Chapter 27
CHARLOTTE
The drink was making me feel less reserved, more relaxed.
Not in the “someone slipped something into my drink” way.
I still felt like me. Still felt in control of everything, but at the same time, I didn’t feel like I needed to keep every part of me locked down.
My leopard was purring softly in her sleep.
She only slept when I was awake and she trusted the location we were in absolutely.
Needless to say, I can’t remember the last time it happened.
“Where are you from originally?” I asked Knolan.
“Oregon, though originally is doing a lot of work in that sentence,” he said.
“How so?”
“My family’s history is geographically complicated.” He tilted his glass, watching the ice sphere shift. “I run a digital security firm. I work remotely, mostly. I prefer… working environments that don’t require a lot of in-person interaction.”
“Computers don’t have feelings,” I said, though I didn’t know why. It just popped out.
He looked at me sharply.
“I mean that generally,” I added. “They’re quieter than people.”
“Yes,” he said. “Exactly.” Something in his expression shifted, like a lock being turned. “What about you? Before the road trip.”
“Here and there,” I said. “My family traveled around. I have a large extended family.” I chose my next words carefully. “I needed some distance from them.”
I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he didn’t press. He looked at the bar and at the various figures arranged around it, and then he did something that surprised me, he nodded toward the silver-haired woman at the bar. “What do you think her story is?”
I looked. The woman was still reading, still being read by her book, apparently content with the arrangement.
“She made a deal,” I said, because the Hex & Hearth was making me honest in inconvenient ways.
“A long time ago. She got what she asked for. She’s still working out whether it was worth it. ”
Knolan considered this. “The two males in the corner,” he said. “Go.”
I looked at them. They were gesturing with their arms, their fingers moving and twitching like they were adjusting dials or tuning instruments.
“Brothers,” I said. “They argue about everything, because it’s the only language they had when they were young, and they never bothered to learn another.
But they always ended up at the same table. ”
Something shifted in his features.
“What do you think they’re arguing about now?” he asked.
I looked at them again. “The best way to fix a lawnmower,” I said and smiled. Knolan chuckled.
“You?” I said.
He’s quiet for a long moment. “I have brothers,” he said. “Two of them. We ended up somewhere we didn’t entirely plan to be. But we’re at the same table.” He said it simply, without self-pity or performance. Just a fact he’d made peace with.
I looked at the group near the window, the ones who were unnaturally still. “That group,” I said, “is here because this is the only place they can be themselves outside of their home. They’re tired of hiding.”
He looked at them and then at me, and I realized I’d said something too true.
“What are you running from?” he asked. His voice was quiet, careful. I realized he was trying not to spook me.
“That’s a strong assumption.”
“I know.” He didn’t apologize. “You don’t have to answer.”
I turned my glass slowly between my palms. The fire in the hearth breathed low and steady. “Family obligations,” I said finally. “They wanted me to do something for them that I wasn’t willing to do. So, I left.”
He nodded.
“And you?” I asked. “What are you really looking for in those historical documents?”
He looked at his drink. At the ice sphere, slowly moving. “Proof,” he said at last. “That something I suspect is true is, in fact, true and has been for long enough that it matters.”
“Corruption?”
His eyes came up to meet mine. “What makes you say that?”
“Pre-restructuring council records,” I said. “You’re looking at what they were before whatever changed them.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “You know the council.”
“Everyone knows the council,” I said, which was true but also not an answer.
He accepted it. “My brother,” he said, “believes there’s something wrong in the structure. I’m trying to find where it started.”
I thought about the woman who’d answered my call. The voice that was not a council representative but said all the right things in all the wrong ways. The fact that the messages I left in the system never seemed to arrive anywhere.
“I think,” I said carefully, “your brother might be right.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think so too.”
We sat with that for a moment, the fire breathing, the room doing its quiet, ancient work around us.
Then Knolan tilted his chin toward the couple near the bar who were gazing at each other with the kind of uncomplicated adoration that only people who had not had to deal with serious complications yet could. “Those two,” he said. “Their story.”
I studied them. “First date,” I said. “She asked him. He’d been working up to it for six months and she got tired of waiting. He’s been slightly stunned ever since. He’s going to marry her.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she picked a place where they could be themselves with no complications.”
He looked at me sideways with what I was coming to call his almost smile. “Optimist.”
“Deeply skeptical optimist,” I corrected. “It’s a specific condition.”
“I know,” he said. “I have it too.”
The evening progressed, the hearth fire breathed and the drinks continued to be exactly what we needed.
We talked about Oregon. About the coast specifically and the way the fog came in off the Pacific.
He told me it had a different texture and a different smell than Atlantic fog.
We talked about books in the vague way of people who love them but didn’t want to get too passionate about it in public.
He told me about the library’s restricted archive with the enthusiasm of someone describing a treasure room.
I found that enthusiasm so unexpected coming from a man who otherwise held himself so carefully devastating to my heart.
At some point he stopped pushing his glasses up and left them slightly crooked, which meant he’d stopped monitoring himself. He was so cute.
“It’s getting late,” he said, eventually.
“It is.”
Neither of us moved.
“Charlotte.”
I looked at him. His voice had gone husky when he said my name and it sent a small shiver through me.
“I know you’re not staying long,” he said.
“I’m not asking you to. I’m just—” He stopped, then started again.
“Tonight has been…” He pushed his glasses up, then seemed to catch himself.
“I don’t do this,” he said, and his candor hit me harder than anything polished ever could.
“I don’t walk into people and end up having the best evening I’ve had in my entire life.
I don’t know what to do with that, I just know I don’t want it to end”
I looked at the sincerity in his blue-grey eyes behind his slightly crooked glasses and his full lips pressed together like he was bracing for my response. and I felt my chest do the thing I’d been telling it not to do since the bookstore run in.
“I don’t either,” I said.
“Maybe we could figure it out,” he said. “Or not. But together.”
I looked at the fire.
“Let’s go back to the motel,” I said.
He stood when I stood, and held the door, and when we stepped out into the October night, the cold air wrapped around us both. He didn’t reach for my hand but he walked close enough that our arms brushed and neither of us pulled away.