CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
STORMY
MASSACHUSETTS, PRESENT DAY
It blew my mind that it'd only been a month, give or take, since I had bumped into Spider outside of Village Tavern. Only a few weeks since he'd stopped that asshole from going further in doing whatever the fuck to my body and only two since he'd threatened my life in the hallway.
The passing of time felt warped, like we'd managed to cram six months into the span of a few weeks, and I wondered if it was always like that when you met the person who somehow made your entire world make sense after a lifetime of fuckups and just … getting by.
Charlie had never mentioned anything about fear or anxiety, and why would he? He hardly knew me. But as open as he'd been in certain regards over the past few days, he'd never once opened up about what kind of turmoil went on in his head. Maybe he thought it was too personal, or maybe he thought it made him seem weak. But I had told him I saw him, and I had meant that in a more multifaceted way than he even understood.
He was so clearly terrified of everything. The world and the people in it. The things he saw, the things he'd seen, and the things he didn't see at all.
Shit, I think there was a good chance he was even terrified of himself, although I couldn't understand why.
Yet, for some reason, he wasn't afraid of me , in the same way I wasn't afraid of him. And that freaked me the fuck out and comforted me at the same time, and I could only begin to imagine the criticism I'd get from my parents for that.
But I’d deal with that another day.
What mattered right now was the stiffness of Charlie's spine as he worked on cooking us some dinner, adding rice to the vegetables in the wok. How shaken up he'd been by this douchebag who'd thought it was a good idea to trespass on a property guarded by a creepy dude who was alarmingly strong and quick with a knife.
What mattered was that I'd promised to tell him a story, and right now seemed to be as good of a time as any.
But how was I supposed to begin telling it when I wasn't sure of where it had even started?
I laughed beside myself, brushing a few strands of flyaway hair from off my forehead. Charlie didn't seem to notice as the pan sizzled and snapped with a thousand tiny bubbles, too wrapped up in his own head.
Just speak. It doesn’t matter as long as I’m speaking.
“So, I don't know what kind of kid you were,” I said, the words feeling weird and too big on my tongue as I tapped the countertop.
“The kind nobody wanted around,” he muttered quietly, as if he hadn't intended for me to hear.
Well, fuck. I hadn’t been aware that a single person could mend my heart while simultaneously breaking it. But there he was, doing just that.
“Oh. Um … well, I wasn't the greatest kid, I guess,” I said, dragging my fingers along the counter as I began walking toward the round little kitchen table. “My parents aren't assholes. I think, deep down, they always did what they thought was best for my sister and me, you know? But sometimes, I'd overhear them say shit to their friends or whoever about how, like, they had to have a second kid just to prove they could make one who wasn't destined for juvie. And looking back, I’m sure they didn’t mean anything serious by it, but I think … I think that kinda fucked with my head.”
Charlie didn't turn from the stovetop, nor did he reply, but as I sat in one of the two rickety wooden chairs at the table, I did catch the tension in his jaw and the heated sidelong glance in my direction.
I reached out for one of the simple wooden black shakers in the center of the table and spun it as I continued, “So, anyway, I spent a lot of time in detention. I was suspended from school a few times. Not for anything crazy, but, like, I pulled the fire alarm a couple of times, got into a few fights that I could've avoided … that kind of thing. And, of course, the kids I was friends with weren't exactly the type to encourage me to do better. They were the ones daring me to do it in the first place, and I had a really hard time saying no, even if I knew it was wrong.”
My fingers froze around the shaker as my heart rate sped to a dangerous, concerning level. I was nearing the part I never liked to talk about, the part only two other people in the world knew about, the part that had hammered that final nail into the coffin, and I readied myself to say it and say it fast.
“So, when I was sixteen, this one friend of mine—I can't even remember her name—she had talked me into sneaking out of the house one night, which wasn't out of the norm for me or anything. But usually, we went to this clearing in the middle of the woods by the high school—The Pit, they called it.” My fingers began to tremble, and I clenched my hand tighter around the shaker. “This particular night though, this girl wanted to check out a club about an hour away. So, we drove down there—my parents had no fucking clue I was even gone—and as soon as we got there, my friend found some guy to talk to and ditched me.”
Charlie's back was no longer ramrod straight, but his lips curled between his teeth, and his white-knuckled fist clenched around the spatula as he moved the rice and vegetables around in the spattering wok.
