17. Charlie
The funeral home lived in a converted Victorian with a wheelchair ramp that didn’t quite meet the sidewalk. When he arrived, mourners had already swallowed Skylar into the receiving line, each one offering comfort and condolences. As he waited, his phone buzzed with the consistency of a fire alarm.
He ignored the wall of texts from his father, and typed out one line.
Charlie:
A friend has an emergency. I’ll call when I’m back at school.
Then Charlie did something he’d never done in his life. His thumb held the off button until the screen went black. The absence of the buzzing left a ringing in his ears, phantom vibrations from a leash he’d not once slipped.
Before he took a seat in the back, Charlie pressed a kiss against Skylar’s cheek but kept his hands at his sides. The urge to touch her shoulder, her wrist, the small of her back, had become a reflex he didn’t trust himself to govern.
The service was touching. Neighbors dabbed their eyes with tissues pulled from coat pockets during Skylar’s eulogy.
She remained steady, her chin lifted, shoulders squared until the final line, a tribute to a man who took pride in his work, his town and his family.
Her lips quivered on the word family, and Charlie’s fist clenched in his lap.
At the cemetery, the October wind cut through his jacket.
Three headstones already bore the Hartley name.
A blank marker waited, fresh earth piled beside the open grave, and the geography of Skylar’s loss carved itself into Charlie’s understanding with a precision no words had managed.
Parents. Sister. Grandfather. Four people in one small plot.
Jake stood on Skylar’s other side, solid and quiet, and when Skylar’s grandmother swayed during the final prayer, Jake caught her elbow before Charlie could move.
Back at the house, Jake fit into the town that showed up with love to grieve the man they lost. Charlie helped where he could, but he didn’t belong.
Maybe helping was just showing up.
When exhaustion was the only look Skylar’s grandmother had left, Charlie said his goodbyes and returned to the Ironwood Motor Lodge.
The one-story building off Route 21 had thin walls and a parking lot that needed repaving, but the next closest hotel was twenty-five minutes away.
Charlie couldn’t bear being that far from Skylar.
The room held a queen bed, a radiator that clanked, and a window that overlooked the gas station where he’d held Skylar the day before.
He sank onto the foot of the mattress and opened his phone to the notes app, staring at the blinking cursor.
Every sentence he started collapsed under the weight of what he’d witnessed.
Instead, he pulled up a new note and rewrote the second assignment for class. Anything to keep his hands busy.
A knock pulled him from the story. His phone read 11 p.m.
Skylar stood in the fluorescent glow of the walkway wearing sweatpants and an oversized flannel that might have belonged to her grandfather. Her hair hung loose around her shoulders, damp from a shower, and the honeysuckle scent he now knew the name of reached him before she spoke.
“I can’t sleep.” Her arms banded tight around herself. “The house is too quiet and I can’t stop hearing the dirt hitting the coffin.”
He stepped aside. She moved past him into the room and sat in the single armchair, tucking her knees to her chest. The flannel swallowed her. In the low lamplight, with her wet hair and the bruised hollows beneath her eyes, she looked twenty-one in a way he had never let himself register.
Charlie lowered himself onto the foot of the bed and left three feet between them. “Can I get you anything? That machine might make a passable cup of tea.”
She glanced at the beaten-up coffee maker and the corner of her mouth twitched. The ghost of where a smile would live if the day had been different. “Talk to me. About anything that isn’t funerals or casseroles or people telling me he’s in a better place.”
“What do you want to hear?”
“Read me your assignment.” She tilted her head against the chair. “Did you rewrite it?”
His lungs compressed. “No.” He forced out a breath. “I started over. Grant deserves better but he also deserves privacy. I wrote about my mother. I’m not finished.”
Skylar’s tired eyes held his. “Read it anyway.”
“It’s rough.” His thumb hovered over the first line. “A first draft only.”
Skylar waited.
“One of my earliest memories of my mother is her humming when she painted. The same three notes repeated over and over, a woman safe and happy. She has no idea how much I miss those sounds.” The piece described her hands, always moving, always making something beautiful, until those hands turned from creating art to shielding her son.
He didn’t write the word father. He didn’t name the injury or the choice or the age.
But the shape of the wound pressed through the prose, visible beneath the surface the way a scar shows through a thin shirt.
