4
Charm
By the time August settled over Kimball Falls hard enough to make the sidewalks shimmer by noon, Ryan and I had somehow built a routine neither of us had been brave enough to name.
We still called what we were doing tutoring, which had become increasingly ridiculous considering most sessions started with literature and ended with me tucked against his side somewhere, his hand resting over my knee while one of us pretended to keep reading.
Professor Brown’s summer course had stopped feeling like an academic punishment somewhere around the second week, mostly because Ryan had spent enough hours dismantling my obsession with finding the correct answer that I had finally started realizing interpretation wasn’t about guessing what someone smarter wanted me to say.
He made me defend everything. If I offered an opinion too carefully, he challenged it.
If I changed my argument because he disagreed, he got annoyed and made me go back to the first version.
The first time I told him I thought one of his interpretations was bullshit and refused to back down, he looked so pleased I almost forgot we were arguing.
Professor Brown had handed back my last paper with an A and a note written beneath the final paragraph that read, Strong original analysis. Trust your argument sooner.
I stared at the comment long enough that the girl beside me asked whether something was wrong before I remembered I was sitting in a classroom full of people. Three weeks earlier, an A would have mattered because it was an A. That morning, the comment beneath it felt more important.
I took a picture before leaving my seat and sent it to Ryan.
Charm: Brown says I need to trust my argument sooner.
His response came before I reached the hallway.
Ryan: Sounds familiar.
Charm: You don’t get credit for this.
Ryan: I want royalties.
Charm: For what?
Ryan: Intellectual rehabilitation.
I laughed hard enough that two students walking ahead of me looked over their shoulders, and for once I didn’t immediately lower my voice or wonder whether I had been too loud.
That had been changing too. Ryan made it harder to remember I was supposed to be careful.
We saw each other most days, even when we didn’t plan to.
Sometimes he showed up at the Book Nook with coffee and a stack of books.
Sometimes I ended up at his apartment and stayed until midnight because I had one more question that somehow became four.
He had started teaching me Spanish in pieces small enough that he could laugh every time I butchered a vowel without completely destroying my confidence, and I had started sending him voice notes solely because hearing him correct me had become one of my favorite forms of entertainment.
When we weren’t together, we texted constantly. When we were together, pretending the flirting was harmless had become impossible.
Ryan touched me casually now in ways that never felt casual.
His hand found the small of my back when he moved behind me.
He pulled my feet into his lap while we studied.
He tucked my hair away from my face when it fell over whatever I was reading, and I had stopped pretending the movement didn’t send warmth through my entire body.
We kissed often enough that the first one no longer felt like an accident we had stumbled into.
Sometimes the kisses stayed soft and lazy, followed by Ryan returning to a book while I sat there wondering how he could possibly read after doing that to me.
Other times, one kiss turned into another until I was pressed beneath him on the couch or sitting across his lap with my fingers in his hair while every intelligent thought I had learned to form disappeared.
Then he stopped.
Every single time.
He never made it abrupt enough to feel cruel.
Ryan usually slowed the kiss, rested his forehead against mine, and waited until our breathing settled before saying something designed to make me laugh.
Once, after I discovered that biting lightly beneath his ear made his entire body tense, he physically lifted me from his lap, placed me on the opposite end of the couch, and handed me Jane Eyre.
“You’re an asshole,” I told him.
His breathing was still rough while he dragged one hand over his face. “You’re trying to kill me.”
“I was reading.”
“You were biting my neck.”
“I can multitask.”
His stare had dropped to my mouth before he muttered something in Spanish and opened his own book again.
I knew what he had told me in his kitchen. I remembered every word. He wanted me enough that rushing into sex felt wrong to him, and some part of me understood the care inside that decision even when another part kept searching for something uglier.
The first time Ryan stopped, I believed him.
By the sixth or seventh, my own mind had started rewriting the explanation.
Maybe he had changed his mind after touching my waist. Maybe my body looked different from what he imagined beneath clothes.
Maybe I was too thin in one place and still too soft in another.