“Um, so …” A quivering breath passed through my lips as I lifted my gaze to the lamp hanging above the table. “I got to talking to this dude at the bar. He bought me a few drinks, and I got a little tipsy. He seemed so freakin' nice, you know? And I was this stupid kid who felt special because this older guy was so interested in me—”
“Stop.” Charlie muttered the word, hanging his head, already seeing where this was going.
But I wouldn't. Not when I’d already started.
“He raped me,” I said quickly and quietly, and with those words hanging in the air, I was sent back there in an instant. To the backseat of his car, his enormous weight pinning me down, my words and screams of protest going unheard despite the eleven people I'd watched pass by the window.
I had counted each and every one.
“Goddammit,” Charlie gritted out through a clenched jaw, pinching the bridge of his nose with tattooed fingers.
“He didn't hurt me or anything,” I added, as if it made anything better. “He just … didn't stop .”
Charlie turned off the burner with a little more force than was necessary. He reached for a cabinet door and opened it, grabbing two bowls, then slammed it shut, rattling the contents inside.
“ They didn't stop,” he replied angrily, using the spatula to split the stir-fried vegetables and rice evenly between the two bowls. “That piece of shit deserves to rot in hell, yes, and I’d fucking kill him myself if I could. But all those people who were around … you can’t tell me nobody had any idea, and they didn’t stop . They heard and ignored it. Who the fuck hears a girl being …” His mouth twisted, but he couldn’t say the word. Raped . “And none of them tried to do something about it. How the fuck does anybody live with that? How the fuck could they not stop ?”
I swallowed against the knot in my throat. “I told you not everybody would.”
He shook his head. “Fucking assholes. Every single one of them.”
The spatula was dropped into the pan, and he opened a drawer to retrieve two forks. Then, the bowls were carried to the table, where he handed me one before sitting in the chair across from mine.
Charlie's dark brown eyes met mine, the gold flecks I'd grown accustomed to now hidden beneath a veil of anger and hatred. It was similar to the look Blake had given me when I told him and Cee about what had happened in fewer details, but this wasn't the same. Charlie didn't hold an ounce of pity for me, only anger on my behalf and hatred toward the man who'd hurt me, and an unexpected lump of emotion built in my throat.
“You didn't tell anyone,” he stated.
I shook my head. “No.”
He nodded like he understood while Cee had unintentionally berated me for staying silent. “I never told my parents how many times my brother's best friend hurt me.”
“Physically?”
He answered with a small nod, and my heart broke a little more.
I couldn't imagine this man hurting even the smallest of creatures intentionally, not without reason. And knowing that he'd been bullied and tormented as a boy made me feel as murderous as he looked.
“I think, at the time, I was more afraid they'd be mad at me for sneaking out and having sex with this college guy,” I admitted, feeling stupid. “Hell, I hadn't even had sex at all before that night, and having to say it out loud and tell them I hadn't even wanted it … I just …” My words drifted off as I cringed inwardly and shook my head.
“So, I”—my breath left my lungs as I diverted my gaze from his—“started having all these nightmares, and this other friend … this guy, Billy … he gave me a pill one day at The Pit, and just like that”—I snapped my fingers for effect—“the nightmares went away.”
Charlie hadn't touched his food yet, but to be fair, neither had I. He wouldn't look at me though and instead stared into his full bowl of fried rice and vegetables. He shoved his fingers into his long, thick hair, plonked his elbow onto the table, and held his head in his hand. Two lines formed between his brows as his other hand fingered the tines of his fork with no intention of picking it up. It clawed at my mind to ask what he was thinking about, but I didn't think it was my place to dig deeper beneath his skin when I'd already decided this was about me spilling my truth and not begging for his.
“And I guess that was really where I started fucking up,” I went on, trying to push past his obvious internal retreat from me and the conversation. “Somehow, I managed to graduate from high school, but I'm not sure it really mattered when I was surviving on pot and pills and whatever booze I could get my hands on. This one time, my little sister even followed me to The Pit—”
Charlie lifted his head abruptly, dropping his hand to the table. “Something happened to her?”
Tears pricked the backs of my eyes as my head jittered with a nod. “She, um … she met Seth, this creep who hung out with the guy I'd buy my drugs from. She liked him for some fucking reason, and … well, long story short, he forced himself on her, and she had his kid.”
