2 #4
“You’ll come back. Your notes are here.”
“You’re holding my education hostage.”
“I’m protecting my investment.”
“You refused payment.”
“Still invested.”
Her hand lowered slowly from her mouth, and the smile behind it stayed.
By the time the lunch crowd started thinning, Charm’s neat notes had spread into arrows, underlines, circles, arguments, and questions written sideways in the margins.
Her hair had fallen forward around her face, one sandal was abandoned beneath the table, and the careful posture she’d arrived with had disappeared somewhere during Mary Wollstonecraft.
That was the Charm I liked.
The one who forgot to arrange herself before taking up space.
She capped her pen and flexed her fingers. “I hate to admit this.”
“You had fun.”
“I learned something.”
“That too.”
She looked across the pages between us. “I thought interpretation meant finding the hidden answer.”
“It means building one strong enough to survive questions.”
“Professor Klein is still going to hate me.”
“Klein hates everyone.”
“That’s comforting.”
“She’ll respect you if you stop giving her safe work.”
Charm’s smile faded slightly. “Safe has worked for me.”
I watched her.
“Has it?”
Her gaze moved toward the window.
I didn’t push.
The silence lasted several seconds before she closed her notebook and slid it into her bag.
“Are we doing this again?”
I stacked the books slowly. “You want to?”
“I need to.”
“Different question.”
Charm looked at me.
That softness came back into her expression, and it hit harder after spending the afternoon watching the sharper parts of her emerge.
“Yes,” she said. “I want to.”
My chest tightened in a way I didn’t particularly appreciate.
“Tuesday.”
“You’re free Tuesday?”
“I’m free for six weeks.”
“That sounds dangerous.”
“For you?”
“For the general public.”
I smiled and slid my old Wuthering Heights essay into her folder.
Charm looked down. “You’re letting me take this?”
“Don’t lose it.”
“I don’t lose things.”
“You wore slippers to drill practice once after losing your shoes.”
Her mouth dropped open. “Who told you that?”
“Aura.”
“Traitor.”
“She has stories.”
“I have stories about her too.”
“I’ll trade.”
“Absolutely not.”
I stood and gathered the rest of the books while Charm slipped her sunglasses back into her hair.
She watched me pack for a moment before tilting her head.
“How many classes did you actually take with Klein?”
I paused with the Norton anthology in my hands.
“Enough.”
“That isn’t a number.”
“Neither was your answer last night when I asked why you were taking her class.”
“That was different.”
“Everything’s different when you’re the one avoiding the question.”
Charm narrowed her eyes. “You know an unreasonable amount about literature for someone who keeps pretending you randomly took a few electives.”
I tucked the anthology into the box. “Maybe I contain multitudes.”
“Whitman.”
I stopped.
The smug smile spreading across her face nearly made me laugh.
“Look at you.”
“You taught me that.”
“I absolutely did not.”
“You said it at the Sin Bin last year when Briggs tried to convince everyone he could be both a goalie and a qualified relationship therapist.”
“That does sound like me.”
Charm folded her arms on the table. “What did you study?”
I looked at her.
For the first time all afternoon, she was the one leaning forward while I decided how much I wanted to give away.
A degree had never felt like something I needed to announce.
Too many people heard where I came from and treated education like some inspirational escape story instead of work I’d earned.
Others looked at the tattoos, heard the Spanish, saw the hockey player, and visibly recalculated when I knew more about the book in front of them than they did.
I got tired of watching faces change.
Charm’s face probably would too.
That bothered me more than I wanted to admit.
“Books,” I said.
Her brows rose. “Books?”
“Words. Arguments. How people use both to convince somebody their version of the world is true.”
“That sounds deliberately vague.”
“It is.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re supposed to be the student.”
“I’m going to figure you out.”
The certainty in her voice made me smile.
“Good luck, mi hada.”
“I’m very persistent.”
“I know.”
She gave me a look that said she heard something underneath the answer, but she let it go.
