Page 57 of TJ Powar Has Something to Prove

He shrugs. “A friend of my mom’s is trans, and she told me the first time a cashier called her ‘miss’ after getting laser, she was really happy. For her, anyway, that felt right. Being seen as your gender is pretty neat. I think maybe you and I take it for granted.”

TJ hadn’t thought about that before. “True,” she says,veryslowly, because she’s loath to agree with him. “I guess we justget to choose which brand of corporate propaganda we subscribe to.”

He nods. This may be the weirdest conversation she’s ever had. She rips off another wax strip. It’s been longer than usual since the last one, and he lets out a string of curses so foul she reaches up to pat his cheek. “You kiss your mommy with that mouth?”

He laughs breathlessly. “Not my mommy, no.”

He looks down at her and she only now realizes how she’s basically crouching between his spread knees and—wow, her mind isnotin PG-13 places.

She busies herself again with the wax. By the time the whole leg is done, he’s wiping away tears and has long since stopped swearing, or talking at all, really. His leg is pink and raw, but ever so smooth when she runs her finger down his calf. He jerks away from her touch. TJ snickers.

“One leg done,” she says in a singsong voice. He rubs his eyes. She surreptitiously checks her phone. As much as she’d love to continue, it’s getting late. “Tell you what. I’ll let you off here.”

Charlie lowers his hand to look at her. “But I signed up for the full TJ waxing experience.”

“This is it,” TJ admits. “I almost never do both my legs on the same day. It takes forever. And mine are way hairier than yours, so it takes even longer.”

He glances at her legs, then her arms. “Yeah, you’re pretty hairy.” She flings the waxing stick at him. He bats it away. “To tell you the truth, I’ve been wondering about the texture of yours.” He reaches for her leg.

“Don’t!” she shrieks, laughing, scooting away. Unfortunately,she scoots right back into the tap of the tub. Pain shoots through the back of her head and she sees stars.

Then there’s hands on her shoulders. “You okay?”

His touch is sudden and distracting. She needs to get away. Now. Panicking, she tries to get up by reaching for something to grasp on to. Of course, when she tries to put her weight on it, she realizes it’s the tap. And she just turned it on, full blast.

Within seconds, Charlie is drenched with ice-cold water. Because she’s right at the wall, she only gets a bit of the spray, but it still makes her gasp and fumble with the tap. Charlie bats her hand away when it becomes clear she doesn’t know what she’s doing. He screws it off again, and then there’s just thedrip-dripof the faucet in the background. His normally perfectly fluffy brown hair is spiky and dark, hanging over his eyes, his black button-down clinging to shivering shoulders.

He meets her gaze.

I like you and I wanted to kiss you.

She nearly flinches at the sudden memory. No. He doesn’t. He can’t. She won’t let him, and she certainly won’t let herself.

“Huh,” Charlie says thoughtfully, and she realizes his hand is on her shin. “Your hair feels the same as mine.”

She jerks away. Clearly their thoughts were in entirely different places. “What did you think it would feel like?” she snaps. “Barbed wire?”

He laughs, the skin around his eyes crinkling. “I—I—I—” He stops midsentence, and his jaw works. She watches him curiously. It’s not like he’s shivering that badly. It’s more like he can’t get the words out. His mouth shuts. This hashappenedbefore. She’s noticed it so many times.

When he says nothing else, she asks, “What’s that about?”

He takes a deep breath before speaking. It still takes him a second, it seems, to get the sentence started. “I—I—Ihave a stutter.”

She stares at him. In the silence, she hears the front door down the hall open and close. “No way.”

The side of his mouth ticks up. “Way.”

How could he have a stutter she never noticed? She frowns, suddenly in doubt of herself. If she’s really as self-absorbed as Simran said... “Is this one of those things everyone except me already knew?”

His smile vanishes. “No. Not many people notice anymore.”

“Anymore?”

“It was more noticeable when I was a kid,” he says. Carefully. “As in, ‘people laughed whenever I read aloud in class’ noticeable.”

TJ blinks. She can’t even picture that. Charlie goes on.

“I went to speech therapy for a while. They told me to try public speaking, to train me to think about what I said before I said it. That’s where debate came in.”