Chapter 16 Charlie #2
I shattered. There’s no other word for it.
Everything I’d been holding gave way at once and I arched into him and cried out, actually cried out, and I could feel him feel it, feel me coming apart around him, and he drove into me once more, twice, and then his whole body seized and he groaned my name into my hair like it was the last word he knew.
We lay there. Breathing hard. His weight half on me, half beside me, his face pressed into my neck. My legs were still tangled with his. I couldn’t have moved if the house caught fire.
After a while he shifted, disposed of the condom, and pulled me against his chest without a word.
His heartbeat was slowing under my ear. His hand traced a line down my spine, up, down, a rhythm that might have been unconscious or might have been as deliberate as everything else he did.
The room smelled like cedar and sweat and the clean cold air leaking through a window someone had left cracked.
I could get used to this.
The thought moved through me and for the first time I didn’t shove it into the box where I kept the things I couldn’t afford to feel. I held it up to the mountain light. Turned it over. Let it stay.
That was either the bravest or the stupidest thing I’d done since climbing into his car in Roatan.
I woke up to mountain light and an empty bed.
Not empty—recently vacated. The sheets on his side were still warm.
I could hear water running somewhere down the hall, and the smell of coffee was already drifting up the stairs, which meant he’d been up long enough to start the French press and I’d slept through it.
I never slept through things. I was a light sleeper by training and paranoia, and the fact that I’d been unconscious in a man’s bed while he moved around the house said something about how safe I felt here, and I wasn’t ready to examine.
His face in sleep—I’d seen it, briefly, when I’d woken at some nameless hour in the dark. The jaw unclenched. The line between his eyebrows gone. Younger and less defensive, like a draft of a person before all the revisions.
I got to the landing and remembered Shane. Decided the coffee was worth it anyway.
I pulled on his shirt from the floor—the gray Henley—and went downstairs in that and his socks and found him at the stove, making eggs. Again. With the same concentrated expression. With the same results.
He looked up. His eyes tracked from the Henley to the socks then up to my face, and something happened in his expression that wasn’t a smile but lived in the same neighborhood.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning.” I sat on my stool. Accepted my plate. Ate his terrible eggs and didn’t say a word about them and thought: I am in serious, catastrophic trouble.
“You’re not staying in this house.”
Mia said it at three in the afternoon, standing in the kitchen doorway with her arms crossed and the expression she’d been using on me since the eighth grade, the one that meant my objections had been reviewed and found insufficient and I should save us both the time.
“I’m fine here.”
“You’re not fine. You’re turning into one of those women in a gothic novel who wanders around a man’s house in socks touching the furniture. We’re going out. Shane found a place.”
Shane, appearing from somewhere behind her with the inevitable glass of wine: “It’s not a place, it’s an institution. The 39 Degrees Lounge. I have it on excellent authority that their wine list is criminal and the bartender makes a martini that could end a marriage.”
“I don’t want a martini.”
“Nobody wants a martini until they’re having one,” Shane said. “That’s the entire business model.”
Asher was in his study. He’d been there most of the afternoon—calls, emails, the apparatus of his life reasserting itself after two days of being displaced by deck conversations and bad eggs and the other thing that had happened last night that I was not currently thinking about in the presence of his brother.
I looked toward the study door, which was half-closed. I could hear his voice—low, professional, the CEO register. The one that sounded nothing like the voice that had said “I’m here” in the dark.
“He’ll survive one evening,” Mia said, reading my look with the precision of a woman who’d been reading my looks for fifteen years. “Put on something that isn’t his socks and let’s go.”
So I went. Not because I wanted to leave the house but because Mia was right—I’d been circling the same rooms for two days, moving between grief and something that felt dangerously like happiness, and the combination was making me strange. I needed noise that wasn’t in my own head.
The 39 Degrees Lounge was the kind of Aspen establishment that looked like it had been there forever and had actually been redesigned last year by someone who understood that rustic meant reclaimed wood and copper fixtures, not actual decay.
The lighting was warm. The music was low.
The clientele was a mix of ski-season holdovers and locals who looked like they’d been coming here since before the remodel and were tolerating the improvements.
Shane walked in like he owned the place. This was, I was learning, how Shane walked into every place.
We were barely seated at a corner table when a woman appeared beside Shane and punched him lightly on the shoulder.
“You actually came back,” she said. “I owe Jax twenty dollars.”
“Sloane, my love, I told you I’d be back.”
“You tell everyone that. No one believes you.” She turned to us with a smile that was quick and assessing and warm underneath the assessment.
Late twenties, maybe thirty, with dark hair pulled back in a knot and the posture of someone who’d either danced professionally or trained in something that required knowing where your body was at all times.
“Hi. I’m Sloane. Shane’s been texting me all day about this, so I feel like I already know you. ”
“Terrifying,” Mia said, offering her hand. “What did he say?”
“That his brother brought a woman home and it’s the first sign of the apocalypse and I should come witness it.”
“That’s almost exactly what happened,” Mia said. “I’m Mia. This is Charlie. How do you know Shane?”
We moved here last year. I know approximately four people, two of whom are bartenders, so when Shane texted I jumped at the chance for conversation that isn’t about snow conditions.”
She slid into the booth beside Mia like she’d known her for years, and I watched something happen that I’d only seen a few times in my life—the instant recognition between women who operate on the same frequency.
Within ten minutes, Mia and Sloane were exchanging numbers and Sloane was telling a story about her husband that involved a surveillance detail gone wrong and a family of raccoons, and Shane was laughing so hard he was holding the edge of the table.
I drank my wine and let the noise wash over me. It was good noise. The kind that fills the spaces grief had hollowed out—not replacing it, just giving it somewhere else to be for a few hours.