For now.
“Tuesday at noon?” she asked.
“Book Nook.”
“You’re very attached to this place.”
“They let me bring my own books and don’t ask why I’m swearing at dead writers.”
“That is good customer service.”
We walked toward the door together, close enough that her arm brushed mine once and then again. The second time, neither of us moved away.
Outside, the summer heat rolled across campus and wrapped around us after hours beneath aggressive air-conditioning. Students crossed the sidewalk between buildings while traffic moved lazily along the road beyond the parking lot.
Charm stopped beneath the awning and turned toward me. “Thank you.”
I adjusted my cap. “Don’t get soft on me.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. You don’t owe me anything.”
Her eyes moved over my face. “You keep saying that.”
“Because you keep trying to turn everything into a debt.”
The words hit harder than I meant them to, and Charm’s smile slipped before I could pull them back.
I watched the retreat happen in the quiet rearrangement of her expression, the same one I’d seen all afternoon whenever something came too close to whatever she kept protected beneath the polished answers.
I stepped toward her. “Tuesday, mi hada.”
Her lashes lifted. “I thought that belonged to the lesson.”
“It belongs wherever I want to use it.”
“That sounds possessive.”
“It is.”
The honesty surprised both of us.
Heat climbed into her cheeks, but she held my gaze.
That was new too. Charm had spent years looking away whenever the attraction between us became too obvious.
Today, she’d flirted with me across a table, watched my mouth while I spoke Spanish, let me touch her face, and stood close enough that one step would put my body against hers.
I could kiss her.
The knowledge moved through me with enough force that my attention dropped to her mouth. Charm noticed, and her lips parted as the entire afternoon narrowed into the space between us.
Then I stepped back.
Disappointment crossed her face before she could hide it, followed by enough embarrassment to make my stomach tighten.
“Tuesday,” I repeated.
Charm adjusted the strap of her bag over her shoulder. “Tuesday, Ryan.”
She turned toward the parking lot, and I watched her walk away while every instinct in me fought over whether stopping had been the right choice.
Kissing Charm would’ve been easy. Stopping after that was the part I didn’t trust.
She was my friend, and our people were tangled together too deeply for me to treat her like some woman I met at a bar and wanted for a night.
Charm already carried enough pressure without adding whatever reaction Lance and Crystal would have to their daughter getting involved with a tattooed Chicano hockey player who came from the kind of childhood people like them probably donated money to at Christmas.
I didn’t care what either of them thought about me. I cared what their opinion would cost her, and that distinction mattered more than I wanted it to.
It also gave me a respectable reason to keep my distance. The rest of it was fear dressed up like self-control.
Books had always been easier than people.
Houses changed, promises disappeared, and people who were supposed to stay could vanish without warning.
Stories stayed where somebody put them. I could open a book years later and find the same words waiting in the same place, untouched by everything that happened after I closed it.
Charm had never felt dangerous when wanting her was mostly physical.
I could blame that on a white bikini at the lake, long legs stretched beneath the sun as she walked across the beach, and a dick with no respect for friendship.
I’d spent years managing it because wanting her body didn’t require me to believe in anything.
Today, I’d watched her come alive across from me.
I’d heard her laugh too loudly, argue with dead philosophers, challenge me back, and speak without waiting for permission.
The careful version of her disappeared one piece at a time, and every piece she gave me made something inside me reach for more.
That was what scared me.
I knew how to lose people. I knew how to survive after they were gone. What I didn’t know was how to trust the feeling tightening inside my chest while Charm walked toward her car, especially when every instinct I had was already telling me to follow her.
She hadn’t given me a single reason to believe she didn’t want me too. I should’ve been relieved that I stepped back, but relief wasn’t anywhere inside me as the distance between us widened.
“Charm.”
She stopped and looked over her shoulder.
I had already spent the entire afternoon giving myself reasons to leave her alone. Apparently, I didn’t trust a single one of them enough to let her drive away.
“Wait.”