17. Charly
— ? —
Charly
The ER eats the whole day, which is the one thing I can say for it.
Twelve hours where the only thing in my head is the next patient, the next crisis, the next problem I can actually fix.
By hour ten I’ve stopped counting the broken bones and the bad decisions, and I’m grateful for every single one, because a packed board is the only thing loud enough to drown out the splinter.
That’s what she is. A splinter in the back of my skull I can’t dig out, four days running.
Celeste. The pretty blonde at the gala who stood next to me, told me my fake fiancé was one of the good ones, and then dropped the word ex on me like she was mentioning the weather.
“You’ve moved bed nine like three times,” Priya says, leaning over my shoulder at the board. “She hasn’t gone anywhere all shift. You okay?”
“I’m fine. Just keeping things straight.”
“You moved her out and then put her right back. That’s not a fine-person thing to do.”
“I thought she was getting discharged. Then she wasn’t.” I cap the marker and give her the calm face, the one I use when a family’s falling apart in the hallway and somebody has to hold it together. “Nine stays. Four’s the discharge. Go.”
She goes. She also gives me a look on the way out, the one that says she’s filing this to bring up later, and I let her, because the alternative is explaining it and there’s no explaining it.
My phone buzzes against the counter. His name. My stomach does the thing it’s started doing, the little flip I keep trying to file under indigestion.
I read it once. Then again, because I’m a professional.
Come find me when you’re off. We should talk about the hallway. I’ll be up.
The hallway. Four days of neither of us saying a word about it, and now there it is in writing, casual as anything, like it’s a normal thing two people discuss over the kitchen counter.
“Okay, what is that face,” Priya says, slowing down with a chart in her hand. “You’re smiling at your phone. At work. Who are you and what did you do with my charge nurse?”
“It’s nothing. Just a guy.”
“A guy.” She stops walking. “Charly. Two months ago you came in here looking like roadkill swearing off men for the rest of your natural life. Now you’re glowing at a text. Spill.”
I should not tell her. I had a whole plan about keeping this clean and separate, work over here, the mess over there. But she’s looking at me, and it’s been a long four days of holding it by myself, and it comes out before I can stop it.
“I’m engaged.”
The chart nearly hits the floor. “You’re what.”
“Engaged. It’s new. It’s very new.”
“How new? Charly, two months ago you could barely get out of bed.” Her voice goes soft for a second, the climb dropping out of it.
“I honestly thought it was going to be a long time before you let anyone near you again. I figured I’d be hearing about your cats for the next decade.
” Then the volume comes back, because she can’t help herself.
“And now you’re telling me you’re engaged?
Okay, no, I’m happy for you, I am. But you cannot just drop that and walk away.
Who is he. I need everything, and I need it before my break’s over. ”
“It’s a long story.”
“With you it’s always a long story.” She points the chart at me. “Fine. Keep it. But you’re glowing, and I haven’t seen you glow in years, so whoever he is, he’s doing something right.”
“It’s hot in here.”
“It is not hot in here, it’s a hospital.” She’s already walking off, not buying a word of it. “Four’s discharged. Go home before you fall over. And hey. Congratulations, Charly. I mean it.”
And that’s the part that gets me, and she doesn’t even know she said it. She’s grinning like she’s watching a good thing finally happen to me, and she has no idea the whole thing is a story I cooked up at four in the morning. The only true part is the part I can’t tell her.
I finish out the shift. I sign off on a kid’s stitches, walk a scared husband through what the next hour’s going to look like, hand the board off to night charge with every bed accounted for.
Whatever’s happening to me does not get to touch the work.
The work is the one thing I haven’t let him near.
Then I clock out and drive home with my hands too tight on the wheel, going over a conversation I already know I’m going to lose.
***
The guest house light is on when I pull in, and so is the one in the main kitchen, which means he’s waiting up, which means there’s no version of tonight where I slip past and deal with this in the morning.
I find him at the counter with two mugs already out. Of course there are two mugs. He heard the car.
“You’re up late,” I say, which is a stupid thing to say to a man who texted me come find me when you’re off.
“You said you’d find me.” He slides one of the mugs toward me. Tea, not coffee, because he knows I’ve been on twelve hours and coffee would keep me up. He knows things like that now. That’s the whole problem, right there in a mug. “Long one?”
“They’re all long ones.” I wrap both hands around the tea and don’t drink it. “You wanted to talk.”
“I did.” He leans back against the far counter, arms folded, giving me the space of the whole kitchen, and somehow that’s worse than if he’d crowded me. “About the gala. The hallway.”
“You mean the part where I grabbed you.”
“I mean the part where neither of us has said one word about it in four days.” His voice is even, careful, like he’s walking toward a thing that might bolt. “We’re good at a lot of things, you and me. We are clearly not good at this.”
“There’s nothing to be good at. It was a weird night, there was champagne, we were selling the thing and it got blurry. It happens.” The words come out too fast and I can’t slow them down. “We really don’t need to make a thing out of it.”
“Charly, come on.” He says my name quiet, and it stops me. “You don’t believe that any more than I do.”
So I look at the mug. I look at the window. I look at everything in this kitchen that isn’t him, because the second I look at him I’m going to do a thing I can’t take back.
“Just ask me,” he says. “You keep starting to and then stopping. You’ve done it like three times since you walked in.”
That’s mine. That’s my read on him, the one I gave him weeks ago, turned around and pointed back at me, and the fact that he was paying close enough attention to keep it does a thing to my chest I don’t have time for.
