by Noir, Roxie
Charlie gives me the world’s most skeptical look.
“Such as?”
I roll my lips together and glance toward the house, because I have no fucking clue.
“Maybe it’ll turn out that we’re actually second cousins,” I offer. “Actually, that one’s not bad. It could work.”
“For that to work we’d have to actually be second cousins,” she says. “That particular information is pretty verifiable.”
“Maybe I’m adopted,” I offer, and Charlie just snorts.
“Go look at those pictures again,” she says. “You’re not adopted.”
“We’ll think of something,” I say. “I’ll take the blame. I’ll tell my mom, I’ll tell everyone. I’ll say I got cold feet and I wasn’t ready. I’ll say—”
“You don’t have to,” she cuts in. “You’re right, we can figure this out later. I should head home.”
She’s still looking at me, the stars still scattered across her face and reflected in her eyes as she raises her left hand tentatively, the ring flashing and glimmering.
“They’re probably watching right now,” I murmur.
My hands are out of my pockets, one on her right hip, her warmth underneath her clothes flooding me.
“Because they’re nosy assholes?” she asks, a slight smile lighting up her face.
“Exactly,” I say.
My heartbeat is fast, hard, a frantic rhythm I’ve never felt before.
Correction: a rhythm I’ve only felt once.
Her eyes dart between mine. I move closer, her hand on my arm, her face tilting up slightly.
“Make it look good,” Charlie teases, and I lower my lips to hers.
It’s a quick, momentary kiss, over in a flash, but it makes my bones shake. It’s a lightning bolt of a kiss, over in a second but when I pull my lips away from hers, I can still feel it jolting through my veins.
I take her face in my hand, thumb gently stroking along the scattered freckles. The movement isn’t intentional, isn’t calculated for an audience. It just is, because the need to touch her again right now is more than I can deny.
Charlie tilts her head into my hand, hazel eyes watching me, guarded and curious and shocked and a thousand things at once.
I want to kiss her again. I want to kiss her properly, harder and longer. I want to push her up against the side of her car and feel her body against mine as she kisses me back.
It takes everything I have not to kiss her again.
Just friends, I remind myself. Just for show.
Stepping away from her feels like wading through concrete, but I do it. The ring flashes one more time as we separate, her hands lowering, and then suddenly it’s over, the spell broken. Charlie looks away, at the trees, at her car, glances over at the house.
“See you later?” she asks, already fiddling with the ring, turning it around her finger again and again, the movement unconscious.
“Of course,” I say.
Charlie looks like she’s about to say something else, but then she gives her head a little shake, smiles at me, gets in her car. I watch from the driveway as her taillights disappear toward the road, as she turns left, leaves.
Finally, I exhale, still rattled. Still shaken from half a second of touching my lips to hers, my mind racing.
I’m thinking that this is a worse idea than I knew. I’m thinking that we can never keep this up, that this lie will come out no matter what we do, that our inevitable breakup will tear everything we know into pieces.
But mostly, I’m thinking that I can’t wait until I see her again.
Chapter Seven
Charlie
That wasn’t our first kiss.
I’m driving fast, too fast, along the dark winding rural roads back to town. Headlights in front of me, darkness behind me, his great-grandmother’s garnet ring around my finger.
It flashes, even in the darkness.
I don’t think Daniel remembers the first time. It’s been six years and he’s never brought it up — not a look, not a glance, not an oblique reference, nothing.
Not that I’ve brought it up either. It was only one kiss.
We were twenty-three and drunk at a bonfire. There’d been cases of shitty beer and a few jugs of moonshine passed around, and the two of us were on the hood of his truck, lying back against the windshield, watching the sparks from the fire swirl up into the sky.
We were laughing about something. We clinked beer cans together. He was three-quarters of the way through his first year at community college, and I’d just gotten accepted into a two-year carpentry program.
I remember it felt like we were floating, celebrating, the wasteland of the past four years behind us. We’d both pulled through bad times and bad company, and there we were, making something of ourselves, letting go for the first time in ages.
I don’t remember what happened next. He turned and looked at me or I turned at looked at him, or maybe both. It must have been both.
But I remember being suddenly breathless with desire. I remember the feeling that my brain had bubbles rising through it, like champagne, and I remember the way that everything but Daniel faded, and I remember that it felt like if we didn’t kiss right then I’d die.
So we kissed. It was gentle, slow, tentative. It was surprising. It felt like walking into an air-conditioned building on a hundred-degree day: wonderful and bracing, with that sense of bone-deep satisfaction.
Either he deepened the kiss, or I did. It doesn’t matter. I just know that it felt righter than any other kiss in my life.
Then I spilled my beer all over both of us. The kiss ended and we were laughing, flicking beer off. Not long after we both went home, separately, because I didn’t want to rush anything. I needed time to consider the fact that I’d just kissed my best friend of thirteen years, process it, decide how best to proceed.
The kiss rattled me, but in a good way. A tambourine, not a rattlesnake.
And then, the next day, Burnley County Child Protective Services showed up at Daniel’s door and told him that a woman he knew was claiming he had a one-year-old daughter, and suddenly, nothing else mattered.
