5. Charlie
Of course Skylar had drawn the seven of hearts.
Charlie turned the seven of spades between his fingers and watched her hold the red card up to the class with the enthusiasm of a woman showing a parking ticket.
Hearts and spades. The universe had a sense of humor, and Charlie suspected the punchline involved him.
When she slid back into her seat, Charlie leaned in. “Looks like we’re stuck with each other.”
“For one hour a week.” She crossed her arms. “Fourteen weeks. Then we never have to speak again.”
“That’s the spirit.”
The rest of the group shuffled chairs and traded seats to sit beside their new partners.
Charlie stayed where he was, taking in the girl beside him.
Dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail that exposed the line of her neck.
No makeup, or so little it didn’t register.
Shadows beneath her eyes and a posture that dared the room to underestimate her.
The effort it took to maintain that kind of vigilance had to be exhausting.
The fact that she maintained it made his chest tighten.
The TA tapped the table for attention and clicked to a new slide. “Final exercise for today. Get to know your partner. I want you to interview each other, then introduce your partner to the class using these three questions. You have ten minutes. Go.”
Charlie turned his chair to face her. “You want to go first?”
Skylar studied the questions on the screen.
1. Name, major, and why take this class?
2. Who shaped who you are today, and how?
3. What’s one thing people assume about you that isn’t true?
He thought her gaze lingered on question two. Three years as starting quarterback had trained him to read what a person’s body said before their actions caught up.
Determination settled on Skylar’s shoulders. “I get to ask first.”
A grin spread across his face before he could rein the reflex in. “Whatever the lady wants.” The phrase had slipped out at the fair too. A line his father used when he was teasing his mother, back when teasing still held affection instead of teeth. He needed to avoid the expression.
Skylar’s fingers hovered over her keyboard, ready to type. The posture of a journalist.
“As you know, my name is Charlie Carnell. My major is business. And this class is required for graduation.”
Her fingers stilled. Curiosity replaced the guarded tolerance she’d been wearing since the card draw.
He held her gaze. “But I’ve been looking forward to this.”
“Really.”
“Is that surprising?”
“I would have thought the star quarterback, son of the man whose name is on the athletic center, could buy his way out of a required course.” The sharpness came quick.
His jaw tightened. He’d built calluses over that assumption years ago.
His father’s name opened doors Charlie never asked to walk through, and every opened door became evidence that he’d never earned anything on his own.
The accusation wasn’t new, but from Skylar the sting was sharper.
“You’d be surprised what money can’t buy. ”
“If you say so.” She lifted her chin.
He studied the angle of that chin, the way defiance sat on her face like armor fitted by a professional. A sentence formed in the notes app in his mind: She wears stubbornness the way other people wear perfume.
“Plus, this seemed easier than learning a new language,” he added. “I have enough trouble with English.”
Her lips pressed together, fighting a reaction, then dropped her gaze to type his answers. “Question two. Who shaped who you are?”
“My mother.” He hadn’t planned to say her name first. Hadn’t planned to say her name at all. But the question carved a straight line to the truest answer he owned, and for once the performer in him didn’t intercept. “She taught me that what you create matters more than what you own.”
Skylar looked up, and the gold near the center of her irises caught the light, the detail that had snagged him at the fair and stuck, the way a sentence he couldn’t get right refused to leave. She stared at him with an expression caught between suspicion and curiosity.
He knew what she saw. The last name that bought buildings and endowed scholarships and stamped itself on every surface his father could reach.
None of those things had come from his mother.
His mother had given him a love of sentences that landed, of paintings that asked questions, of beauty pursued for its own sake rather than for what it could purchase.
“Question three,” Skylar continued. “What do people assume about you that isn’t true?”
“That I had any say in how my life turned out.”
Skylar seemed to wait for more. But more would require honesty he wasn’t prepared to offer to a woman he barely knew, in a classroom where nine other people could overhear.
“That’s vague.”
“That’s honest.” His mouth curved. “Your turn.”
Skylar straightened in her chair. “Name: Skylar Hartley. Major: Photojournalism. And like my partner, I’m knocking off one of my required classes.”
Charlie opened his notes app and typed her answers. Her head snapped toward his thumbs on the screen.
“You can text your football buddies later. If we’re going to be partners, then I expect you to at least pay attention.”
He looked up and let his gaze hold hers without flinching. “I promise, I’m deadly serious about this course.” He turned the phone toward her.
Her name, her major, and her answer glowed on the screen in black text.
“Oh.” Her thumb traced the rim of her laptop. “I assumed . . .”
“Doesn’t everyone.” The phrase came out clipped.
“You can’t blame me.” Her hand brushed her collarbone. “It’s a bit odd.”
“It’s just easier for me.” He tipped his chin toward the board. “Question two?”
The color drained from her face, all at once, like a door slamming shut between the woman sitting across from him and the girl she used to be.
“My grandparents shaped who I am.” She sounded like she was a witness on a stand, reciting facts.
“They raised me after my parents and sister died when I was twelve.”
The girl with the pink hair glanced up. The fraternity guy stopped talking.
Charlie’s fingers froze on the screen. “I’m sorry.