The words soured against my tongue, sizzling and burning like acid, as I thought about Seth and the secrets my sister, Ray—Rain—had only told me and her husband. She had sworn me to secrecy, afraid our parents would demand she get rid of the baby growing in her belly. And I had kept those secrets, never speaking of them aloud until this moment, but I still couldn't trust her with my own.
I was too ashamed. Too embarrassed of the disaster I'd allowed my life to turn into while she had still managed to thrive despite it all.
“She just wanted to be with you,” Charlie quietly added.
“No,” I protested, shaking my head. “I think she …” I blinked away the moisture in my eyes to stare at the ceiling. “I think she just wanted to do something other than read and—”
“Trust me,” he said, pinning me with a gaze so full of pain that I thought I might crumble on the spot. “She just wanted to be with you.”
I didn't argue his point.
Hell, for all I knew, he was right. Even if it was hard for me to envision any world in which Ray would ever want to be with me, let alone like me.
“Anyway …” I lifted my fork to do something other than stare at the heartache reflected in his eyes and poked at the rice in my bowl. “One night, when I was twenty-one, I went down to The Pit to get high, and I watched that guy, Billy, die. Right there on the side of the road with his best friend pounding on his chest and begging him to wake up, and, um …”
Fuck . I could still feel the bite of the February wind that night, stinging my cheeks and chapping my lips, as I’d stared over the chain-linked fence and watched in horror as Billy Porter took his last breaths.
We weren't kids, but I felt like we were, and it was surreal to say I'd known a guy who had died. A guy my age, one who I had gotten high with and fucked on more than one occasion.
“That kinda thing can really fuck you up,” I muttered.
“I'm sorry,” Charlie said, and I looked back at him then. Partly because I was shocked and partly because I couldn't understand.
Nobody had ever said they were sorry to me before. Not about that.
“Why?” I asked before I could stop myself.
“Because he was your friend,” he replied gently.
“He wasn't a good guy,” I countered while knowing I hadn't been a good person then either. “He was a drug addict whose best friend was his dealer. He cheated on his girlfriend pretty regularly, and I only know that because I was one of the girls he used to—” I bit down on my lip and shook my head, suddenly rethinking divulging that much of my strange and fickle relationship with the boy who had died.
“I don't care what he did or what you did with him,” Charlie replied, his tone even and kind. “If he had meant anything to you at any point, then I'm sorry. And I'm also sorry that you had to watch him die.”
I was quick to shake my head. “No. See, I won't let you be sorry for that . Did it fuck me up? Yes. But it also saved me. Because if I hadn't watched him die from taking one of those fucking pills I was popping on the regular, I would've ended up just like him. What had happened to him scared me so much that I didn’t do it again.”
Charlie hummed a small, contemplative sound as he nodded, then grabbed for his fork. “They do say everything happens for a reason. I'm glad you found reason in his death.”
I cocked my head at the chill in his tone and the nonchalant way he began to eat. He was fire and ice embodied, a puzzle I was eager to figure out. But he was also predictable, and I'd quickly learned that these moments in which he'd shut down, it was directly correlated to something he didn't want to talk about.
So, I moved on.
“Yeah, so I started to take my life a little more seriously. I got a job at the front desk of a tattoo shop, and I apprenticed under their body piercer for a couple of years. Things were going okay for a while, but I was still living with my parents, and even though we kinda get along, our relationship is, um … let’s say, better at a distance. They could never accept that I'd changed or I was trying to, and I couldn't find the patience to force them to see it. Plus, they were always so much more interested in what my sister was doing, so …”
“You left,” Charlie finished for me before furrowing his brow and scrubbing the palm of his hand over his mouth.
“Yep. I came up here, bounced around between a few shops for a while until I found Salem Skin. Blake and Cee adopted me, and the rest is history.”
The memory of walking into Salem Skin for the first time brought a little, nostalgic smile to my lips. The way Cee had looked up from the front desk's computer to watch me come in, forcing an air of confidence I couldn't convince myself to actually feel. I'd known of Blake Carson for a while, watched his climb to celebrity through social media, and when I'd seen the announcement on their feed that they were in need of a skilled and experienced body piercer, I had talked myself out of applying about six times before I finally worked up the courage to step into the shop.