Shane told the proprioception story again—Mia had heard the outline, but Shane’s versions always grew—and added details that were either true or spectacular inventions.
The ski instructor was apparently “a former Olympian who wept openly.” The trash can “had to be retired from service.” Destry had sent Shane a bill for emotional damages, which Shane had framed and put in his bathroom.
“So,” Sloane said, turning to me during a lull. Her voice had shifted to something more private, pitched just for me under the general noise. “How’s the house?”
“Beautiful. Quiet.”
“Yeah.” She traced the rim of her glass. “Those men and their quiet houses. Jax was the same way. These big, controlled guys who build these perfect fortresses and then sit in them alone and call it a life.” She took a sip. “They don’t always know how to let you in. Even after they decide to.”
I looked at her. There was nothing pointed in her expression—no agenda, no advice being dispensed. Just the offhand observation of a woman who recognized the terrain because she’d already crossed it.
“How did you—” I started, and then stopped, because the question felt too raw for a bar with a woman I’d met thirty minutes ago.
“Patience,” she said, like she’d heard the rest of the question anyway. “And being loud about the things I needed, because he wasn’t going to ask.” She shrugged. “They think protecting you from information is the same as protecting you. It’s not. But it takes them a while to figure that out.”
She said it lightly. A throw-away line, general wisdom, the kind of thing women say to each other in bars about men they love. I filed it and moved on. The evening was too warm to follow any thread into the cold.
the way you do when you’re surrounded by people who don’t need you to perform and you can just be whatever version of yourself exists in this moment.
Sarah would have loved this. The thought moved through me gently, without the usual blade.
She would have ordered the most expensive thing on the menu and argued with Shane about architecture and told Sloane she had excellent taste in men.
She would have pulled me aside in the bathroom and said: “This one. This one is different.”
I thought about calling Wyatt. The impulse arrived and I noted it without acting on it—a different kind of progress. Not pushing the thought away. Not punishing myself for thinking it. Just letting it exist, the way Asher had let the silence exist on the veranda.
We closed the bar. Shane tipped absurdly. Sloane hugged me at the door like we’d known each other for years and said, “Come back. Both of you. Jax makes incredible brisket and I need more people in my life who aren’t talking about powder days.”
Mia’s voice was already fading up the staircase. I stood in the entryway and let the warmth settle—the wood smell of the house, the last ember light from the fireplace, the particular quiet of a place that had been full of noise and was finding itself again.
Shane’s phone lit up.
He glanced at it the way you glance at something you weren’t expecting—one beat of attention, then a small, exhaled damn that he mostly kept to himself.
“Something wrong?”
“No.” He tilted his head, reconsidering.
“Maybe. I don’t know yet.” He turned the phone so I could see a headline—a tabloid link, grainy photo, Destry’s name in the caption—then pocketed it before I could read more.
“Devlin. He sends these sometimes. No comment, no context. Just—here, look at this. Figure it out yourself.”
“What do you do with it?”
“Figure it out myself.” The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. “Don’t mention it to Ash. He won’t—” A slight pause, the recalibration of someone choosing the precise word. “He won’t want to know.”
He went upstairs. I watched him go.
Then I turned and saw the light under the study door.
I found Asher at his desk, laptop open, phone beside him, the remains of what looked like a long evening of work spread across the surface—papers, a half-empty glass of water, a legal pad covered in the sharp, compressed handwriting I’d seen on SEAS documents.
He looked up when I appeared in the doorway.
“Good time?” he asked. His voice had the slightly roughened quality of someone who’d been on phone calls for hours.
“Really good. Shane’s friend Sloane is great. Her husband does security?”
Something crossed his face. Quick, barely there—a flicker behind the eyes that in anyone else I might have missed. In Asher, who controlled his expressions the way he controlled everything, it registered like a seismic event.
“Jax Shaw. Yeah. Good guy.”
He said it normally. Easily. And then he closed the laptop, which he’d been in the middle of using, and stood up. The phone on the desk buzzed once and he reached over and silenced it without looking at the screen.
“Come to bed,” I said, because I wanted to and because it still felt new enough to be thrilling and because the alternative was standing in his doorway noticing things I didn’t want to notice.
He crossed the room. Kissed me—slow, warm, and tasting like the coffee he’d been drinking all evening. His hand found the small of my back and rested there with the careful weight I was learning was his specific language for wanting.
“What were you working on?” I asked against his mouth, not because I was suspicious but because I was curious and because asking questions was how I moved through the world and I didn’t know how to stop.
“Nothing important,” he said it into my hair, already guiding me toward the stairs. His voice was easy and his hand was warm and there was absolutely no reason for the phrase to snag on anything.
It snagged anyway.
Not loudly. Not even consciously. More like a splinter—something too small to see that you only feel when you press on the spot later.
Nothing important. A closed laptop. A silenced phone.
The barely-there flicker when I’d mentioned Sloane’s husband.
Each thing, on its own, was nothing. Together they formed a shape I couldn’t quite see and wasn’t trying to.
We went upstairs. His room. His bed. The mountain light through the windows, the same peaks I’d stared at yesterday morning from the guest room, rearranged by angle and altitude and the fact that this time I wasn’t looking at them alone.
He fell asleep first. Face down, one arm across my waist, breathing the slow even rhythm of someone who’d been holding tension for hours and had finally let it go. I lay there in the dark, warm and full and slightly drunk, listening to the house settle around us.
Everything was right. Mia was down the hall.
Shane was somewhere being Shane. The mountains were outside doing what mountains did.
I was in the bed of a man who made terrible eggs and kept an empty house and had called my best friend before I’d known I needed her, and his arm was heavy across my waist and his breathing was steady and the splinter was so small I almost didn’t feel it when I pressed.
Almost.