5. Charly #2
“He wasn’t there. He’s at the coast with her.” He says it flat, and I don’t ask how he knows where his brother is. “I didn’t go through your stuff. I took what looked like yours. If I got something wrong, I’ll put it back.”
I pull out the quilt and press my face into it, and it smells like my grandmother’s house, like home, like before, and not like cedar and hotel sheets and a life that isn’t mine. The gratitude hits me so fast and so hard it scares me.
Because that’s how it started last time, with a man who paid attention.
“Why are you doing this?” It comes out almost mean. “And don’t say decency. Nobody drives across the city into their cheating brother’s apartment for a woman he barely knows out of decency.”
For the first time since the hotel, he doesn’t have an answer ready. He looks at me for a long moment, and whatever the real reason is, I watch him decide to keep it.
“Because somebody should have looked out for you a long time ago,” he says, “and nobody in my family ever did. Not even your own mother. Call it a debt.” He goes to the door. “Get some sleep, Charly.”
I almost let him leave. I don’t.
“Clarence.” He stops. “That thing you said in the hotel. That he’s been your problem longer than he’s been mine.” I make him look at me. “What did he do to you?”
The quiet goes on so long I think he’s going to walk out without answering.
“Goodnight, Charly,” he says, and shuts the door soft behind him.
***
Day five, I come around the corner from the bathroom and stop dead.
He’s in the hallway outside the bedroom in nothing but a towel, water still running down his back, reaching up for something on the high shelf.
And I notice all of it before I can tell myself not to.
The broad shoulders, the muscle moving under wet skin as he reaches, the kind of back a man only gets by working for it, in a gym, on purpose, every morning.
Heat goes through me, low and fast and so wrong I actually make a sound.
He turns around. And he doesn’t grab for the towel or say sorry, he doesn’t rush to cover himself.
He just looks at me looking at him. The air goes tight.
And the worst part, the part I’m going to be furious about later, is that he knows.
He watches my face go red and he doesn’t look away, and neither do I, and neither of us steps back.
“My shower’s acting up at the house,” he says, and his voice has dropped lower. “Should’ve told you I’d be over here.”
“It’s fine. It’s your place.”
“Your place. There’s a difference now.” He takes the shirt off the shelf, the thing he was reaching for the whole time, and pulls it on slow, like none of this is getting to him, like he doesn’t know I’ve forgotten how to breathe. “I’ll knock next time.”
“Great. Good. Yes.”
He walks past me, close, close enough that I get the warm clean smell of him, and he slows down right next to me for a second longer than he needs to.
“You’re allowed to be a person, Charly,” he says, low, right by my ear. “Even this week.”
Then he’s gone, and I’m standing there against the wall with my heart going like I sprinted.
I push the heels of my hands into my eyes. Five days. Five days since the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, and my body picks now to want something. I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything, he’s just a man and I have eyes, and I almost buy it.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand.
I grab it, glad for anything that isn’t the feeling of his breath on my ear, and then I’m sorry I did.
It’s Adam. On a beach somewhere, white sand, blue water, Rebecca tucked under his arm in a bikini, both of them grinning, so care-free, like they didn’t just ruin my entire life. New beginnings, the caption says. Sometimes life surprises you.
It hasn’t been a full week since he blew up my life at an altar, and he’s at the beach. The comments are a wall of hearts and congratulations, and that’s when the floor really goes out from under me, because they think it’s me.
So happy for you two! Beautiful as always. You guys are couple goals. One of his cousins, a woman I sat next to at three family dinners, has written looking gorgeous, can’t wait for the big day with a string of hearts. She doesn’t know. Half these people don’t know.
From the outside, in a bikini, at a distance, my sister and I are the same face, and Adam is just a man on a beach with the woman everyone always saw on his arm. Nobody can tell he swapped one of us out for the other.
That’s the part that takes the air out of me.
It isn’t that he replaced me. It’s that he replaced me with the one person on earth nobody could tell apart from me.
To all these people I’m not even gone. I just got quietly switched, like a part in a machine, and the machine kept running like it never happened.
I’m about to throw the phone when the app feeds me the next one, because of course it does. Another photo from the same beach, posted by an account I don’t know. Rebecca, turned to the side for the camera, one hand on the curve of her stomach, laughing at something out of the frame.
The caption: Can’t wait to meet you, baby girl. Coming this spring. Mommy and Daddy are so ready.
Spring baby.
I already knew when it started. She told me herself, at the altar, her hand on her stomach and her voice cracking around the word birthday.
But knowing it and seeing it announced to the world are two different things.
Seeing her post it like a celebration, like something to be proud of, like the baby wasn’t conceived while I was picking out save-the-dates.
That’s the part that guts me. Not the math. I already did the math. It’s the performance. The way they’ve turned the worst thing they ever did into a photo op, complete with hearts and congratulations from people who have no idea what they’re looking at.
Every Sunday call. Every dress fitting she came to. Every time she squeezed my hand and told me she was so happy for me. She was carrying his child and smiling at me like I was the one who didn’t know what was coming.
I’m still standing there holding the phone, staring at my sister’s stomach, when I hear his car start up outside in the dark. He’s leaving. And I am not ready to be alone with this yet.