“I was twenty, and I was always over at his place, so we decided I should move in. And my mom — she was such a romantic, she wasn’t even trying to talk me out of it. She wanted me to marry him. I did too.”
Charlie says nothing, just watches me, leaving space for me to go on, or to stop.
“My phone died at some point in the night.” My voice is hoarse now, like my throat is closing off to keep the rest in. But I can’t stop. I need him to know. I need to not be alone with this for another second.
“When I was with him, I’d just . . . get so swept up. When we woke up, I didn’t even plug my phone in until after we’d made breakfast.” Eaten. Had sex. Made more coffee.
The back of my nose burns. “Libby had been calling me for four hours. She was alone at the hospital, and . . .” Nothing comes out after that. My mouth is moving, but there’s no sound.
Charlie sits forward, pulls me in against his chest. His mouth presses hard against the top of my head, his thumb brushing over my shoulder.
“I can’t imagine.” He pulls my legs over his lap, crushes me to his chest again, smoothing my hair and kissing it.
I close my eyes, focusing on these sensations, in this moment. I’m here, I promise myself. It’s over. It can’t hurt me anymore.
“Libby would wake up screaming.” My voice is wet now, thin. “For months after Mom died. And I couldn’t sleep at all. I was too scared I wouldn’t be there if she needed me.”
I learned to wait until she woke in a panic, to throw my blankets aside and scoot to the far side of my bed so she could slip in beside me under the quilt. I’d wrap my arms around her until she cried herself back to sleep.
I never told her it would be okay. I knew it wouldn’t. Instead I took up Mom’s old refrain for comforting us: Let it out, sweet girl.
“Jakob was great at first,” I say. “I barely saw him, but he understood. And then he got the chance to go to this residency, out in Wyoming — he was a writer.”
“He left you?” Charlie says.
“I told him to go,” I admit weakly. “I felt like . . . I didn’t have the time or the energy for him anyway, and I didn’t want to hold him back.”
“Nora.” His chin nudges my temple as he shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have been alone through that.”
“He couldn’t have done anything,” I whisper.
“He could’ve been there,” he says. “He should’ve.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But it wasn’t just him failing me. I kept making plans to visit and then canceling. I couldn’t leave Libby. And then . . .”
He brushes my sweat-dampened bangs out of my eyes. “You don’t have to tell me.”
I shake my head.
All this time, deep in the pit of my stomach, the shadowy monster of grief and fear and anger has been in the corner where I locked it, but it’s been growing, new ropes of angry black lashing out in every direction, starving, mad with hunger.
A demon that’s going to devour me from the inside out.
“I planned a surprise visit. Got Xanax, took a bus out because that’s all I could afford, left Libby alone. I could tell as soon as I saw him that things had changed. And then, the first night I was there, I woke up in a panic. I didn’t know where I was, and I couldn’t find my phone. All I could think was — that something had happened to Libby. I was . . . hallucinating, almost. My chest hurt so badly I thought I was dying.
“Jakob thought I was having a heart attack. He took me to the ER, and they sent me home a couple hours later with a huge bill and some breathing exercises. It happened again the next night, and the next. I told Jakob I needed to go home early. He bought me a plane ticket and told me he wasn’t coming back. He’d decided to stay.
“I wanted to figure something out. Libby only had a year of high school left, but I thought maybe I could move her out there with us. A week after I got home, he told me he’d met someone else.”
Like the universe was punishing me, for wanting too much, for even considering putting Libby through that when she was at her breaking point. It still makes me sick to think about.
Charlie’s fingers glide up and down my arm. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not that I am sure he was ‘the one’ or something.” I close my eyes, heart racing. “It’s just . . . ever since then, it’s been hard to imagine letting anyone close like that. Not when I’m so fucking broken I can’t sleep anywhere but my own bed. Even here it’s hard, with Libby right next to me. I’ve just never trusted myself since then.” I press my face into his warm skin as that ache yawns wide in my chest. “I’m sorry. I’m just . . .”
“Don’t be sorry,” he says roughly. “Please don’t apologize for letting me know you.”
“It’s embarrassing,” I say. “To be so obsessed with being in control that sleeping makes me panic. I’m a fucking mess.”
He turns me to face him, his hands laced against my lower back. “Everyone’s a mess,” he says.
“You’re not.”
He smiles faintly, the reflection of the embers in the fireplace catching the flecks of gold in his irises. “I’m living in my childhood bedroom.”
“Because you’re helping your family,” I say. “I threw mine under the bus the first chance I got.”
“Hey.” He touches my chin, lifts it. “Your ex left you in the fucking wilderness, Nora, on your own, and you did your best. You’re not the villain in his story. He is — and not because he fell for someone else, but because he exited your relationship the second you were the one who needed something.”
He cradles my face between his hands. “I’ll take you home whenever you want,” he says. “But if you want to stay, and you wake up screaming, it’s okay. I’ll make sure you’re okay. And if you want to stay, and then change your mind, I don’t mind driving you back at four a.m.”
I read once that not everyone thinks in words. I was shocked, imagining these other people who don’t use language to make sense of everyone and everything, who don’t automatically organize the world into chapters, pages, sentences.
Looking into Charlie’s face, I understand it. The way a crush of feeling and feathery impressions can move through your body, bypassing your mind. How a person can know there’s something worth saying but have no concept of what exactly that is. I’m not thinking in words.
It’s a feeling of not quite Thank you, not just You make me feel safe, but something that dances in between those.
“I want to stay,” I say. “But I don’t think I can.”
He nods. “Then I’ll take you home.”
“Not yet.”
He smooths my hair, tucks it behind my ear. “Not yet.”
We lie down together, my back pressed against his warm stomach, his arm draped over my hip, fingers brushing along my ribs like tiny skiers following the gentle slopes, until he’s hard again, and I’m drunk on the way he’s touching me. We have slow, dreamy sex, and when it’s over, I settle against his chest, feeling his heartbeat thudding softly against me, as calming as the lights and hums of the city blurring past my apartment window, a whole world that keeps spinning while you sleep.
If I don’t say it aloud, I think, it doesn’t count. Maybe it won’t even be true.
But it is true, and I’m not sure I’d want to stop it, even if I knew how: I am falling in love with Charlie Lastra.
In the morning, I skip my run. Libby and I sit on a blanket spread in the meadow, coffee in hand, and I tell her everything.
Eyes lit up from within, she says, “He’s staying?” and my heart crumples in on itself.