Chapter 19
I don’t know how long I sleep for, but when I wake, I’m in the same position. And Charlie still has his arm around me, like he’s been holding me in place, protecting me from any more battering. He must have gotten up at some point, because the curtains are closed, and the room is dim and cave-like. Like I’ve retreated from the world, gone into hibernation. I breathe in deeply, not quite a yawn.
“Are you awake?” he says softly, almost a whisper.
I wriggle and turn in the bed in response, so that I’m facing him, and I tuck my head under his chin. He kisses me my hair, and I nuzzle in.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble.
“Don’t be,” he says. “How do you feel?”
“Exhausted,” I say as I smell him. “Sad. But otherwise okay.”
He kisses my forehead.
“You were magnificent. You’re so strong, Daisy. I wish I could be like you.”
His hand rubs circles between my shoulder blades. “You’re such a beautiful, strong girl. Funny and clever and bright. I don’t see how she doesn’t see that. But I do. And everyone else does too.”
“I just wish she loved me,” I say into his chest.
“I think she loves you, in her own way. You wouldn’t have so much power to hurt her if she didn’t care.”
Tears run sideways from my eyes and form a wet spot on the bed, and on Charlie.
“I’m making you all snotty.”
“I love being snotty,” he answers. “It’s my favorite thing. Next to being your fake boyfriend.”
His nose is in my hair, and he gives me a nuzzle. “Perfect girl,” he whispers.
I lean my head up to him and kiss him, and he seems hesitant at first, like I’m too fragile. But his mouth softens and then his hand slides from my back to my hip.
We undress each other slowly, wordlessly, sitting up in the bed as we take each other in. His T-shirt goes over his head, and then mine. Our lips meeting again and again between each gesture. He unclasps my bra, and winces when he sees the angry skin of my breasts, still red and inflamed.
“Does this hurt?” he asks.
I shake my head. He kisses each breast tenderly, like he might be able to make them all better. Like he can make me all better. Like he can heal the wounds in my heart and soften life’s blows.
I can’t fix this for you, he says with his mouth, but I wish I could.
The sex is slow and languid. His forehead barely leaves mine as we gaze at each other. My lungs are filled with him. My body. My heart. Until there isn’t any more room for pain. Just Charlie.
When we are finished, I finally look at the clock. I slept for three hours.
We lie facing each other. He strokes my hair back from my forehead, running strands through his fingers and toying with the ends. Our feet are tangled together, my knee tucked between his.
“How are you feeling?” he asks me.
I’m feeling confused. How can pain and pleasure coexist this way? And how is Charlie nudging out the hurt and replacing it so that, while, yes, I’m sad and the wound is there, its impact is not nearly as profound as it would be? He’s sharing it with me. He’s carrying some of the weight, and it’s something that we go through together.
When the blowup happened with the family, it had created a fracture between Rob and me. Like we were standing on two different ships, sailing away from each other. The hurt and angst we both felt so keenly did nothing but push us apart. He withdrew from me, like there was no more room when he was so consumed with darkness. It subsumed him. It stole him away. And eventually, I think I became the thing that he resented. He resented my attempts to keep things whole between us. My insistence that we could love each other enough, that nothing else mattered.
The way Charlie looks at me now makes me float. Makes my insides soft and melty, and I don’t understand how I came to feel this way so quickly. It’s frightening.
But I don’t say any of this to Charlie. I don’t want to risk this fragile thing that exists between us. I wrap it up like fine china and tuck it away inside of myself.
“I’m feeling… hungry,” I say. “I could eat. How about you?”
Relief passes over his face. “That’s a good sign that you have an appetite. Let’s go get some food.”
We get dressed, our clothes wrinkled from being in bed, but neither of us bothers to even mention it. It doesn’t matter. We walk through the hotel looking like vagabonds, and Charlie takes me to the place where I ran into him after I saw Gabby and Rob for the first time, just down the street.
We step into the dark bar, the neon beer signs casting blue and red light across the room. A placard at the front asks us to please seat ourselves. We pick the same booth where we sat last time, and our feet lock under the table, my one foot between his, like not touching each other isn’t an option.
A surly college kid who looks like he spent the whole night in the library comes and takes our orders, and we both ask for beers. Charlie orders a burger and shoots me an apologetic look.
“Don’t apologize.” I laugh at him with our server still standing there looking impatient. The veggie menu isn’t exactly robust, so I get a basket of fries and a garden salad. Strange combination, I know, but I’m in need of the comfort food and a salad alone isn’t gonna cut it.
“So,” Charlie begins when our orders are placed, and we’re sipping the foam off our beers, “I was wondering, when we get back to Denver, if I can take you out to dinner?”
A flutter erupts in my stomach, and I’d like to lean across the table to kiss him.
“You mean like a real date?” I say with my best coy face and flutter my lashes at him.
“Just like that.”
“I don’t know… I thought this was just a fling,” I say as I rub the condensation off the outside of my glass of beer with my fingertip.