He wrote about watching her choose to leave, and how leaving required a courage he still couldn’t name.
“We talk on Sunday morning and she shows me her new paintings. I listen for three notes from five thousand miles. But she’s painting again, and that’s enough for now.
Still, there are things I have never said to my mother, and every one of them is a door I closed to keep her safe. Now I’m the protector.”
When he finished, his hands trembled. A fine vibration starting in his fingertips and traveling up through his wrists, his forearms, settling in the locked muscles of his shoulders.
He’d written hundreds of notes on his phone.
Fourteen years of words stored behind Face ID and the unspoken agreement that Charlie Carnell didn’t show people what lived inside him.
The exposure sat on his skin like a sunburn, raw and impossible to cover. His pulse beat in his ears. The instinct to deflect fired so hard his teeth clenched. He fought the impulse and sat in the wreckage of his own honesty, phone screen dimming between his hands, and waited for Skylar’s verdict.
“Charlie.” His name came on a whisper. When he dared to look up, Skylar’s eyes shone in the lamplight, wet and gold-flecked and fixed on him. “I… I didn’t know.”
He tossed the phone on the bed. “Maybe I made it sound worse than it was.”
Her fingers twisted the cuff of the flannel and she unfolded from the chair. She closed the distance and knelt before him. “Don’t do that. That was the most honest thing you’ve ever written.”
He stared over her shoulder. “How would you know.”
“Because I know you.” Her fingers brushed his knee. “Because I feel like I just looked straight through you.”
Their eyes locked and he could count the gold flecks in her irises. His pulse knocked against the base of his neck, steady and insistent, and every nerve in his body oriented toward the space she occupied.
“This isn’t what the professor wants.” He swallowed. “It’s too . . .”
She stood, her knees nearly touching his. “Stop thinking about what other people want.” Her thumb traced his cheek. “Think about what you want.”
Her honeysuckle scent filled his senses and desire warmed in his blood. “Skylar.”
The distance between their bodies shrank as she straddled him, the weight of her settling onto his lap too familiar, too right. He gripped the bedsheet. She uncurled his hands and placed them on her hips. “Do you want this, Charlie?”
His fingers curled into the soft cotton of her sweatpants. Want didn’t cover the sensation coursing through his veins. “You don’t want this.”
“Why not?” She shifted in his lap and spots formed in Charlie’s vision.
Her lips bent to his ear. “Can’t I have something that’s easy for once?”
Easy. That was what everyone thought about Good Time Charlie.
Funny how easy stopped meaning anything with Skylar’s weight in his lap and her pulse beating against his thigh and the full catastrophic understanding that he would remember this room for the rest of his life.
The lamplight caught the wet streaks on her cheeks, and he reached up before he could stop himself and brushed a tear from beneath her eye with his thumb. “This is grief talking.”
“It wasn’t grief on my porch.” Her breath fanned his lips.
He should drop his hand and say goodnight. He should be the version of Charlie Carnell who understood that touching a grieving woman in a motel room was exactly the kind of wanting that led to damage.
He didn’t drop his hand.
“Please, Charlie.” Her eyes held his, and the gold in them smoldered. “I want to feel alive. Not numb. Make me feel good.” She pulled herself closer to him, arching against his chest. Her soft moan spiked his heartrate. “Can you do that for me?”
Every wall he had built since age eight screamed at him to step back. To protect her from the damage a Carnell could inflict. To protect himself from the vulnerability pressing against his solar plexus, dangerous and alive and asking him to let it breathe.
Stepping back wasn’t possible. Not with Skylar’s hand on his face and her grief and her courage to ask for what she wanted. He couldn’t hold her hand in the church like Jake had, but she was here instead of with her ex. She wanted him.
Their mouths met, and the tenderness of the contact reached a place he’d spent years walling off. The mortar crumbled. The bricks shifted. The feeling that rushed through the gap so vast and terrifying that his hand shook where it cupped her face.
Slowly, he pulled back. Palms stroking her face as he held her there to search her expression. Red-rimmed eyes. Swollen lids. The grief still living in every line of her face.
“Please.”
As if he could resist giving her anything she wanted.
“Tell me if it is too much.” His hand stilled against her cheek. “Tell me and I stop. No questions.”
She nodded.