I couldn’t blame Daniel for getting hit by a tornado, even though I was hurt. I couldn’t blame Rusty for being the tornado. I was sad and upset and disappointed, but what could I do? Life moved on. I got over it.
Okay, I did make a voodoo doll of Crystal. It was a really bad one — just a vague human shape that I carved from a block of wood that I had lying around — but believe me, I stabbed the shit out of that thing. I think it made me feel better, though eventually I threw it away. Having a voodoo doll of your best friend’s baby mama is fucked up.
I’m probably lucky that he forgot, or pretended to, or that we both decided to ignore it forever. Everything would be different now, and we’d have wrecked the friendship that we have. I wouldn’t hang out with his family every Sunday at dinner. I wouldn’t be Rusty’s cool aunt who buys her stuffed animals of deep-sea fish and secretly let her drive her own bumper car once at the state fair.
Daniel doesn’t know about that last part, mostly because before I took her, he gave me an extensive rundown of what rides she should and shouldn’t go on.
I ignored the list and we went on all of them. We ate cotton candy, too. It was a blast.
When I finally pull into my parking space behind my apartment, I don’t really feel better. I still feel a deep, layered guilt over wearing his great-grandmother’s ring. I feel the same about lying to his mom and half his brothers, not to mention my own parents.
And I sure feel something about that kiss, something big and spacious and impenetrable, something taking up almost all the room I’ve got for feelings and leaving no room for anything else.
I head up. I glance into the kitchen, decide that there’s nothing in dire need of cleaning before tomorrow. I brush my teeth, wash my face, turn out my apartment lights, and get in bed.
The ring catches on the sheet as I pull it up �
� just slightly, no big deal — and my heart skips a beat. I sit upright in bed, turn on the bedside lamp and pull it off.
Then I hunch over the ring in the not-very-good light, heart still thumping, as I assess it for any possible damage — a prong torn off, the gem fractured, I don’t know — but it’s fine.
I sit there, staring at it, for a long moment. I tell myself that literally millions of people own engagement rings, that plenty of them probably wear them to bed, and that these are made to go on hands. They can probably stand up to cotton sheets.
I close my hand around it and get out of bed, because I can’t wear this while I sleep. I’ll wake up every forty-five minutes to double check that I haven’t somehow swallowed it or something, and that’s no way to live.
I need a ring receptacle. What I really want is, I don’t know, a wall safe with a thumbprint scanner, because while you can lose keys and forget combinations, you can’t lose or forget a thumbprint.
I don’t have a wall safe. I don’t even have a fireproof lockbox, even though my mom keeps telling me to get one. My ‘important documents’ are just in a cardboard box under my bed, a fact that made both my mom and my sister briefly close their eyes and breathe deeply when they found out.
In the absence of something that locks, I head into the kitchen and grab a mug. I have about two thousand too many, because whenever I find a particularly weird one, I can’t help but buy it. That also means that other people buy me weird mugs, so appropriately, I find one that Daniel gave me last year.
It’s got a cartoon illustration of several pinup-type women facing away from the camera, wearing thongs, and in goofy all-caps text it says VIRGINIA BEACH: NO BUTTS ABOUT IT!
First, no butts about what? ‘Virginia Beach’ isn’t really a statement.
Second, there are clearly some butts about it because the butts are right there on the mug. I guess the argument could be made that the butts aren’t really about Virginia Beach, because butts simply exist and aren’t really about anything, but then it might seem like I’ve given this dumb mug way more thought than I should have.
I drop the ring in, and it lands with a satisfying clink. Then I double-check the locks on my door, put the mug on my dresser, and get back into bed.
After congratulating myself on actually finding a proper spot for the ring instead of sticking it wherever and telling myself I’d deal with it in the morning, I fall asleep.
Chapter Eight
Daniel
I unlock the side door to the brewery, step inside, and take a deep breath. Instantly, it relaxes me: the smell of grain and malt, the sweet bready aroma that comes from boiling wort, the sharp tangy afternotes of hops.
It smells like work, and thank God for that. Loveless Brewing feels like the one area of my life that’s going well right now: we’re increasing production and expanding perfectly in line with Seth’s business plan. Whatever he’s doing, in terms of advertising and distribution and all that, it’s working.
I pretty much just make the beer, talk us up to potential vendors, and stay out of his way.
I head to my office, checking the pressure gauges and thermometers on the huge, upside down cone stainless steel tanks as I do.
In my office, I fire up my computer, put on some coffee in the break room, then come back and open the brewery’s spreadsheet.
Beer operates on a very specific schedule — even more so if you want to maximize efficiency and profit, like we obviously do. The master spreadsheet is half me (the beer schedules) and half Seth (the profit maximizing). It’s also complicated, color-coded, partly automated, and a thing of beauty.
Today I’m dry-hopping a batch of IPA, filtering and bottling a lager, and making a very small batch of an experimental amber ale that I’ve been wanting to try. Easy. Straightforward. Beer can’t protest. It’s not my seven-year-old daughter waking up late and then stomping off to the bus, furious at me because she couldn’t find the right glittery headband.
