Page 24 of What He Always Knew
I wanted to be the only hands that got to touch her, and that’s when I realized that it didn’t matter if my morning with Blake was meaningless. It still hurt.
It was still wrong.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, brushing Charlie’s cheek with my knuckle. “I won’t let it happen again. I promise. I give you my word. Just… stay with me this weekend. Blake is gone. Tell Cameron you’re going somewhere, or hell, tell him the truth, I don’t care. Just…” I lifted her chin, our lips just centimeters apart as I whispered my plea into her skin. “Be with me.”
She considered me, her eyes searching mine before they flicked to my lips and back again. But then she sighed, pulling away until we no longer touched, until there were feet between us instead of inches.
“I’m sorry, I just don’t know how I feel right now,” she said with a sniff. “I need some time to think. To process. Besides,” she added. “Cameron is taking me somewhere this weekend.”
Dread seeped through me slow and mercilessly, followed quickly by a hot, jealous anger. I clenched my jaw, testing my next words carefully in my mind before letting them out.
“Where is he taking you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell him no,” I said without hesitation, as if it was the only solution. “Say you don’t want to go. Say you want to be with me, instead.”
“I can’t,” she said on a sigh. “I told him I would go already. I promised him I’d give him this chance.”
Her eyes met mine then, and they were hard again, like the eyes I’d seen the first day I’d been in town, only this time they weren’t empty. They weren’t dead.
They were alive with a fire I knew I’d lit.
“And, honestly?” she said. “I don’t want to be with you right now.”
“Don’t sleep with him.”
Charlie’s mouth popped open, and she blinked several times, as if she’d imagined what I’d said. “You’re joking.”
“I’m as serious as an obituary. Don’t sleep with him.”
“Wow.” Charlie adjusted her bag on her shoulder, shaking her head. “Fuck you, Reese.”
With that, she was out the door, on her way home, on her way to him.
And there was nothing more I could do.
Charlie
How was it that I’d managed to wake up in someone else’s life?
I flipped open the top of my old suitcase with that thought on repeat, my fingers running the intricate stitching on the sides. I hadn’t touched the suitcase in years, since before I’d been pregnant. There were no vacations happening once we’d found out, and definitely none that were evenconsideredafter we’d lost the boys.
That suitcase had been a wedding gift from my parents, one I’d opened with an unmatched joy as I thought of all the places it would see. I imagined it stuffed under a plane on its way to Paris, loaded in the back of our car for a weekend getaway, packed to the brim with souvenirs from a new city we’d see each year.
And that suitcasehadseen a lot, at least, in those first few years of our marriage.
It’d touched down in Las Vegas the night Cameron and I flew there on a whim, and it had seen the beach when Cameron and I spent our honeymoon in Hawaii. It had even lost a zipper at the old cabin we booked with Graham, Christina, and my parents for Christmas three years after we’d married.
It had seen nothing but the inside of our closet since that trip.
But, here I was, cracking it open after years of it collecting dust, my clothes and shoes piled on the bed around it as I tried to figure out how to make it all fit. And all I could think as I packed was that I must have somehow slipped into someone else’s life, because I knew it couldn’t possibly be mine I was living.
It couldn’t possibly be me, Charlie Pierce, caught in a confusing web of lies and truths, trying to decipher it all and make what seemed like an impossible decision.
It couldn’t be me in love with two men. It couldn’t be me with two men doing all they could to have me.
But it was, and I wished I could break down the facets of that reality as easily as I’d chosen what to pack for the weekend, but it was useless. So, I focused on that packing, on that easy task, on something that felt like it could be tackled, since my thoughts couldn’t be.