“I’ve wanted to do that for so long,” he said.
“I haven’t.”
“God, I love how honest you are.”
Wait, love? Did he just say love? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold the phone.
I pulled back from him and reality crashed down. I clamped my hand over my mouth.
“Oh, shit.”
“What is it?”
“I kissed you.”
“Technically I kissed you and you let me.” Oh, it was more than that. If I’d just let him kiss me, my face would have been still. Not moving against his like I’d been practicing my whole life and this was my one shot at kissing him.
“This never happened.”
He took a step back too, and let go of my face. I started shivering the moment his skin left mine.
“If you want it that way.”
I nodded.
“This didn’t happen. It can’t happen. Please, I just…”
“It’s okay, Charlotte. You don’t have to explain it to me. I shouldn’t have done it. But I’m not going to take it back.” He licked his lips, as if he was trying to taste me on them.
“Then why did you do it?”
“I stopped thinking and just ran with it.”
So did I.
Zan
“So what happens now?” she said as we walked back to the dorm. I was replaying the moment when I’d leaned in and found out her lips were just as sweet and soft as I’d always imagined them to be. No, they weren’t. They were better than I imagined. Kissing Charlotte was better than f**king every single girl I’d ever f**ked. I’d have to be careful so I didn’t show her how much I liked the kiss.
“What do you want to happen now?” I said.
“This can’t be a thing. It just can’t.” She motioned to me and back to herself. “I’m an emotional train wreck right now and I’m not thinking clearly, and this can’t be a thing. If you were someone else…”
She had no idea how many times I’d wished I was someone else.
“I understand.” She pressed her fingers to her lips, and it made me lick my own to taste her still on them. “Will you at least tell me one thing?”
“What’s that?”
“Why were you crying?”
She breathed out slowly.
“Lexie. Something happened to Lexie.”
“What?”
She wrapped her arms around herself. She should have told me she was cold. “I don’t think I should be talking about this with you.”
We were almost to the dorm, and once again, my time with her was being cut short.
“You can talk to me about anything, Charlotte,” I said, wishing it were true.
“No, I can’t, and that’s why this can never happen. You and me.” My heart pounded when she’d said ‘you and me.’
“There will always be this thing between us. I’m never going to get past it. I can pretend, but I just can’t. It’s between you and her and I choose her.”
I’d asked for this. I’d asked for these words.
I shouldn’t have kissed her.
She smiled sadly as I held the door open for her.
“Can I walk you to your door?” This was the end.
“Sure.”
She was just about to open her door when we both heard something that made her blush and me want to roll my eyes.
Katie and Zack were going at it, loudly, and from the sounds of the squeaking bedframe, very energetically.
“Oh my God,” Charlotte said, moving away from the door as if it was diseased. “I can’t believe her.” Katie let out an especially loud moan and Charlotte gave me a look of revulsion.
“You can come down to my room and wait, if you want. My roommate is almost never here,” I said.
Zack yelled out something that we couldn’t make out and Charlotte’d had enough and booked it toward the stairs with me following.
“It’s just disgusting the way they go at it like rabbits. It’s like he makes her lose all common sense.”
“He has that effect on women.”
“I know.”
We walked the rest of the way to my door in silence.
Chapter Twenty-four
Lottie
I hadn’t really looked at his room the last time I’d been inside it. How had I not noticed the enormous amount of books?
“You read?”
“Yeah.” He stood in the doorway, as if he was afraid to come inside. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, I’m fine. Look, I can just go knock on my brother’s door.”
“Will you just do one thing for me? Before you go and this night becomes another thing we have to pretend didn’t happen?”
“That depends on what it is.”
“It’s not what you think it is,” he said, going to his closet and getting what looked like a very old, ugly yellow suitcase out, along with an old red milk crate.
“This was my grandfather’s,” he said, setting it down in the middle of the floor and opening the top. Inside was a turntable, and the crate was full of records. He pulled several out before choosing one and bringing it back over. He didn’t say a word as he put the record in place and set the needle.
“Lie down,” he said, getting down and lying with his head on one side of it.
“What?” I had no idea what he was up to, but I wasn’t going to just lie on the floor with him.
“Just lie down. You can hear it better. It’s not some sort of twisted game. I just wanted you to hear this. I think you’ll appreciate it.” He closed his eyes and patted an empty space beside him.