I offered her a different, shiny headband, but did she want it? No. No, she did not.
It’s not my best friend wearing my great-grandmother’s ring and kissing me outside my mom’s house and… no.
I’m not thinking about that this morning. I’m not wondering if I really buried the past as well as I thought I did.
I’m thinking about beer and nothing else. I pull my to-do list for the day up on my screen, give it a quick read over, and then head for my office door so I can get started.
Just as I’m almost there, the phone on my desk rings. I frown and check the caller ID, because it’s just past nine in the morning and beer people don’t tend to call that early.
SETH LOVELESS, reads the small, blocky screen. I roll my eyes.
“WHAT?” I shout, not bothering to pick up the receiver.
“COME OVER HERE!” a voice shouts back. “PLEASE.”
The phone stops ringing. I walk the seven feet from my office door to Seth’s and lean against his doorway. He’s in his office chair, leaning back, hands laced across his midsection like he’s a movie villain about to say I’ve been expecting you.
“I called because I was trying to be polite,” he says.
“You could’ve just walked over,” I point out. “I just did that and I’m fine.”
“Yeah, but I needed you in here,” he says, and shifts his computer screen toward me.
It’s… a spreadsheet? A flow chart? There’s also a graph.
“Tell me you didn’t redo the brewery spreadsheet,” I say, darting a glance at my younger brother. “You can’t just do that without—”
“Chill, I didn’t,” he says. “Take a closer look.”
I lean in until I can read the small text on the screen, and I realize something: the spreadsheet is full of names and times. Up in one corner, the only two things in that column, are DANIEL LOVELESS and CHARLOTTE MCMANUS.
“What is this?” I ask, though I half-suspect the answer.
“This is my analysis of your engagement announcement,” he says, swiveling in his seat to face his screen. He looks incredibly smug right now.
I fold my arms and wait, because apparently, he thinks he really is a Bond villain and wants to explain his entire evil scheme to me.
“I thought the timing and manner of your engagement announcement was kind of strange,” he says.
“I explained that,” I say, patiently, readying the story that Charlie came up with. “We weren’t going to tell anyone yet, but then at the hearing—”
“Nah, that’s not it,” Seth says, waving one hand at me. “Because that happened at what, approximately eleven-thirty in the morning? Yet the first confirmation of the engagement from you is hours and hours later, at Mom’s house, at approximately eight p.m.”
“Why do you know this?”
“I asked Eli and Levi.”
I want him to get to the point, but I don’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking questions, so I continue to wait.
“On the other hand, it seems that Mavis Bresley had heard the news and was informing others of it by approximately twelve-thirty that day. I myself heard it from Patricia Yardley—"
“Did you?” I smirk. “Does Trixie know where you’re hearing rumors from?”
“Trixie and I were never exclusive, and besides, we’re no longer seeing each other,” he says, like he’s impatient to move on.
“Doesn’t mean she’s not mad,” I point out. “When do I get to start tracking your rumors?”
My brother Seth is tall, charming, good-looking, and on account of those qualities, he’s been to bed with a sizeable chunk of Sprucevale’s female population.
As this spreadsheet proves, he’s also a huge dork.
“—anyway, I heard it from Patricia around two, still long before either you or Charlie had broken the news to anyone.”
“Congratulations,” I deadpan. “You’ve got the insider track on town gossip.”
“Except I should have known long before that,” Seth says, raising
his eyebrows.
He temples his fingers together, really getting into this whole Bond villain thing.
“Even if what you’re saying about keeping it a secret and informing the court due to extenuating circumstances is true, you should have been on the phone telling your family the moment you stepped out of there,” he says. “Not saying anything for hours is highly atypical for you.”
“I’ve never accidentally shared news of a secret engagement before,” I protest.
“Even so, not the sort of behavior I’d normally expect,” he says. “Anyway, I did some analysis, and it turned out that the primary vector of the news was Pete Bresley, who just so happens to be a bailiff at the Burnley County Courthouse.”
“Yes, he was there,” I say.
“Furthermore, this regression suggests that Charlie herself was unaware of her own news until mid-afternoon, though it’s more difficult to pin down an exact time,” he goes on.
“She had her phone off.”
“And finally, there’s the most important data of all,” he says, swiveling back to me. “And that’s that the two of you haven’t been in a goddamn relationship this whole time and I don’t know who the hell you think you’re kidding, Daniel.”
There it is. Frankly, I’m surprised that he waited this long to confront me about it. I can fool a lot of people, but fooling my brothers is difficult, to say the least.
Doesn’t mean I won’t make him earn it.
“Yeah, that’s what secret means,” I tell him. “That people didn’t know.”
“I’m not saying people didn’t know,” he says. “I’m saying that maybe you can tell everyone else you and Charlie have been together for ages, but you can’t tell me that. So would you like to tell me what’s really going on?”
I look at the spreadsheet one more time, and I admit I feel a little bad that he’s clearly spent hours on this.
On the other hand, Seth really loves spreadsheets and formulas. Maybe he had fun. I don’t pretend to understand any of my brothers.