2
Ryan
I spent most of the drive to the Book Nook telling my dick to behave.
It wasn’t a conversation I expected to be having with myself before noon, especially over a woman I’d known for almost four years, but apparently friendship stopped being useful protection once the friend in question started flirting back.
The light ahead turned red, and I eased the truck to a stop before dragging one hand over my jaw. My phone sat facedown in the cupholder with Charm’s message from twenty minutes ago still waiting beneath the screen.
Charm: I’ll be there at noon. Please tell me you aren’t bringing enough books to publicly humiliate me.
I’d answered with a picture of the box currently riding in my passenger seat.
She’d sent back a middle finger.
That was part of the fucking problem.
Charm used to blush if I looked at her too long.
Freshman-year Charm could barely hold eye contact with me without finding something extremely important to do with her purse, her hair, or whatever happened to be sitting in front of her.
I’d known she had a crush. Everybody had known.
Bliss once told me Charm dropped an entire stack of pencils because I asked whether the chair beside her was empty, and I’d spent the next month asking her about available seating just to watch her get pissed.
It had been cute then.
Now she flipped me off through text and looked directly at me when she made an innuendo.
My dick preferred the upgrade.
“Behave,” I muttered as the light changed.
A car behind me honked almost immediately, and I lifted my middle finger toward the rearview mirror before accelerating through the intersection.
Charm had always been beautiful. Every guy with working eyes who attended KFU during the last four years knew that.
Strawberry-blonde hair, pale skin that flushed easily, legs that looked dangerous beneath the skirts she wore, and a face soft enough that people assumed everything about her would be.
I’d learned quickly that assumption was bullshit.
The first time I really noticed her body had been at a lake party the summer before last. She walked down from Bliss’s family cabin wearing a white bikini and sunglasses, carrying two towels beneath one arm while arguing with Aura about sunscreen.
I’d been halfway through a beer and nearly swallowed the fucking bottle cap.
Cade caught me looking and laughed. I told him to fuck off and spent the rest of the afternoon deliberately facing the water.
Charm had been immediately untouchable anyway, and her father had nothing to do with that.
I barely knew Lance beyond what I’d picked up from the girls and the few times I’d been around him.
I knew he had enough money to make people straighten their backs when he entered a room.
I knew Charm’s entire posture changed when his name appeared on her phone.
I knew Bliss joked about him checking Charm’s GPA more often than most people checked their bank accounts, and Aura had once described the Harlen house as a luxury prison with catered appetizers.
Whatever Lance thought of me had never mattered.
The people attached to Charm did.
Bliss and Aura had been part of our circle long enough that the lines between friends and family disappeared years ago.
Charm came with them. She was at hockey games, bonfires, birthdays, holidays, parties, hangovers, breakups, and every other piece of life that turned a bunch of unrelated people into something harder to walk away from.
You didn’t risk that because somebody looked good in a bikini.
That rule had been easy enough when Charm was eighteen and I could pretend her crush would fade. It became harder once I got to know her.
She was funny as hell when she forgot to be careful.
Dry, sharp, and capable of saying something absolutely vicious in the same soft tone she used to thank a waiter.
She hated raisins with a level of resentment usually reserved for personal betrayal.
She reorganized things when she was anxious, defended people before they asked for it, and could spend forty minutes explaining why the construction of a dress mattered without noticing I’d stopped understanding half the terminology ten minutes earlier.
She cared about everybody, sometimes so much that she disappeared beneath it.
I’d also learned that the Charm I liked best appeared whenever she temporarily forgot somebody might be judging her.
Barefoot Charm sitting cross-legged on a couch with her hair piled on top of her head.
Laughing-too-loud Charm. Pissed-off Charm.
Charm swearing when Aura pushed her far enough, then looking mildly horrified with herself afterward.
Charm talking about clothes with both hands moving because she got excited enough to forget she’d been taught to keep them neatly folded in her lap.
That woman came out in pieces. Then something inside her remembered the cage, and she climbed right back into it.
Last night at the Sin Bin, she’d spent twenty minutes defending an elective she didn’t even need because her father thought it belonged on her résumé.