Maybe he liked the flirting because it was easy and stopped whenever it came close to becoming real because Ryan could have almost any woman he wanted and eventually remembered that.
I hated that part of myself most.
Ryan had given me no reason to believe any of it. My brain rarely required evidence before deciding I was the problem.
Saturday morning, I stood barefoot in front of my bathroom mirror wearing silk shorts and a bra while August humidity pressed against the windows. My phone rested beside the sink with a message from Ryan glowing across the screen.
Ryan: Brown give homework or can I steal you later?
I read it without answering because the woman in the mirror had already ruined my mood.
My stomach looked wrong.
I turned slightly and watched the shape change beneath the bright vanity lights. My waist seemed thicker than it had yesterday, which didn’t make sense considering I had barely eaten dinner. I pulled the skin flatter with one hand, hated the shape that created too, then let go.
My thighs looked heavier from the front. My collarbones looked too sharp from the side. Nothing agreed with anything else, yet every angle managed to be wrong.
The phone buzzed again.
Ryan: You alive, mi hada?
I picked it up.
Charm: Unfortunately. Brunch and shopping with my mother today.
His answer appeared almost immediately.
Ryan: Body armor?
A smile tugged at my mouth.
Charm: Emotional or literal?
Ryan: I can get both.
Charm: It’s shopping. I think I’ll survive.
Ryan: That wasn’t what I asked.
I looked at my reflection again and hated that he could make me smile while I hated the person doing it.
My hand moved toward the drawer beneath the vanity.
The measuring tape sat exactly where I had left it, tucked behind extra brushes and products nobody would ever need to move.
I pulled it out without hesitation, and relief arrived before I wrapped it around any part of me, carried entirely by the possibility that numbers might settle what the mirror refused to show me.
That should have bothered me enough to put it away.
Instead, I looped it around my waist and pulled until the tape pressed into my skin.
The number was smaller than the one I remembered from last week.
For several seconds, my chest loosened.
Then I decided I might have measured from the wrong place.
I adjusted the tape and tried again. The number changed, and the relief disappeared. I measured a third time, tightening it until I could feel my pulse beneath the pressure, but that number felt dishonest too.
My hips came next, followed by each thigh because one looked larger in the mirror and I needed to know whether it actually was.
When the difference was less than a quarter inch, I measured again.
I moved to my upper arms after that, then returned to my waist because I no longer trusted the first three numbers.
The ritual had become too practiced to require thought. Measure. Check. Adjust. Start over. Every number offered relief for a few seconds before my brain found a reason it couldn’t be trusted.
By the time I wound the tape into a perfect circle and returned it to the drawer, my skin carried faint pink lines and the mirror looked worse than it had before.
Ryan had texted again.
Ryan: You don’t need luck.
I stared at the message longer than necessary.
Charm: You have an alarming amount of faith in me.
The typing bubble appeared.
Ryan: Somebody should until you catch up.
My throat tightened before I could stop it.
I smiled at the screen, then caught sight of myself behind the phone. The warmth vanished almost immediately.
My hair had frizzed around my temples. My face looked tired. My stomach still looked wrong.
I set the phone down and started getting dressed.
My mother chose brunch at the hotel attached to the first boutique because Crystal Harlen believed luxury became more impressive when it was also efficient.
She was already seated near the windows when I arrived, looking perfectly composed in pale blue with her blonde hair falling in smooth waves around her shoulders.
A cream handbag sat beside her chair instead of beneath it, and the sunlight caught the pearls at her ears every time she turned her head.
Her face brightened as soon as she saw me.
“There’s my girl.”
I smiled and bent to kiss her cheek. “Hi, Mom.”
She caught both of my hands before I sat and looked me over with such immediate affection that guilt moved through me before she said anything else.
“You look beautiful.”
The compliment landed automatically. Then her fingers rose to the side of my hair.
“The humidity is winning near your crown again.”
My shoulders tightened while she gently smoothed a loose strand.
“I thought it looked okay.”
“It does, sweetheart.” Her smile remained warm. “We should schedule the keratin treatment before the cotillion, though. Formal photography can be terribly unforgiving.”