23. Skylar
In the passenger seat, Charlie’s temple rested against the window.
He’d stripped off the coveralls at Break State, handed her the keys without hesitation, and fallen asleep in minutes.
The ease of it hollowed her out. A man who spent every waking hour performing for strangers had closed his eyes in her presence and let go.
She merged onto the interstate. The McLaren’s headlights cut through the November darkness and the speedometer climbed without effort.
She kept both hands on the wheel and her focus on the road but the sound he’d made in that room, the raw, gutted cry that had torn its way out of him, ran through her again, and a shiver chased down her arms.
brENNAN CARNELL pulsed across the McLaren’s display, bright enough to cast blue light across Charlie’s sleeping face.
Skylar’s jaw tightened. She glanced at him. Still asleep. The call rang twice more.
She tapped the steering wheel to accept.
“Charlie.” The voice filled the McLaren’s cabin through the speakers, smooth and clipped. “Let’s run through your answers for the interview.”
“Charlie isn’t available right now.” Her spine pressed flat against the seat.
A pause. Long enough to register surprise. “And who is this?”
“Skylar. I’m Charlie’s friend.”
“Ah.” The single syllable stretched into a judgment. “You’re the girl of the week.”
The girl. Not a name, not a person, just a category. One of many, the word implied. Skylar’s knuckles tightened on the steering wheel. A hot anger climbed through her abdomen. “I’ll let him know you called.”
“Are you driving my car?”
“Charlie was too tired to drive.”
“Wake him up. Now.”
“No.”
The silence on the line shifted. When Brennan spoke again the warmth was gone. “Young lady, I don’t think you understand the situation.”
“Believe me, I understand.” The line hummed with a fury she recognized, contained and calculated, except Charlie had needed a padded room and a sledgehammer to release what his father aimed like a lens.
Her thumb hovered over the dashboard screen.
“I’ll tell him you called. Good night, Mr. Carnell. ”
She ended the call. Her pulse drummed against the inside of her wrist, fast and defiant, and the speedometer crept up five miles per hour.
Charlie didn’t stir.
Charlie woke when she turned off the engine. He blinked against the parking garage lights, disoriented, and for a moment he looked younger than twenty-two, stripped of every polished edge. He scrubbed both hands over his face. “Do you want to come up for a tea?”
The smart answer was no. The safe answer was goodnight, Charlie. But the man beside her had spent the last hour trusting her with his car and his sleep and she couldn’t bring herself to say goodnight.
“Sure.”
The elevator opened into the quiet of his condo, city light pooling across the wood floors. Charlie dropped his keys on the counter and shed his Thorndale varsity jacket. His eyes carried the glassy, emptied-out quality of a man who’d spent everything and had no reserves left.
“Make yourself comfortable.” Charlie headed for the kitchen.
Confident hands pulled a small brown pot from the cupboard. His back faced her, shoulders rounded, and Skylar leaned against the counter across from him and folded her arms over her ribs.
Her eye moved over him the way it moved over any scene worth shooting.
Available light: city glow filtered through west-facing glass.
Subject: a six-foot-two man in a gray T-shirt, blond hair a mess, making tea at eleven-thirty on a Tuesday night because offering caffeine was easier than asking for what he needed.
Composition: his back to her. The unguarded slope of his shoulders, the slight hunch of a body that had just learned what surrender cost.
He filled the kettle and set the water to boil.
“Have you decided about the fellowship?” she asked.
He pulled down a tin of tea and two mugs. “No. With the finals coming up I’m not sure I’ll have time.”
The fellowship wasn’t the only clock running out.
Football season ended in two weeks. When that happened, so did the Dean’s deal.
No more promotional events, no more reason to stand four inches from Charlie and inhale his scent and live off it until the next time she was near him.
Next came finals, winter break, a new semester with new classes and new schedules and no creative writing section pairing them together on Thursday afternoons or excuses for him to drop by the diner on Wednesday nights and drive her home, just the two of them in his car.
Every structure holding them in each other’s orbit had an expiration date, and Skylar’s ribs tightened around a breath she couldn’t release.