I didn’t know.” The words were inadequate and his throat closed.
He’d asked the question casually, the way people ask about weather or weekend plans, and the answer had landed like a blade between his ribs.
A heaviness spread through his lungs, the kind that came from watching a person bleed and knowing you’d handed them the knife. “Was it . . . a car accident?”
“A fire destroyed my home.” The words came out like a sentence said so many times the edges had been worn smooth. “I was staying at my grandparents’ house that night.”
Charlie recognized the architecture of the silence that followed. The load-bearing walls she’d built around the rest of the story, because he lived inside a similar place. A different floor plan, but the same foundation.
He’d been an eight-year-old boy choosing football to keep his parents from fighting. She’d been a twelve-year-old girl waking up at her grandmother’s to learn she was the only one left. Both of them had been children making sense of devastation too large for a child’s frame.
“Question three.” She needed to move on, and he understood. Standing still near the thing that broke you was its own kind of danger. “What do people assume about me that isn’t true.”
Her gaze dropped to her laptop, and when she spoke, the armor thinned.
“That I’m doing photojournalism just because my mother did. That I got this scholarship because of her legacy, not my own work.” A pause. Her shoulders dropped as though a wire had been cut. “The truth is, I love photography. Not because of her. Because of what a camera can do.”
The clinical distance dissolved and warmth replaced the flat delivery, a current that pulled her forward.
“A photograph can tell a whole story without a single word. There’s a picture of my parents on their wedding day, my mother mid-laugh, my father looking at her like she hung the moon. Anyone who sees that image understands exactly what they had.”
Charlie stared at his phone. His fingers gripped the case hard enough to imprint the seam into his palm. She’d bypassed the surface question and gone straight to bedrock, and the rawness of the detour left him unable to type.
“That’s not what people assume about you.” He met her gaze. “That’s what you love.”
She held his gaze until the sound of hands clapping broke the stillness and the TA announced time was up.
One by one, partners stood and introduced each other. Charlie half-listened until his turn.
He rose from the chair and faced the room without notes. “Skylar Hartley is majoring in Photojournalism. She’ll tell you the scholarship is because of her mother’s legacy, but I think that’s only the first chapter.”
He hadn’t rehearsed the line or shaped the thought into careful language the way he did with team speeches and toast-night anecdotes. The writer in him simply spoke.
“When she talks about photography, her whole face transforms. It’s like someone stepping from shadow into sunlight. She doesn’t just study images. She speaks their language. I suspect she sees truth where the rest of us only see surfaces, and I think her writing will teach us to look closer.”
He sat. The applause registered as sound without meaning, because the only reaction that mattered was the one he refused to look for. He kept his gaze on the table and his hands flat against his thighs.
Skylar stood. “I’m pretty sure Charlie Carnell needs no introduction.”
The frat guy whooped. “Go Titans.”
Charlie lifted a thumb in acknowledgment. The expected response. Inside, he waited for the deflection.
“Yes, go Titans. But Charlie is about more than football. Or his business major.” She glanced at her laptop. A pause followed, the kind that lived between two versions of a sentence, and for once he couldn’t read what she might say next. He leaned forward in anticipation.
Skylar curled a strand of hair behind her ear. “His mother taught him that creation matters more than possession, which . . . surprised me. I made assumptions about him before today.” Her grip tightened on the laptop. “I’m beginning to think a lot of people do.”
She sat down and refused to meet his eyes.
A pressure built behind his sternum, slow and unfamiliar. She hadn’t exposed him or traded on his wealth, and the restraint cracked a seam in the performance he wore every time he walked into a room on this campus.
Charlie leaned close enough that his breath moved a strand of hair near her ear. “Thanks.”
They were dismissed at 3:15. Skylar shoved her laptop into her bag with the efficiency of a person calculating travel time in her head. Charlie stepped between her and the door. “Poppy says you haven’t opened the camera.”
Her chin rose. “It’s too expensive. I can’t accept—”
“A gift doesn’t carry strings.” His jaw flexed. “If you want to donate the thing to a second-hand shop, that’s your choice. But I’m not taking the camera back.”
“Fine. The thrift store on Church Street will appreciate your generosity.”
“Fine.” He stayed where he was. “But doesn’t a photojournalism student need a camera? Isn’t that kind of a basic requirement?”
“I’ll survive.”
Two words. An ache settled low in his chest at her certainty. Survival as philosophy. He understood that language better than she could possibly know.
Her phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen and sighed. “Jake.”
Charlie walked away, down the hall, out into the September afternoon where the oak trees lining the quad threw long shadows across the brick path. Away from the name of another man on her lips and the feeling it put in his chest.
His phone buzzed as he reached the parking lot.
Poppy:
The girls want to do facials for the photoshoot on Sunday. Raincheck on dinner on Sat night?
Charlie typed back a thumbs-up. He pocketed his phone and walked to his car.
In the driver’s seat, he opened his notes app and typed.
A girl dependent on her independence, with gold in her eyes. A girl who built her whole life on not needing anyone, and the only one who sees the truth.
He deleted the note, started the engine and pulled out of the lot.
But the sentences remained lodged behind his ribs where deletion couldn’t reach.