My connection with Cee had been instantaneous, whereas the friendship I'd built with Blake took time. He wasn't an easy guy to know, and the walls he'd raised around his heart were high. Eventually though, I'd become not just a part of the shop, but a member of a family who accepted me just as I was. They never looked the other way when I broke down and admitted the gritty details of what had happened to me. They gave me shoulders to lean on while I worked on building the bridges I'd burned with my biological family. They had become my brother and sister, unbound by blood, and I loved them in ways I’d never known possible to love someone you hadn't been born to.
From the look on his face, Charlie didn't understand what that was like. And I couldn't say it surprised me, but my heart ached just the same.
I wasn't sure he'd had anyone in his life in a long, long time.
“Your friend seems nice,” I carefully said, changing the subject. Afraid I'd pushed him too far by telling my story. “Ivan, right?”
He nodded without looking my way. “Yeah. And he is. Weird as hell, but aren't we all?”
“Even the Misfit Toys had each other.”
That made his lips quirk in something close to a reluctant smile.
“You really should go to his wedding,” I added, finally heaving a forkful of rice to my mouth before closing my eyes and nodding with instant approval.
I had to give it to the guy—he sure knew how to cook.
Charlie took a bite and, with his mouth full, said, “I'm thinking about it.”
I poked at a sprig of broccoli and lifted one shoulder. “I told you I’d go. As your plus-one.”
For a second, he looked like he might take me up on the idea, and I hoped he would. But then he shook his head quickly, chasing the thought away.
“It's the day after Thanksgiving. I'm sure you have stuff you have to do. Family and what—”
“Come with me,” I blurted out before I knew what the hell I was saying.
Come with me? Had I really just invited this man I hardly knew to meet my family in Connecticut? And not just my sister and her family, but my parents too? The people who had stopped asking if I was ever going to settle down somewhere in my late twenties because I’d “clearly given up on wanting more” from my life?
Their words, not mine.
And for a second, I hoped he'd shoot me down immediately, the way he had when I initially asked him to Blake's party. I hoped he'd scoff and stare at me like a third eye had popped up in the center of my forehead.
But …
Fuck it . No. I wanted him to come, and I wasn't going to pretend like I didn't. I wanted him to have a holiday surrounded by people who were at least friendly because God only knew when the last time he'd had that was. I wanted him to be there with me as my date because I liked him, and I wanted my parents and sister to like him too.
The invitation startled him enough to let some rice drop from his fork as he stared across the table at me. I did, in fact, feel like I'd grown a third eye, but I didn't care. All the more to look at him with.
What could I say? The dude was ridiculously hot.
“Please,” I added, holding my fork tight as drunken, disoriented butterflies swarmed around my gut.
Great, I'm begging. That's a new low.
His throat bobbed with a hard swallow. “Y-you haven't asked them or—”
“I don't need to ask. I'll tell them I'm bringing my …” My jaw flapped a few times, as I was unsure of what word to fill that blank with. “Guy … friend.”
He sputtered with a chuckle, one side of his mouth lifting in a genuine smile. “Guy friend?”
“It's much more family-friendly than guy who makes me come harder than I ever have in my life ,” I muttered with a nonchalant shrug.
He snickered. “Okay, lying isn't necessary.”
“I might be a lot of things, Charlie, but a liar has never been one of them.”
His rich brown eyes met mine with a curious tip of his head. I flashed him a smile and asked what that look was for, and he responded with a slow shake of his head.
“You just”—his head continued to shake—“remind me of someone.”
“Someone good, I hope,” I teased, scooping another forkful of rice.
He pulled in a deep breath as the corners of his mouth tugged gently downward. “The best.”
Jesus fuck, he looked so sad . I wanted to get to the bottom of it. I wanted to dig out every one of his secrets and help him carry the load that weighed so heavily on his shoulders.
But before I could comment on the shift in his demeanor, he dropped his eyes back to his food and muttered a quick, “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“I'll go to your family's house for Thanksgiving. And we'll go to Ivan's wedding.”
He filled his lungs and nodded quickly to himself, like he needed reassurance, while I sat, stunned.
“Seriously? I kinda expected you to fight a little harder at least.”
He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Nope.”
“Why?” I asked against a burst of incredulous laughter.
“Because you'll be there,” he said with finality. “And I just decided that, for as long as we have together, I'll go where you go.”