6
Charm
The knock came three minutes before three while the measuring tape was still pulled tight around my waist.
“Shit.”
I released it so quickly that the end snapped against my skin. A faint red line circled my stomach where I had pulled too hard, joining the marks already fading along my thighs and upper arms from the measurements I had taken and retaken over the last twenty minutes.
Ryan knocked again.
I bent over the bathroom counter and tried to breathe while the measuring tape hung loosely from one hand. The first number had been fine. Better than fine. It was smaller than the one I remembered from last week, and for a few seconds, relief had loosened the pressure behind my ribs.
Then I decided I had measured from the wrong place.
The second number was different. So was the third. By the fourth, I couldn’t remember which one had been right or where the tape had rested the first time. I moved to my hips, then my thighs, measuring each one twice because the left looked larger in the mirror even when the numbers said it wasn’t.
My arms came next. One was too soft. The other was too thin. My collarbones looked sharp while my stomach looked wide, and nothing about the body in front of me agreed with anything else.
Some rational part of me understood the contradictions. I knew clothing sizes, measurements, garment construction, and how mirrors distorted angles beneath unforgiving light. I understood enough to know the reflection shouldn’t have looked the way it did to me.
Knowing didn’t change what my eyes insisted was there.
Another knock carried through the apartment.
“Charm?”
My chest tightened.
Ryan was standing outside expecting me to understand philosophy, poetry, and whatever else he had planned, while I stood half-dressed in front of a bathroom mirror measuring pieces of myself like one correct number might finally make the entire woman acceptable.
I wound the tape into a tight circle and shoved it into the drawer beneath the vanity. My hands trembled badly enough that it caught against a brush before I forced the drawer closed.
When I faced the mirror again, my eyes went directly to my stomach.
The ritual came so automatically that I barely recognized it as one anymore. My fingers settled against the edge of the counter while I studied every part of my reflection I had spent twenty minutes correcting before Ryan knocked.
I hate you.
The thought came with the familiarity of something rehearsed.
I hate you.
My fingers tightened around the counter.
I hate you.
“You don’t deserve him,” I whispered beneath the bathroom fan.
Ryan thought I was smart. He thought I was funny.
He looked at me like there was something beneath the clothes, makeup, and carefully chosen answers worth taking the time to understand.
He didn’t know I could leave his apartment after he made me feel beautiful and stand naked in front of my own mirror searching for evidence that he had been wrong.
He didn’t know how quickly every compliment became something I had to disprove.
He didn’t know I had eaten half a taco the night before and spent an hour afterward promising myself I would make up for it today.
He didn’t know I could measure my waist four times and trust the largest number simply because it hurt the most.
“You’re lying to him.”
A tear slipped down my cheek before I could stop it.
I lifted the hem of my shirt and caught the skin at my stomach between my fingers, pulling at it while disgust tightened behind my ribs.
“Fat.”
The word broke on the way out.
I turned slightly toward the mirror, searching for an angle where I might finally look acceptable. My fingers found the same place again, harder this time, and tears filled my eyes while I stared at a body Ryan had touched like there was nothing wrong with it.
“Disgusting.”
My breathing changed before I fully noticed it. The next breath stopped halfway into my lungs, followed by another that came too fast and never reached deep enough. Pressure gathered behind my ribs while heat crawled beneath my skin.
I knew what was happening.
That didn’t mean I could stop it.
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe the way every therapist, article, and concerned friend suggested when anxiety was treated like something lungs could reason with. Slow breath in. Hold it. Let it out.
My chest refused to cooperate.
“Charm?” Ryan called through the door, his voice closer now. “Everything okay?”
I pressed both hands flat against the counter and focused on the cold stone beneath my palms.
The bathroom fan hummed overhead. Water dripped once from the faucet. Ryan shifted outside the apartment, and the faint scuff of his shoe against the hallway floor reminded me that he was waiting while I came apart.
I named five things I could see. The mirror. My lipstick. A hand towel. The gold cap on my perfume. The closed drawer hiding the measuring tape.
Four things I could touch. The counter. My shirt. The tile beneath my feet. The necklace against my chest.
