Chapter 17
CHARLOTTE
He showed up at six-thirty.
Charlotte knew this because she'd parked across the street from Nick's at six-twenty-five, telling herself she was early because of traffic and not because she'd changed her outfit multiple times and left her apartment before she could change again.
She was wearing jeans, a white blouse she'd borrowed from Kate, and the silver hoop earrings she'd bought herself the week she signed her lease in Sunnyside.
She watched Dominic walk up the sidewalk. He was wearing jeans too — she'd never seen him in jeans during their engagement, not once — and a navy henley pushed up at the sleeves. No blazer. No cufflinks.
He went inside. She could see him through the window, sliding into the same booth they'd shared the night of the soup incident. He sat on one side, left the other open. Didn't check his phone. Just sat there, waiting for her.
She sat in her car for another minute. Breathed. Then she went in.
"You're early," she said, sliding into the booth across from him.
"You're on time."
"I'm five minutes late."
"I didn't notice." He had noticed. She could tell by the way his shoulders dropped when she sat down, a release of tension she wasn't supposed to see. He'd been worried she wouldn't come.
The waitress appeared, the same woman from last time. She looked between them, registered the change in atmosphere, and grinned.
"Well, well. You two again. What'll it be, hon?"
Charlotte ordered a grilled cheese and tomato soup. Dominic ordered a burger. The symmetry wasn't lost on either of them.
"So," she said. "This is a date."
"This is a date."
"What do people do on dates? I've forgotten. It's been a while."
"I think they talk."
"We talk every Thursday."
"About budgets and showcase logistics. I want to know about you." He leaned forward, elbows on the table. It was casual, none of the polished posture she'd spent six months sitting across from. "Tell me about Lake George."
She blinked. "What?"
"Lake George. You told me about it on our third date — your dad driving your family up in a car with no air conditioning, gas station sandwiches, swimming until dark. I didn't listen. I was on my phone." He met her eyes. "I'm not on my phone."
She looked at the table. At his hands, folded, still. At the phone that was nowhere in sight.
"It was the summer I was nine," she said. And told him.
She told him about the car, a maroon Buick with a tape deck that only played the left speaker.
About her dad singing along to Billy Joel with the windows down because the AC had died on the Taconic, and her mom navigating with a paper map because they didn't have GPS and didn’t trust her phone.
Charlotte in the back seat with her legs stuck to the vinyl and a juice box she'd been rationing since Yonkers.
She told him about the lake. The cold shock of the water, the green smell of it, how the light came through the trees in the late afternoon and turned everything gold. Her dad teaching her to skip stones. Her mom reading a paperback on a towel, sunglasses pushed up on her head, laughing at nothing.
"We stayed until dark," she said. "We ate gas station sandwiches on the hood of the car and watched the stars come out. My dad said, 'This is the good stuff, Charlie. Remember this.' And I did. I remember all of it."
Dominic was quiet when she finished. He’d been listening intently, with his whole body.
"What kind of sandwiches?" he asked.
She laughed. "That's your question?"
"I want the details."
"Turkey and Swiss. From a Mobil station. The bread was stale, but they were the best sandwiches I've ever eaten."
He smiled. It started slow and moved across his whole face, the one she'd seen for the first time in this same diner weeks ago, the one that made him look like a man she'd never met.
He asked her more questions. They weren’t the questions he'd asked during their engagement — where did you go to school, what's your class size, how do you like the apartment — surface questions, filling-silence questions, questions designed to show interest without requiring attention. These were different.
“What's the worst part of teaching?” he asked.
“The paperwork,” she said. “The bureaucracy, the testing mandates, the forms that multiply like rabbits. But I love the kids. So I endure the system.”
“What's your favorite book?”
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I read it at thirteen and it rearranged my understanding of what a story could do. I’ve read it six times since.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Elevators,” she said. And then, quieter, “Being invisible. Being in a room with someone who's supposed to love you and realizing they don't see you.”
Charlotte met his gaze. That was the thing she was most afraid of, and she'd lived it. She was sitting across from the man who'd taught her what it felt like.
He didn't flinch. He held it.
