16. Charly
— ? —
Charly
I kissed him.
He didn’t kiss me. I grabbed his jaw, pulled him down, and kissed him, in a dark hallway at a charity event with way too much champagne in me and the poor man basically wearing his whole heart on his face.
And it was good. It was so annoyingly good that my brain just turned off for a solid three seconds and my whole body went yes, finally, and now I’m pulling back and looking at his face and oh God what did I just do.
I don’t even know why I did it. There wasn’t a plan.
My hand just came up and grabbed him and the rest of me went along with it.
And okay, here’s the thing I’m not going to want to admit later: it felt amazing.
Not even in a fireworks way, more like there’s been this itch in the back of my brain for weeks, this thing I couldn’t reach and couldn’t stop poking at, and kissing him just scratched it.
Everything in my head went quiet for a second. Like, oh. So that’s what I needed.
Which is bad. That’s so bad. You don’t get to feel that about your fake fiancé who happens to be your ex’s brother and still tell yourself you’ve got this under control.
His eyes are still closed. His hands are still where they were, one on my waist, one on the wall beside my head, and when he opens them he looks completely undone. Just gone.
“I’m sorry.” It comes out way too fast. “I shouldn’t have done that.”
He just stands there. His mouth opens and then closes and then opens again and nothing comes out, and I’ve never seen this man lost for words before.
I just short-circuited Clarence Carrington. The man who always has a comeback for everything is standing in front of me with his mouth open and absolutely zero words coming out of it.
Any other night I’d enjoy that. Right now I need to get out of here before I do it again.
“I need a minute.” I press my hand against his chest and push back gently. “Just give me a minute. I’ll be right back.”
“Charly, wait...”
“One minute. I promise. Don’t follow me.”
I turn and walk toward the bathrooms and my legs are working but they don’t feel connected to the rest of me, and my lips are buzzing, and I can still taste him, and what the hell was that.
The bathroom is empty. Thank God. One of those fancy ones with the good lighting and cloth towels and a little basket of mints nobody ever touches. I lock myself in and grip the sink and look at my own face in the mirror.
My lipstick is gone. Not faded. Gone. My cheeks are flushed and my eyes are too bright and my mouth is puffy and pink and very obviously just been kissed.
I press my fingertip to my bottom lip. Tender and a little raw. The kind of raw that doesn’t come from a polite kiss. That comes from the kind where nobody’s thinking about anything except more.
And I’m smiling.
I’m standing in a bathroom at a charity event after kissing my fake fiancé who is also my ex-fiancé’s brother, and I’m grinning at myself in the mirror, and I cannot stop.
“Get it together, Charly.” I say it out loud to my own reflection. “You are a grown woman. You’ve kissed many people in your lifetime. You’re not about to walk back out there looking like you just made out in a hallway.”
My reflection looks like a woman who absolutely just made out in a hallway and would very much like to go do it again.
I splash cold water on my wrists. Fix what’s left of my lipstick. Tuck a stray hair back. Take three breaths.
“Okay. We’re fine. That was the champagne and being in close quarters all night and a really good dress.” I point at my reflection. “We’re not doing this. We already fell for a Carrington once and it went horribly. This is a plan. This is strategy. That kiss was a mistake.”
My reflection is not buying a single word of this.
“Fine. It wasn’t a mistake. But we’re handling it. We’re going back out there and we’re going to act normal.”
I dry my hands. Check my face one more time. Walk out.
The party’s winding down but there are still enough people that the room feels alive. Gerald and Margaret are in a corner laughing about a thing. A few donors are doing last drinks at the bar. The string quartet switched to jazz, which is venue code for please go home soon.
And Clarence is across the room talking to two women from the museum board, sleeves rolled up now, collar loosened, glass in one hand, laughing at a thing one of them just said, and my whole chest does this stupid squeeze just from looking at him.
I lean against the wall near the bar and just let myself watch for a second. Not in a weird way. In the way where you’ve been trying really hard for weeks to not notice how hot a person is and then you kiss them in a hallway and suddenly you can’t see anything else.
That jaw. The one I just had both hands on five minutes ago.
The way his shoulders fill out that jacket without even trying.
The way he stands, all loose and easy, this chill confidence that’s just built into him.
His hands when he talks, slow and specific, the same hands that were on my waist ten minutes ago.
I’ve been shoving this down for weeks. Telling myself it’s just the situation.
Just gratitude. Just two people stuck in close quarters with too many feelings floating around.
It’s not. It’s him. It’s been him for a while and I’ve been doing a world-class job of pretending otherwise, and then I kissed him in a hallway and blew my entire cover in three seconds.
Then he looks up and catches me staring, and he smiles. Not the one he hands the donors, not the polite one he keeps in his back pocket for these things. The real one. Slow, a little crooked, aimed straight at me, and my stomach just drops through the floor.
I nod back casually. Not at all like I was just standing here staring at him and thinking about his hands. He holds my eyes for a beat too long, then turns back to his conversation, and I let out a breath I forgot I was holding.
And then he’s moving. Crossing the room toward me, not fast, not making a thing of it, but coming straight for me with that look still on his face, and every casual cell in my body forgets the assignment.
