them, and then rolls to face his back to me. His breathing evens out while I stare up at the ceiling.
The blatant dismissal strikes like a barb to the heart.
The darkness consumes me, letting every awful, self-deprecating thought creep in until I’m swimming in reasons why he hates me. Why I’m not good enough and never will be. Why I’m unlovable.
Tears track down my cheeks, soaking the pillow. And on soft feet, I slip out of bed, snagging a sweatshirt and heading to one of the private office spaces. The FaceTime ringtone fills the air while I swipe away the tears, the only evidence I’m impacted by Mateo’s behavior, that I’m hurt.
I know what’s happening, why I feel this way, but I can’t say the words out loud and make it real.
It’s one a.m. on the East Coast, but I pray Amy is awake, because right now I need my best friend. I need to hear her voice, and I wish I didn’t depend on her so much, but I need her to help me work through my muddled thoughts.
I’ve always put too much of my emotional baggage on Amy’s shoulders, but I can’t always work through it on my own without shutting down.
Amy’s face pops onto the screen, her pink hair fanned out on a pillow. “What’s up, Charles?”
A sob rips from my chest at her familiar smile, and the signal between my brain and mouth disconnects as everything I’m feeling bubbles to the surface .
“I think—and Mateo. Well, the thing is—he’s upset, but I don’t know why, and now my brain is scrambled eggs because I don’t know how I feel or how he feels…”
The words are a string of incoherent nonsense.
I have no idea how to arrange my thoughts. Everything between Mateo and me before this trip was black and white. He was the annoying thorn in my side, put into a definable box, but now everything is gray.
Uncovering this new side of him—the version that leaves chocolate and touches my scars like they’re special to him—is a discovery akin to people in the 1600s learning Earth is neither flat nor the center of the universe.
Life-altering.
“Are you high?” Amy sits up, a blanket falling off her chest until I’m eye to eye with her pierced nipples. “I didn’t understand a single word you just said.”
I’m unfazed by her nudity. After a night of pounding back wine coolers and watching true-crime documentaries, we decided we needed to know what the other’s boobs looked like in case it was the only way to identify our bodies after a gruesome murder.
A large hand moves into view of the camera, covering both of her breasts, and a smug smile blooms on her face.
“Ames…are you with a man right now?”
A deep, very British accent says, “As nice as it is to see you again, Charlie, please get to the point so she can get back to the man lying in her bed.”
For a split second, my predicament fades away as I squeal, “ Oliver ?”
Amy nods, her eyebrows wiggling, before shifting to Oliver, who, after a moment of silence, releases a groan not meant for my ears.
Gross .
“Mateo isn’t the person I thought he was, and now my brain is freaking out because he is actually kind and thoughtful and attractive, and for years, I thought he was this big, cocky asshole, but he’s not the asshole.” I pause before admitting what is an incredibly difficult pill to swallow. “I am.”
The words whoosh out on a breath, and the admission loosens a kernel of guilt in my chest.
“Oh, wow. It’s finally happening.”
“What’s happening?”
“ The reckoning ,” she whispers. “I’ve been waiting for this day. Oliver, will you grab that binder?”
A worn-down t-shirt replaces his arm, and Amy smirks, focused on whatever’s happening in her room.
“Binder?”
“Hold on.” She flips to the first page and begins reading. “Today, we have witnessed a miracle,” she starts in a monotone voice. “Our beloved Charles has blossomed from a girl in hate into a woman in love.”
My jaw flies to the floor.
What the fuck is this?
“On this glorious day,” she continues, “Charlotte Louise Bowen has conceded that Mateo Alvarez is, in fact, not a ‘pain in her ass’ but the object of her skewed affection.”
“Amy, what is this?”
“I wrote this three weeks after we started living together, and I have patiently waited to be right. I played the long game.” She flicks through the pages.
“It has become clear that Charles’s intense, self-proclaimed rivalry is truly a shield for the feelings she harbors for a certain tall PhD student. ”
Oliver snickers in the background as I sit stunned, listening to Amy’s speech.
My first instinct is to deny her words, to bury any feelings I have until they fade away, but there’s no point in lying to her or myself. I am harboring feelings for Mateo, and I was hurt today, enough to call my best friend.
“Say hypothetically, I agreed with your hypothesis, and perhaps have potentially developed a smidge of feeling for Mateo.” Amy beams a victorious smile, and I hiss, “This is all hypothetical!”
“Sure it is,” Oliver chimes in.
I ignore the truth in his annoying British accent. “And let’s say Mateo and I were exploring new territory in our relationship, but now he’s suddenly upset, and I can’t shake the feeling I did something to cause it.”
“All hypothetical?” Amy cocks a brow.
“Yup.” I pop the p , and she gives me a knowing look.
“Did you say anything?”
“I-I don’t think so. We were fine. He’s Willy Wonka, Amy.” I drop the truth bomb, letting it explode between us.
How many times have I jokingly said I would marry whoever was my chocolate fairy?
“ Oh .”
“He brought the chocolate on the boat for me,” I whisper. “He’s being so fucking kind that I don’t know how to act anymore! But now he’s turned into this…this different person, and he barely spoke to me after board games, and we didn’t watch TikToks.”
That stings the most. It became a nightly routine for us and the best part of my day, when Mateo is mussed and ready for bed. I like when it’s the two of us.
“So you’ve been watching TikToks, and now…?”
“Nothing,” I say. “And when I asked him if he was upset with me, he said, ‘Do you see me, Charlie?’ What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh. That is not good.” Amy shakes her head.
“What do you mean, it’s not good ?”
“Do you see him, Charlie?” Oliver asks.
“I don’t know what that means,” I scream .
“Who do you look for first in a room?” he asks, and it all clicks. Oh, shit. “I think she sees him,” Oliver says, and the walls close in on me. My lungs constrict, and the beginning stages of a massive spiral begin. Sweaty hands. Shallow breaths. Racing thoughts.
“Uh…Charles, don’t get weird when I ask you this—”
“I won’t get weird. I’m not weird.”
My head does an odd jerking motion, which does not validate my declaration.
Do you see me? Do you see me? Do you see me?
His words replay on a loop in my mind. He’s all I see, and it’s infuriating and terrifying, and I’ve never felt so utterly consumed by someone before.
“Do you have a crush on Mateo?”
“ What ? No!” I don’t know why my first reaction is to deny my feelings, but the words are shrill and unbelievable.
“I’m just asking because you’ve spoken about him every day since we’ve met, and your eye is doing that twitching thing when you’re upset and bottling it up.”
She shrugs, her pink hair bobbing. I hate when she does that annoying best-friend thing where she sees straight through my bullshit.
“Ugh. Fine. Maybe I do. But it doesn’t matter because he will barely speak to me. I’ve finally begun to like him, and now he hates me.”
“Maybe apologize,” she offers. I open my mouth, and she lifts a hand. “Even if you don’t know what you did wrong. It could help.”
“You’re right.”
“I know,” she preens. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, there is a very hot man lying naked in my bed.”
“You think I’m hot?” Oliver teases.
Bleh.
“Go. ”
At least one of us is going to have a good time tonight, because I sure as hell am not going to while I practice my apology speech.