So I ask the small question, because I can’t ask the big one.
“Okay, this is going to come out weird, so just let me get through it.” I wrap both hands tighter around the mug. “Your ex talked to me. At the gala. Celeste.”
He doesn’t say anything, so I keep going.
“And look. I know I’ve got no real right to ask you about this. We’re not, this isn’t a real, you know what this is.”
I set the mug down. Pick it back up. My hands need a job.
“But it threw me, okay? I’m living in your house pretending to be your fiancée in front of a whole room of people, and a woman I’ve never met walks up and tells me she’s your ex, and I had nothing. No idea who she even was.”
He’s watching me, quiet, letting me get there.
“So I’d just rather know. If there’s history there that’s still warm, if she’s someone who’s going to keep turning up, I’d rather hear it from you than get caught flat-footed again.”
He goes still, and it’s a different still than before. He sets his mug down.
“Wait. She came up to you?” His whole face changes, and it isn’t guilt, it’s closer to alarm. “At the gala. Celeste walked up and introduced herself to you and I didn’t know about it?”
“You didn’t see her?”
“I didn’t know she was in the building.” He drags a hand down his jaw. “Charly, I’m sorry. I genuinely am.”
“It’s not like you knew she’d be there.”
“If I’d known she was anywhere near you, I’d have told you who she was before she got within ten feet of you. You shouldn’t have found out my ex existed from my ex. That’s on me.”
He exhales, slow.
“And listen, just so you’re not wondering about it. There’s nothing there. Hasn’t been for years. We broke up, she moved to Paris, and honestly I was relieved when she did.” He holds my eyes. “Whatever she showed up for the other night, it wasn’t me. I can promise you that much.”
And here’s the thing that gives me away, the thing I can’t take back even as it’s happening.
I’m relieved.
It hits before I can stop it. My shoulders come down, the breath goes out of me, and it’s all over my face before I can do a thing about it. And he catches it. Of course he catches it. He’s been reading me for weeks now, better than anyone’s read me in a long time.
“Oh,” he says, soft. “Oh, look at that.”
“Don’t start.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said oh. I know what your oh means by now.”
The kitchen’s gone really quiet. He pushes off the counter and takes one step, and all that space I was so glad to have a second ago just disappears, and I don’t back up. That’s the part I’ll think about later, lying awake. He gives me every chance to and I don’t take a single one.
“You were jealous,” he says. Not smug. Almost careful, like he can’t believe it either. “Four days. You’ve been losing sleep over a woman I haven’t loved since before you knew my name.”
“I wasn’t jealous. I was curious.”
“You’re a terrible liar for someone so smart.
” He’s close now. Close enough that I have to tip my head back to keep his eyes, close enough that the warmth comes off him, and his gaze drops to my mouth and back up and he doesn’t bother hiding it.
“Say the word and I’ll step back. I mean it.
Two months and I haven’t taken anything you didn’t give me, and I’m not about to start tonight. ”
The kitchen’s gone still. There’s a little smear of flour on his shirt from whatever he cooked, and a muscle going in his jaw, and his eyes keep dropping to my mouth and coming back, and every wall I spent two months building is just standing there falling down.
I could close it. That’s what scares me.
It’s six inches, and I already know how he kisses, and my body remembers it a lot better than my pride wants it to.
One lean and we’re back in that hallway, except this time there’s no champagne to blame it on and no donors to sell it to and nobody coming to interrupt.
But he doesn’t move. He just waits, holding right there, leaving the last inch for me.
“Back up,” he says again, quiet. “Just say it.”
“No, don’t.” It comes out before I can think about it, low and certain, the truest thing I’ve said all night. “Don’t back up.”
And that’s the thing that gets me. Not a line. Not a move. Just him standing there telling me the truth, that he’s been holding back this whole time because he’d rather want me forever than take one piece of me I didn’t hand him.
Nobody has ever done that for me. Not once in my whole life.
So I hand it to him. I close the last inch myself, up on my toes, both hands fisting in that flour-smeared shirt, and I kiss him.
He makes a low sound against my mouth like he’s been waiting two months to be allowed, and then his hand is in my hair and the counter’s at my back and there’s no champagne and no donors and nobody coming through a door this time, just him and me and a kiss that’s been four days and probably a lot longer than four days in the making.
It’s not the careful version from the hallway.
It’s the real one. The kind neither of us is going to be able to walk back in the morning.
When we finally break, his forehead drops to mine. We’re both breathing like we ran here.
He lets out a breath, eyes still closed. “We’re fucked.”
“Yeah, we are.” I can’t even argue. My hands are still in his shirt. “We really, really are.”
That’s the moment it lands, and it lands like a verdict.
I’m in love with him.
Not the plan. Not the story I built at four in the morning to make Adam back off.
The actual man with his forehead against mine and his hand still warm in my hair, who learned how I take my tea and which stair creaks and that I can’t be crowded, who has wanted me for weeks and never once made me pay for it.
I’m in love with him, and it terrifies me so completely that for a second I genuinely can’t breathe.
Because I did this once. I fell for a Carrington once, and it cost me three years and every dollar I had and my own sister, and I stood in a church in a white dress and learned exactly what it gets you. I swore on everything that I would never do it again.
And here I am in his kitchen at midnight, still tasting him, doing the one thing I promised myself was off the table for the rest of my life.