The ground shifted beneath her feet and she reached for a safe topic. “How’s your mom?”
“Good. Started a new painting.” He set the mugs on the counter, aligned the handles. “She asked about you.”
“She did?”
“I may have mentioned you. Once or twice.”
The warmth that spread through her lower belly had no business being there. Yet she was tired of denying the sensation.
For three weeks, she’d been telling herself the word friends covered the territory. Three weeks of sitting across from him at the diner on Wednesdays, their knees not touching under the booth. Three weeks of lying in her bed and replaying the hotel room in Ironwood until her skin overheated.
With a click, the electric kettle shut off. Charlie filled the pot with water and moved to the fridge.
The truth pressed against the inside of her teeth as she stared at his back.
She was tired. Not the bone-deep exhaustion of two jobs, a full course load, and six hours of sleep, but the specific weariness of holding herself three inches back from her own life.
She’d spent years refusing to need, refusing to reach, refusing to let the wanting get close enough to wound her.
Standing in Charlie’s kitchen, the ache bellowed in her chest and no amount of refusing would quiet it.
She ached for him.
The version who wrote on his phone at three in the morning and cried in padded rooms and fell asleep against her shoulder because he trusted her more than he trusted anyone. For the first time since the fire, something belonged entirely to her, and she was done pretending otherwise.
“Charlie.”
He poured milk into the first cup. “Hmm?”
“Can we talk?”
His hands stilled on the mug.
She took his silence as agreement. Every nerve in her body screamed for him to turn around, but maybe his back was the only reason the words kept coming.
“I asked to be friends and you did exactly that.” Her hands unclenched at her sides, one finger at a time, as if her body had decided that weeks of lying had been enough.
“You showed up every week and you respected every boundary I set and you never once made me feel guilty for any of it.”
His shoulders rose on an inhale. Held.
“I was wrong.” The relief was immediate and terrifying, a fist unclenching around a blade.
“Sleeping with you wasn’t a mistake. I don’t want to be your friend.
I mean, I do, but that’s not all I want.
” She braced her fingertips against the counter behind her.
“I really like you, Charlie. I’m scared, and that’s my problem, not yours, but I want to be honest with you. I want you.”
He stood completely still.
The silence lasted four seconds. Five. Six. Skylar’s throat constricted. Too late. She’d waited too long, and the word friends had done its damage.
Silence.
Her lungs burned. She pressed her lips together to keep from filling the quiet with an apology, a retraction, anything to pull back the grenade she’d just thrown across his kitchen counter.
Charlie turned.
His jaw was tight. His eyes were glassy and wide and locked on her face with an intensity that pinned her to the counter behind her.
Every wall he’d built, every polished surface he’d maintained since she met him at the campus fair, crumbled.
The man standing three feet away from her was completely, terrifyingly bare.
He crossed the kitchen in two strides and his mouth found hers.
The kiss obliterated every careful inch of distance she’d maintained.
His hands cradled her jaw, fingers sliding into her hair, and his mouth moved against hers with a hunger that tasted like patience finally abandoned.
Skylar grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him closer.
The counter pressed into her lower back and she didn’t care.
She kissed him with the accumulated weight of every Wednesday night she’d spent pretending his knee brushing hers under the table meant nothing, every class she’d spent staring at his profile instead of listening to the professor, every morning she’d woken up reaching for the pillow beside her and finding the sheets cold.
He kissed her neck. Her collarbones. Fingers digging into her skin, securing her to him. His breath came ragged against her skin and the warmth sank low in her chest.
Then he stopped, his grip easing. He pulled back, his forehead rested against hers, his hands still framing her face.
“Skylar.” His voice came out rough, scraped raw. “I’m not sure we should do this.”
The words landed between her hips, a cold drop against all that heat.
She searched his expression. The fear beneath the want, the old wound sitting right behind his eyes.
The same fear she’d photographed without understanding.
A man terrified of wanting too much because wanting too much, in his experience, turned people into weapons.
Her fingers curled into the hair at the base of his neck, holding on. “I am.”
His thumb traced her cheekbone, his jaw working around words that wouldn’t come. “If this goes wrong . . .”