“Hi there,” he says, and stops close. Closer than he needs to. Close enough that I have to tip my head back to keep his eyes, and he doesn’t step off, and neither do I. My mouth still remembers his. That’s the problem with standing this close to him now. My whole body’s keeping score.
“Hi.” Very smooth and normal. A real wordsmith, me.
“You came back.” He says it like a joke, but it isn’t, not really. His eyes drop to my mouth for half a second, like he can’t help it, like he’s thinking about the exact same thing I am. “I had money on you going out the bathroom window.”
“I looked. It was too small.” I reach for someone’s abandoned champagne off the bar ledge, mostly so my hands have a job that isn’t reaching for him again. Because they want to. They really want to. “I keep my promises. One minute, I said.”
“It was nine minutes.” His voice has dropped lower than it was a second ago, and we both hear it.
“You were counting?”
“I count every minute I’m away from you.
” He doesn’t dress it up, doesn’t play it cool, just hands it to me straight, which is the whole problem with him, he never makes me guess.
His eyes drop to my mouth, linger a beat too long to be an accident, and lift back up, and he catches me catching him, and he doesn’t look away and he doesn’t say sorry.
The air between us goes tight as a held breath. “Charly. That thing in the hallway...”
“Don’t. It’s fine.” It comes out quick, and quieter than I want it to, almost a plea. “Don’t say anything about it. If you say something nice right now I am going to do it again, right here, in front of everyone, and then we’re both in trouble.”
A slow grin tugs at one corner of his mouth. “That a threat or a promise?”
“I genuinely don’t know yet. That’s the problem.”
“Okay.” He eases back half an inch, just enough to let me breathe, no push, no wounded face, the way he backs off the second I need him to, which is honestly worse, because it’d be so much easier if he were a little less good about it.
“We don’t have to figure it out tonight. I’m not going anywhere.”
“You’re at your own event. You have everywhere to be.”
“Nowhere that matters.” He says it looking right at me, and my stupid stomach does the flip again.
I open my mouth, no idea what’s about to come out of it, and I never find out, because a man in an expensive vest materializes at Clarence’s elbow with the specific energy of someone about to talk about a wing of a building with his name on it.
“Clarence! There you are, I’ve been hunting you down all night.”
And just like that he gets pulled half a step away, hand on his arm, the man already steering him toward the far doors, going on about catching the Hendersons before they leave.
Clarence shoots me one quick look back over his shoulder, a look that says hold that thought, a look that says this isn’t finished.
I lift my glass at him. Go. Go be charming at the nice man.
And then he’s gone, swallowed into the hallway after the donor, the door easing shut behind them, and the room feels bigger and emptier without him in it. I lean back against the wall and try to get my breathing under control before I do anything insane, like go after him.
“He cleans up nice, doesn’t he?”
A voice to my left. I turn and there’s a woman leaning against the wall next to me, tall, blonde, stupid pretty in that way where she probably rolled out of bed looking like that.
She’s got a champagne flute in one hand and she’s looking toward the doors he just left through with the kind of easy familiarity that says she’s known him a lot longer than tonight.
“Sorry?” I say.
“Clarence.” She tips her glass after him.
“He hates these things, you know. The schmoozing, the small talk, all of it. He’d rather be literally anywhere else.
But he does it because the artists need him to, and that’s just who he is.
” She takes a sip. “He’ll never admit it, but he’s actually pretty great at it when he gets out of his own head. ”
“Yeah, he really is.” I’m trying to figure out who she is. Board member? Donor? Someone’s plus one?
Her eyes drop to my hand. To the ring. Her face does a quick thing, a flash that’s there and gone, and then she smiles.
“That’s new.” She nods at the ring. “Congratulations. You’re a lucky girl.”
“Thank you. That’s really sweet.”
“I mean it. He’s one of the good ones. I know everybody says that about everybody, but with Clarence it’s actually true.
” She turns to face me properly, shoulder against the wall, totally relaxed.
“The foundation, the way he built the whole thing himself, the way he treats the artists. He could’ve just checked out when his family turned into a mess, but he didn’t.
He just put his head down and built this on his own and never once asked anyone to pat him on the back for it. ”
“You know him pretty well.”
“We go back a while.” Her smile shifts, a little softer now.
“I was at the first gallery show he ever put together. Four artists, a rented room above a bar, and Clarence in a suit that was too big for him, walking up to total strangers and getting them to care about people they’d never heard of.
” She shrugs. “I remember thinking, this guy’s either going to do incredible things or burn himself out trying.
” She tips her glass toward the doors. “Turns out it was the first one.”
“That sounds exactly right.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” She finishes her champagne and sets the glass on the ledge behind us. “The suit fits now though. That’s a big improvement.”
I laugh. Real and easy, and she laughs too, and for a second it’s just two women at a party enjoying the view and having a good time.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.” I turn to face her and hold out my hand. “I’m Charly.”
She takes it. Her grip is warm and her smile is steady and open and genuinely kind.
“I’m Celeste.” A beat. “His ex.”