2 #3
“I know you have a four-point-oh, your senior collection is half finished before classes even start, and you have enough discipline to turn anxiety into a competitive sport.”
“That isn’t reassuring.”
“It wasn’t meant to be.”
Charm sighed and rubbed her thumb over the edge of her gold necklace. “I hate that you make sense when you’re being annoying.”
“I’m good at both.”
“You’re excellent at one.”
“Still came.”
“You ordered my coffee.”
“That all it takes?”
“Vanilla foam has saved worse men.”
I smiled and leaned over the book again. “Tell me why Wollstonecraft matters to fashion.”
Charm blinked. “Fashion?”
“That’s your language. Use it.”
“She wasn’t writing about clothes.”
“She was writing about performance and presentation. What women are trained to look like and what that appearance is designed to communicate.” I turned the book slightly toward her. “Sounds like fashion to me.”
Her attention sharpened immediately.
“Clothing can create obedience before a woman says anything.”
“Explain.”
“A corset changes posture, movement, breathing, the amount of space a woman can occupy.” She sat forward, forgetting the careful arrangement of her body as her hands began moving with her words.
“Even when the garment is beautiful, it controls her. It creates the silhouette society wants and makes discomfort look elegant.”
I stopped pretending to look at the book.
Charm caught me watching.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Because that’s your paper.”
“That was barely an observation.”
“It was yours.”
She looked down again. “Klein would ask why it matters.”
“Then answer her.”
Her brows drew together while she stared at the paragraph.
“It matters because clothing isn’t neutral. It teaches the body how it’s allowed to exist.”
“Holy shit.”
Her eyes widened. “Was that good?”
“That was fucking good.”
The smile that broke over her face was bright, unguarded, and so completely different from the careful ones she handed out everywhere else that my entire body reacted to it.
I wanted to drag the table out of the way and kiss her.
The thought arrived with enough force that I sat back.
Charm noticed.
Her smile faltered for half a second before I tapped the notebook between us.
“Write it down.”
She grabbed her pen and started scribbling, fast enough that the neat lines of her handwriting leaned into one another.
“I hate you for being right.”
“No, you don’t. You hate that you couldn’t prove me wrong.” I watched her write another line. “Admit it, amiga. Sé muy bien lo que hago.”
“I don’t speak Spanish.”
“I said I know damn well what I’m doing.”
She smiled while finishing the sentence. “Yeah, well, you made that sound easy.”
“It gets easier when you stop editing yourself before the thought gets out.”
“That feels personally invasive.”
“You keep saying that like it’s going to make me back off.”
“It hasn’t worked yet.”
“It won’t.”
She wrote for another minute before glancing up. “Can I ask you something unrelated?”
“You usually do.”
“How do you say my name in Spanish?”
I looked at her. “Your full name?”
“Charmagne.”
The name sounded expensive in her mouth. Softer than Charm, sharper somehow too.
“Charmagne stays Charmagne. Names don’t always translate.”
“That feels disappointing.”
She closed the notebook halfway. “What about Charm?”
“Encanto.”
Her expression softened. “That’s pretty.”
“It means charm, enchantment, something that pulls you in.”
The blush returned.
She pointed her pen toward me. “You’re abusing your position.”
“I’m volunteering.”
“Even worse.”
I reached across and pushed the pen down before she stabbed me with it. My fingertips brushed hers, and neither of us moved immediately.
“There’s another word.”
“For Charm?”
“For you.”
Her gaze held mine. “What word?”
“Hada.”
She repeated it carefully. “Hada. What does it mean?”
“Fairy.”
Charm stared at me before laughing. “You think I’m a fairy?”
“I think you’re small, pretty, expensive-looking, and capable of causing chaos without anybody noticing until it’s too late.”
“That is an insult wrapped in glitter.”
“It fits.”
“I’m not that small.”
I looked at her folded into the chair with one leg tucked beneath her, both hands wrapped around a coffee cup that looked too big for her.
“Eres tan pequena que pareces un hada.”
Her lashes lifted. “What did you say?”
“You’re so small you look like a fairy.”
The smile that moved over her face was quieter this time.
“Say it again.”
I leaned closer, lowering my voice without thinking about why.
“Eres tan pequena que pareces un hada.”
Charm’s fingers stilled around the cup.
“Mi hada,” I added.
Her eyes dropped to my mouth. “What does the mi change?”
“My fairy.”
The words settled between us with more weight than they had any business carrying.
I’d called women beautiful. Sexy. Trouble. I’d used nicknames designed to get somebody into bed and forgotten half of them before morning.
Mi hada felt different the second it left my mouth.