“Like a vacation friend?” His grin goes lopsided.
“But I guess I’ll take you out for a test drive in Denver.”
“Please, no more road-rage incidents if you do.”
I give him an evil smile. “Buckle up, Beamer, because Mini Cooper is about to be back in action.”
My heart is lighter now. The altercation with my mom has faded away into the background. Charlie and I could sit here and do the postmortem, but instead we chat and flirt.
“You never told me what you like to eat, besides ice cream and vegetables.”
“I can eat French,” I say, “but I love Italian.”
“Done,” he says. “Endless breadsticks are in your future, Daisy.”
“Can we get ice cream after though?”
“For my flavorite? Anything you want.”
Our food arrives, and I shovel French fries in like I’m coming off a diet.
“Do you think it’ll be weird? When we’re back in Denver?” I ask. I’m trying to picture him in a different backdrop, when we both have jobs to attend to and friends that, if all goes well, will need to be introduced.
“There’s no way it’ll be weird. Not after this. This is weird. Denver will be a cinch.”
“I’m not going hiking with you,” I blurt out. “At least, not a lot. Maybe on your birthday. If we make it that far.”
“We will,” Charlie says confidently.
“I hiked with Rob, but I don’t like hiking. I like to jog and go bike riding, but I don’t want to pretend to be into hiking.”
I hiked with Rob for the same reasons I’ve done so many things—because I’m addicted to pleasing the people around me. And I’ve decided I’m going to stop doing that.
He leans forward in his seat with a conspiratorial look. “Daisy, you don’t have to hike with me—you shouldn’t do anything you don’t want to do just to make other people happy—but there’s something you should know.”
I tilt back a little, apprehensive. “What’s that?”
He’s going to tell me he’s about to hike the Pacific Crest Trail and he’s going to be gone for four months. I just know it.
“I don’t like hiking either,” he confesses.
“What?” I break out in another laugh. “Then why did you say you did?”
“I didn’t say I like hiking,” he points out. “I just said that I hike a lot.”
I raise an eyebrow at him as I munch on a French fry and pick up another. “Why,” I point the fry at him, “would you hike if you don’t like it?”
“Do you remember what I told you, about how Sarah and I split up?”
“Of course.”
“When that happened, and I essentially became a non- functional human being, I started developing all this restless energy. But I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone. I just wanted to be alone, so I started hiking. It always felt like a chore, but it also cleared my head. When I was sweating it out on the trail and hating every minute of it—it truly feels like punishment—”
I nod enthusiastically at this statement.
“It matched my mood, and eventually, after enough time slogging away, it would empty my mind. And I would come home so exhausted that I could sleep at night.”
I frown at the thought of Charlie—sensitive, considerate Charlie—feeling so terrible that he had to punish himself just to get through life.
“I’m sorry you had to go through all of that,” I say sincerely.
“It’s alright.” He slides his hand across the table to put it over mine. “In the end, it was good for me. Spending a lot of time alone let me do some soul-searching, and I learned a lot about myself.”
“Like what?” I ask.
“Like that I don’t like hiking, for one thing. And that I hadn’t been happy for a long time before the breakup happened. Ultimately, it turns out, the thing that hurt the most was the way it happened.”
I relate completely.
We walk back to the hotel. It’s around four o’clock in the afternoon, and despite it being a holiday, the traffic is heavy and people in business attire mingle with vacationers on the sidewalk.
“How about a movie?” Charlie asks as we stroll hand in hand.
“At a theater?”
“I was thinking in our room.”
Our room. I smile to myself.
“I think that sounds great.”
We walk through the glass doors to the hotel, opened for us with a smile and a nod from a uniformed man, and I remember to thank the gods once again for the invention of air conditioning.
“Charles!” a man’s voice calls us, and Charlie pauses.
“Oh, hi, James,” he says to the middle-aged ginger man swinging a briefcase in corporate attire. “You just getting out?”
“Yeah, the meetings dragged. So much for the long weekend. But you know.” He shrugs. “Billable hours.”
Charlie chuckles. “Don’t I know it.” He looks to me. “Daisy, this is my colleague, James. He works in the DC branch of my department, with Mark. James, meet Daisy.”
I give James a wave.
“Nice to meet you, Daisy,” James says with a polite smile and a passing glance before turning back to Charlie.
“I’ve gotta get going. My wife has been texting me non-stop all afternoon. We were supposed to take the kids out on the boat.”
Charlie says farewell, and just as James turns to leave, he stops and turns back briefly. “Hey, by the way, man, great job on the Matchless Mountain deal. Alex said you were a real bulldog.”
Matchless Mountain.
The words hit me like birdshot, stunning and visceral. Charlie was on the Matchless Mountain deal? The deal my team and I worked so hard to stop. The land we petitioned the governor to try to get the state to purchase and turn into a park. The deal that I spent the last six months pouring my heart and soul into, while I hid myself from my imploding personal life. The project I told him about. He knew I was the lead on the project, that it was my brainchild, that it crushed me when I failed.