What the hell. I couldn’t go back to my room, and if I went to Will’s now, he was going to know something was up, and I didn’t want to deal with him.
I lay down as the pops and fuzz sounded the beginning of a new song.
I caught my breath when it started. ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ by Ella Fitzgerald.
Her voice filled my head, pushing everything out, including my conflicted feelings about Zan. I heard him breathe next to me as we both stared at the ceiling and listened to Ella sing about a boy she had loved and lost and regretted losing.
Our shoulders were nearly touching and his arm was so close to mine, I could feel how warm he was. His finger twitched and bumped into mine. Then he did it again.
I glanced down, and saw him take my hand. It made complete sense to wrap my fingers around his. He’d held my hands all afternoon, so what was a little more?
Holding Zan’s hand, in that moment, with Ella singing, felt right. This moment felt right. More right than I’d had in a long time.
Zan’s thumb started moving up and down the back of my hand with the rhythm of the song.
“I wish you wouldn’t hate me,” he said when the song ended. I turned my head to look at him. Our hands were still linked.
“I don’t want to anymore.” His eyes were deep and bottomless again. “But I can’t just erase what happened. I told you. I have to choose, and I choose her.”
“I know.” He looked down at our hands, where his thumb was still moving. He tried to pull away, but I didn’t want to let go. Correction, my hand didn’t want to let go. It was happy holding Zan’s hand. As far as hand-holding went, it was definitely top five in all of my hand-holding experience. Oh, who was I kidding? This was the pinnacle of hand-holding. Not that he had a whole lot of competition. Clark’s hands were always sweaty.
“If I could change it, I would,” he said.
“So would I.” I shifted so I was closer to him. “I used to wonder what would have happened if it was me in the car, instead of her.”
“It’s not your fault, Charlotte.”
I took a breath as Ella continued to sing. Something about the raw power and emotion in her voice loosened something in me.
“You make me feel very… confused. I’m sure you’ve noticed I’m not usually lost for words,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“I just… You’re not the guy I imagined in my head. All these years, I’ve turned you into this monster, and then here you are, and you’re nothing like I thought you were, but it’s so hard to let go of that image, even if it isn’t real.”
“Who am I now?” For maybe only the second time in my life, I thought about my answer before I said it.
“You’re this guy who sees everything. You think before you speak, as if you’re picking the right words in your head. I wish I could be like that. Words just tumble out of my mouth and I can’t seem to stop them. I’m like a… word geyser.”
His eyes were on me, so I looked back up at the ceiling.
“You’re an extraordinary girl, Charlotte.”
“Why do you call me that? Everyone always calls me Lottie.”
“I like Charlotte. It just happens to be the name of my favorite talking spider.” I turned my head and met another earth-moving smile.
“I was named after that spider, you know,” I said.
“I know.”
“How?”
“Lucky guess.”
The record ended and the room was quiet, except for the videogame noise from Will and Simon’s room. Zan got up and found another record and put it on. And then another, and another.
Before I knew it, my eyes were drooping as we listened to Frank Sinatra’s ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin.’ Zan was humming along, and we were still holding hands.
Zan
“Charlotte?”
“Hm?” I had been holding her hand for almost an hour. She hadn’t flinched, or tried to pull away, or yelled at me or hit me. For a second when I kissed her, I thought that she was going to slap me, but I would have taken it. A million slaps in the world would have been worth it. Burning in hell would have been worth it.
“We should probably get you to bed,” I said, as her grip loosened. Her eyes were closing, despite her effort to keep them open. Katie and Zack were probably done, but I didn’t want her to leave.
“Where’s your roommate?” she mumbled.
“Not sure. He’s never here, really.” His crap certainly was, though.
“Oh.” She let go of my hand and sat up. “I really don’t want to go upstairs. What time is it?”
“Nearly one.”
“They’re probably done, right?”
“I’m not all that familiar with my brother’s, um, stamina.”
She screwed her face up and her expression made me laugh.
“Oh, God. That is the last thing I want to think about,” she said, rubbing her eyes.
“You could stay, if you wanted.” I’d been saving the right moment to ask her. “You could have the bed and I’ll take the floor.” I hoped she didn’t think it was a ploy to seduce her. It honestly wasn’t.
“I don’t know.”
“At least let me walk you back up, then.”
She yawned and tried to get to her feet.
“Tell you what. If they’re still going at it, I’ll come back.”
I’d never hoped that my brother was hav**g s*x so much in my life.