It felt private.
Charm swallowed. “Do you call all your students that?”
“I have one student.”
“That didn’t answer me.”
I watched her for a moment, fighting the instinct to make the joke easier than the truth.
“No. I’ve never called another woman that.”
Something softened in her face.
“You just invented it five minutes ago.”
“For you.”
Charm’s lips parted slightly.
Fuck.
I could’ve pushed.
Every sign I knew how to read was sitting right in front of me. She hadn’t rejected a single flirt. She looked at my mouth whenever I leaned close. She let our hands touch without immediately moving hers. If Charm were anybody else, I would’ve known exactly where the afternoon was heading.
She wasn’t anybody else.
She’d spent most of her life surrounded by people deciding what she should do, what she should wear, what she should want, and who she was supposed to become. I wasn’t going to add myself to that list simply because I wanted her.
I leaned back and reopened the book.
“Now tell me why Frankenstein isn’t about a monster.”
Charm blinked twice before following the abrupt change. “You flirt, emotionally destabilize me, then assign work?”
“That’s the premium service.”
Her laugh came easier this time as she leaned over the anthology. “Frankenstein is about irresponsible men creating problems and abandoning women to deal with the consequences.”
I laughed loudly enough that a woman at the next table looked over.
“That’s a terrible interpretation.”
“It’s socially relevant.”
“It’s not wrong.”
“Then why did you call it terrible?”
“I wanted to see if you’d defend it.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You’re testing me.”
“Everything has consequences, mi hada.”
“That means my fairy, and now you’re doing it intentionally.”
“Good student.”
“Your teaching methods are manipulative.”
“You’re learning, aren’t you?”
“I’m going to tell Aura and Bliss.”
“I’d expect nothing less. They’ll probably ask whether we kissed.”
Charm’s smile slowed.
“Did we?”
I held her stare. “You’d remember.”
The tip of her tongue touched her lower lip before she looked back at the book.
I shifted in my chair.
Fucking hell.
She was cute when she blushed and sexy when she stopped, and spending one-on-one time with both versions was making every argument I’d built around friendship increasingly difficult to defend.
I cleared my throat and tapped the page.
“Victor creates life, then panics when it isn’t beautiful enough for him. What does that make the novel about?”
“Conditional love.”
“Keep going.”
“Parental failure. Social rejection.” Her voice slowed while she thought. “The danger of creating expectations for something, then punishing it for becoming what those expectations produced.”
The sentence came quieter at the end.
Charm straightened the edge of her notebook.
I watched her fingers.
“That one yours too?”
Her hand stopped.
“Maybe.”
“Write it.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Then you’re wasting both our time.”
Her eyes snapped up, sharper now. “You don’t get to talk to me like my father.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re giving orders.”
“Your father tells you what to think. I’m telling you to stop being scared of what you already think.”
The anger in her face shifted.
She picked up the pen but didn’t write.
“You’re very annoying.”
“You’re very trained.”
Charm’s jaw tightened.
I reached across the table and hooked one finger beneath her chin before she could disappear into the notebook.
Her eyes widened at the touch.
“Don’t take that as an insult.” I kept my voice lower now. “They taught you to doubt yourself before anybody else gets the chance. That doesn’t make you weak.”
The coffee shop moved around us in low conversation, pages turning somewhere nearby while the espresso machine hissed behind the counter.
Charm held my gaze.
“What does it make me?”
“Someone who has to decide whether she wants to stay trained.”
Her breath left slowly.
My finger remained beneath her chin a second longer than necessary. Her skin was warm, and she didn’t pull away.
I wanted to slide my thumb across her bottom lip.
Instead, I released her.
Something flickered across her expression before she looked down and wrote the sentence about conditional love.
I hated that I noticed.
We stayed at the table for another two hours.
Charm argued that Jane Eyre’s restraint was power. I told her restraint was still a cage when everybody else had built it for her. She accused Byron of being the original toxic celebrity, and I agreed before explaining that half the Romantic poets would’ve been unbearable on social media.
“What would Byron post?” she asked.
“Shirtless pictures with captions about suffering.”
Charm laughed. “You just described half the hockey team.”
“Briggs would absolutely quote Byron without knowing it was Byron.”
“Briggs would spell Byron wrong.”
“He’d tag Byron.”
“He’d look for him.”
That got me laughing hard enough that Charm joined in, and somewhere between Jane Eyre and Briggs trying to friend-request a dead poet, she snorted.
The sound escaped before she could stop it.
Charm slapped one hand over her mouth.
I stared at her.
Her eyes widened. “Forget that happened.”
“Never.”
“I will leave.”