James is walking from the lobby, out into the sunshine of a beautiful, carefree afternoon.
I turn to look at Charlie, and I see his face falling in slow motion. I release his hand. My ears buzz. He was on the deal. He knew, this entire time, that I had been on the other side, that I was the one he defeated, and he never said a thing. I rifle through memories as I watch Charlie’s hands come up. His lips part and he inhales, ready to try to explain.
My jaw falls open. Everything is happening as though I’m watching from somewhere else.
I see Charlie in the cab, telling me he works for the bad guys. Charlie telling me he wishes he could do something courageous. Charlie telling me he wants to quit his job. Charlie telling me he has something to tell me, and then never actually doing it.
This was it. This was what he wanted to say, and he didn’t have the guts. In fact, when Mark tried to talk about their work at the bar, Charlie put a stop to it. He lied to me. He lied by omission and let me fall apart in front of him and pour my soul out about my most personal, deepest secrets, while he knew that he’d been working against me and the things I believe in, all this time.
A horrible, nauseating notion comes over me. What must he have thought of me, knowing I was the one he defeated? Has he been pitying me? Thinking of me as a fool? He claimed to be a man with convictions—he told me he admired me. Maybe he’s been lying about more than just what he does for a living. Maybe he’s been lying about how he sees me. About the sort of person he wants to be. Maybe I was just an easy target. A silly girl with silly ideas, not someone to be taken seriously, respected, regarded as an equal. Not someone entitled to know the truth of our connection. He slept with me, all while withholding this information from me.
I pinch my eyes closed, shaking my head, wanting to say something but unable to speak.
“Daisy,” he says as he reaches for me. “I wanted to tell you.”
I take a step back, away from him.
“But you didn’t, Charlie. You didn’t tell me.” I’m shaking my head at him. “You knew how much that meant to me, and you didn’t bother to let me know who you really were.”
“Daisy.” He sounds flustered. “Just give me a minute to explain. Can we just go upstairs and talk? Please?”
The pleading look in his eyes makes me want to go, and then Mom’s pleading look comes back to me and I realize I can’t. I can’t listen to him tell me why this is okay. I can’t listen to him explain away an omission of this size. I can’t put my own feelings aside when I’m this hurt.
“I didn’t know,” he’s saying as I shake my head and take another step backwards. His voice echoes across the lobby, and a few lingering hotel guests are looking at us. “When you told me you’d been working on that campaign, I didn’t know how much you’d mean to me. How important you would be.”
“It’s okay, Charlie.” I force a hollow laugh. “Of course you didn’t know. How could you have known?”
He nods slowly, like he might be making some headway. He holds his hands in front of him like he’s trying to negotiate with a feral animal.
“But I did mean something, didn’t I?” I ask. “I thought I did. You meant something to me at least, Charlie. I told you everything. I let you in, completely.” I press my hand to my chest. “You meant something to me, and I thought this was starting to mean something, whatever it was.”
“Don’t say that. Don’t say ‘was’ .”
There is fear in his eyes, his brow creased and his lips downturned. I can see his mind working, trying to figure out a solution, trying to find an angle he can use to bargain his way out of this.
“This was just a vacation fling, right? I wasn’t important enough for you to be transparent with me. I wasn’t important enough for you to take a risk.”
“No!” he nearly shouts. “It’s the opposite. You were too important to take the risk. I was scared. I was scared you would hate me and refuse to talk to me. And think that I’m some… soulless…I don’t know, monster or something. That I don’t have a conscience.”
The loitering hotel guests have stopped whatever they were doing, and are watching us with curious, intrigued eyes. This will make for good gossip later. I couldn’t care less.
“Do you?” I ask. “Do you have a conscience? You pushed the deal through.” I sneer, “You were a real bulldog, apparently.”
I don’t know if I’m being fair. I don’t know what kinds of lines to draw around myself. I’ve been a doormat for other people for so long that I don’t know how much to accept. How much give and take and forgiveness I need to offer. I wish Cara were here, to tell me how to draw boundaries in the proper places. I don’t know how to do that yet. I’ve never learned. But there is one boundary I know that I need to establish—that I began to establish with my mother this morning—and it’s that I won’t apologize for who I am, and I won’t accept being used or taken for granted. Not anymore.
He opens his mouth to plead with me again, but I stop him with a hand. “Please, Charlie. Just don’t. I can’t. I can’t think right now. There’s too much going on already.”
Charlie exhales hard, as his head drops forward and his eyes squeeze shut. The look of hurt on his face nearly breaks me. He looks like a dog that’s been kicked.
“I’m just so sorry, Daisy. I’m really, really sorry.”
I speed walk to the elevators, forcing myself not to run. I hit the button and look back. Charlie is standing in the same place in the lobby, his bereft hazel eyes following me, but he doesn’t move.