She had reorganized condiment bottles without realizing she was touching them, barely eaten the fries Bliss put in front of her, and looked at me like I’d handed her a life raft when I told her interpretation didn’t require somebody else’s permission.
Helping her should’ve been simple.
The fact that I wanted to put my mouth on her had complicated the plan. The fact that she seemed increasingly interested in letting me was becoming a much bigger problem.
I pulled into the Book Nook parking lot with ten minutes to spare and killed the engine. The cardboard box on the passenger seat held enough books, old essays, notebooks, and study guides to embarrass both of us.
I looked at it, then at my reflection in the windshield.
“Books,” I reminded myself. “You like books.”
Unfortunately, I also liked Charm’s ass.
I grabbed the box and headed inside before that train of thought got any more specific.
The Book Nook smelled like espresso, old paper, and air-conditioning cold enough to make people regret wearing shorts.
I claimed a table near the back windows and covered half of it with books from my apartment.
Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre. Frankenstein.
A battered Norton anthology with enough notes in the margins to qualify as a second narrator.
Two composition notebooks, three study guides, and a folder of old essays from Klein’s classes that I’d kept because throwing away work I’d bled over felt wrong.
I’d lost enough things growing up to get weird about keeping what belonged to me.
Clothes disappeared between foster homes. Shoes got left behind. Cheap toys mattered more than they should’ve because sometimes a social worker handed you a trash bag and ten minutes to decide which pieces of your life fit inside it.
Books had been different.
Libraries carried the same stories no matter where I ended up. I could leave one copy behind in a house I never wanted to see again and find another somewhere else with the same characters waiting exactly where I remembered them. Nobody rewrote the ending because my address changed.
By college, I’d started buying my own copies whenever I had money.
I didn’t get rid of them.
Charm stopped beside the table at twelve-oh-three wearing cream shorts, a coral-colored tank, and sunglasses pushed into her hair.
Her gaze moved over the books before landing on me.
“You brought a small liberal arts department.”
I leaned back in the chair and adjusted my backward cap with one finger. “You said you wanted help.”
“I thought that meant coffee and emotional support.”
“It means work.”
She set her bag on the empty chair and stared at the stacks again. “This feels threatening.”
“You’re intimidated by books?”
“I’m intimidated by anyone who brings notebooks in four colors.”
“Five.”
Her eyes cut to mine. “That made it worse.”
I smiled as she slid into the chair across from me.
She looked less polished than she had at the Sin Bin the night before, though less polished for Charm still meant every piece of her looked intentional.
Her hair fell loose over her shoulders, her mouth was glossed soft pink, and the thin gold chain at her throat rested against the warm skin exposed above her tank.
My attention dropped farther than it needed to.
Cream shorts with long bare legs.
That fucking coral top.
I dragged my eyes back to her face and found her watching me. One delicate eyebrow lifted. “Are we starting with literature or my shirt?”
The laugh escaped before I could stop it. “You’ve gotten brave.”
“I’m asking for clarification.”
“Literature.”
Her mouth curved. “Eventually?”
I stared at her.
Charm calmly reached for the chair beside her and pulled it closer to the table as though she hadn’t just thrown gasoline over the exact fire I’d spent the drive trying to put out.
This was what made staying on the friend side of the line harder now.
She fucking flirted back.
There was no shocked retreat anymore. No pretending she didn’t understand. She gave me enough to know the attraction wasn’t living exclusively in my head, then sat there looking pretty and innocent while I decided how much trouble I was willing to cause.
I pushed an iced coffee toward her instead.
She looked at the cup, then at me. “What is this?”
“Your coffee.”
“You know my order?”
“I guessed.”
Her fingers closed around the cup. “That could be a disaster or a gold star.”
“Vanilla cold brew, light ice, extra foam, cinnamon on top.”
Her mouth curved. “You sound obsessed.”
“I pay attention.”
“That sounds stalkery.”
“I’ve known you almost four years, and you drink the same coffee every time we’re together.”
“Sometimes I drink wine.”
“That really cleared your name.”
She laughed softly and took a sip. “Gold star.”
“I’ll treasure it.”
“I didn’t say you could keep it.”
“Too late.”