"I see you," he said. "I see you now."
"I know," she said. And meant it.
They closed the diner. The waitress refilled their coffee twice and then stopped refilling it, but started wiping down tables around them pointedly.
Dominic left a tip that made the woman's eyes go wide.
They walked out into the warm night, and Charlotte expected — wanted, if she was honest, which she was trying to be — him to kiss her.
He didn't.
He walked her to her building, close enough that their arms brushed twice. He matched her pace, which was slow, because she was stretching the walk, willing it to last.
At her door, he stopped and put his hands in his pockets.
"I had a good time," he said. Like a teenager. Like a man who'd never ended a date before, which was absurd. He'd ended hundreds of dates, probably, in the years before her. But he said it like he meant it in a way he'd never meant it before.
"Me too," she said.
A beat. She waited. He looked at her mouth: she saw him look, saw the effort it cost him to drag his eyes back up, and then he took a half-step back.
"Good night, Charlie."
"You're not going to kiss me?"
The question escaped before she could catch it. She watched his expression shift. Surprise, then want, then a control so deliberate she could almost hear it click into place.
"Not tonight," he said.
"Why?"
"Because I rushed everything the first time. I'm not rushing this."
She stood on her stoop, watching him walk to his car. Frustrated, charmed and something else she didn't have a name for. A feeling that sat warm in her chest. He was courting her. For real, this time.
The Friday dates at Nick's became a rhythm.
Every week, same booth, same waitress. Her name was Gloria.
She'd started calling them "the regulars" and saving them extra pickles without being asked.
Charlotte ordered the grilled cheese. Dominic ordered the burger.
They talked for hours, and every Friday he walked her home and didn't kiss her, and every Friday the not-kissing drove her a little more insane.
Until the third Friday, when she grabbed his jacket on her stoop and kissed him herself.
He immediately kissed her back with a hunger that contradicted every gentlemanly exit of the past two weeks.
She pulled back, breathing hard, and said, "If you were waiting for me to make the first move, congratulations, it worked. "
"It wasn't a move."
"It was absolutely a move. It was a good one, and I hate you a little for it."
He grinned. God, he was handsome. She kissed him again.
After that, the kissing became part of the rhythm too. At her door, in the diner parking lot, once in the school hallway after a Thursday meeting when she'd been sure no one was watching.
But he didn't press for more. He didn't invite her to his apartment, didn't suggest they go somewhere private, didn't let his hands wander past her waist or her hair or her shoulders.
He was drawing a line and holding it, and she understood why.
The last time they'd been together, he'd moved her into his apartment within weeks, absorbed her into his life like a current taking a swimmer, and this time he was letting her stand on her own shore.
Until the Friday he walked her home after two hours at Nick's and she kissed him on the stoop and didn't stop.
The kiss deepened. His hand found the back of her neck, her fingers twisted in the front of his henley, and the sound she made against his mouth was loud enough that he pulled back and glanced down the hallway.
Empty. The fluorescent bulb on the landing below was out, the stairwell dim and quiet.
Just the two of them and the muffled bass of someone's television through a closed door.
"Charlie," he said. A warning. Or a question.
She pulled him closer. Kissed the corner of his jaw, the spot below his ear, felt his breath catch. "Don't leave yet."
His forehead dropped against hers. She could feel the fight in him: the line he'd drawn, the discipline he'd been holding for weeks.
His hand was on her hip, his thumb tracing the strip of bare skin between her jeans and the hem of her blouse, and even that — just his thumb, just that inch of contact — was making her dizzy.
"We're in a hallway," he said.
"I know."
"Your neighbor's door is ten feet away."
"She's eighty-two and goes to bed at seven."
He laughed. It was low, strained. She kissed him again, and this time she took his hand from her hip and moved it. Down. Over the front of her jeans, pressing his palm flat against the seam, and his whole body went rigid.
"Charlie." Her name in his mouth, rough and undone.
His fingers found the button of her jeans. The zipper. His hand slid inside — warm, deliberate — and when his fingers found her center she dropped her head back against the door and bit down on her lip to keep from making a sound that would wake Mrs. Papadopoulos and her four cats.