The exercise gave my thoughts somewhere to go, but my body remained trapped inside the panic. My hands tingled, my vision tightened, and every breath felt like proof the next one might not come.
I pressed my palm against my sternum.
“You’re fine,” I whispered. “Stop being dramatic.”
The words sounded like my mother even though she had never said them during a panic attack. She didn’t know I had them. Nobody did. I understood how to become composed before anyone saw enough to ask.
Ryan knocked again, softer this time. “Open the door, princesa.”
The concern in his voice nearly broke me.
I wanted to open it. I wanted to let him walk into the bathroom, look at the measuring tape marks on my skin, and somehow understand everything I couldn’t explain without making me say it.
The fantasy lasted only a second.
Then I imagined his face changing.
Ryan had spent weeks telling me I was beautiful.
He touched my waist like he wanted it, kissed my body without hesitation, and watched me eat slowly without turning it into an interrogation.
If he saw me like this, he would finally understand that the woman he wanted wasn’t real.
She was a finished product built from lighting, clothing, makeup, hunger, and enough self-control to hide what happened before anyone arrived.
I kept my palms against the counter until the cold reached through the panic. Gradually, my breathing began to slow. The room stopped narrowing around me, though my hands continued trembling when I reached for a tissue.
Ryan had been waiting almost five minutes.
I lowered my shirt and faced the mirror, repairing everything that had slipped while I came apart. I wiped the tear tracks from my cheeks, fixed the mascara collecting beneath one lash, smoothed my hair, and pressed my lips together until the color looked even again.
By the time I stepped back from the counter, Charmagne Harlen looked exactly like Charmagne Harlen was supposed to look.
Nobody ever saw the process. They saw the finished product.
I sprayed perfume across my wrists because routine mattered, slipped my phone into my purse, checked my earrings, and gave myself one final inspection.
My first attempt at a smile looked wrong, so I relaxed my mouth and tried again until the woman staring back at me appeared pleasant, composed, and entirely unaware anything had happened.
Ryan knocked once more. “I’m about thirty seconds from picking this lock.”
“You don’t know how to pick a lock.”
“I know people.”
Despite everything, the smallest laugh caught in my throat.
“I’m coming.”
I turned off the bathroom light and went to meet him.
Ryan stood in the hallway with a canvas bag slung over one shoulder, three books stacked against his chest, and two coffees balanced in one hand like he had made the trip often enough to stop treating my apartment as somewhere he needed permission to enter.
His backward cap sat low over his brow, a few dark strands curling near his ears from the humidity, and his black T-shirt stretched across his shoulders in a way that temporarily erased Professor Brown, the mirror, my mother, and every other problem I had been carrying five minutes earlier.
His mouth curved when he saw me. “You planning to leave me out here until dinner?”
“I was getting ready.”
“For four additional minutes?”
“I’m extremely detailed.”
“I’ve noticed.”
He leaned in before stepping past me, pressed a kiss against my mouth, and handed me my coffee.
The kiss was barely anything, which somehow made it worse.
Ryan had kissed me enough over the last few weeks that affection had started slipping between us without ceremony.
A kiss hello. His hand against my back when he passed behind me.
My legs across his lap while we read. His thumb moving over my knuckles in the truck.
Things I had spent years imagining had become ordinary enough that I was only beginning to understand how much I depended on the ordinary.
He dropped his keys beside the bowl near the door without asking where they went, and the familiarity hurt in a place I didn’t want to examine.
“You’re staring at me.”
I blinked. Ryan had already made it halfway toward the kitchen.
“I’m evaluating the number of books you brought.”
“You’re thinking too loud.”
“I hate when you say that.”
“You hate when I’m right.”
He set everything on the kitchen table, then turned and caught me still standing near the door with the coffee pressed against my chest. His gaze moved over my face more carefully, and I wondered whether I had missed some trace of the panic despite checking three times.
“You good?”
The question brushed too close to everything I had hidden. I walked toward him before my expression had time to betray me.
“Professor Brown made me defend my paper in front of the class today.”
Ryan’s eyebrows lifted. “That why you look like you fought somebody?”
“I don’t look like I fought somebody.”
“You look pissed.”
“That’s different.”
His smile appeared. “What happened?”