Charli grinned. “So that’s where your ability to do impersonations comes from.”
“Luke, I am your father,” he said in a perfect Darth Vader voice.
“You may have actually made it in Hollywood,” she said. “With that talent. And that hair.”
“Did you just give me a compliment?” he asked.
“Possibly,” Charli said and flagged over their waiter for another beer.
As the dinner went on, she ended up sharing a bit her of past with Christopher. She told him her favorite memory growing up—a daylong water balloon fight in her backyard with all the neighbor kids. Although Jack had been a big part of why that day was fun, she left him out of it and instead shared stories about the other people who were there. Sean Jones, who got hit so hard with a balloon he got a black eye. Sandy Rogers, who barricaded herself inside a canoe and who everyone thought was lost for hours. Nate Owen, who brought out his older brother’s Water Blaster 2000 and hosed everyone down with it. The ice cream man who eventually showed up and put an end to the fight by causing everyone to run home to get money for Creamsicles.
She also told him about her favorite restaurant in Portland—Montage (which was actually a close second to Hayden’s, but he didn’t need to know that).
“I used to go there all the time with my parents,” she explained. “It’s this great restaurant tucked underneath the Morrison Bridge. They have the best macaroni and cheese you’ll ever taste, and they wrap your leftovers in tin foil that they mold into different shapes like balloon animals.”
“So, you leave with your food looking like a giraffe or something?” Christopher said.
“It’s an experience,” Charli told him.
“Sounds like something I’ll have to check out one day.”
“Definitely,” she said, wondering if she and Christopher would ever go there together down the road.
After dinner, their conversation switched back to talk of school and their friends, and Charli really started to enjoy herself again. Christopher took her to get ice cream down the street at a local creamery called Sugartime, and they ate mint chip cones while walking along the beach and listening to the waves crash down. At one point, Christopher picked her up and ran her over to the water, threatening to throw her in.
“Put me down!” she squealed. Although they were enjoying a warm October, it was too cold to swim.
“No way!” he said.
“Christopher!”
“You have to promise to give me something good first.”
“Like what?” she asked.
“How about a kiss?”
Charli decided that maybe it was time. Jack was off locking lips with someone else. There was nothing wrong with her doing the same. “Okay,” she said.
“Really?” He set her down on a wet patch of sand that the water had just touched.
“Sure,” she said.
“You’re certain that you’re okay with it?”
“If you ask me again, I might change my mind.”
Christopher smiled, wrapped his hands around her waist, and then touched his lips to hers. The kiss was soft. Sweet. Nice. Charli didn’t let herself analyze it any more than that.
She grinned at him afterwards. “Where to next?”
Christopher drove her to Frankie’s Fun Park for a game of miniature golf.
“You ever played before?” he asked as they waited in line for their clubs.
“No,” she said, relieved that Jack had never taken her putt-putting.
“This should be interesting then. Neither have I. Do you want to bet on the outcome?”
“All right,” Charli said. “If I win, you give me a back massage.”
“Okay. And if I win,” Christopher said, “I get to kiss you again.”
“Deal.”
On the very first hole, it was apparent that Christopher was not going to be the victor. It took him fifteen putts to knock his ball in. He didn’t have one athletic bone in his body.
“Winner is the guy with the most points, right?” he said, making a joke to hide his obvious embarrassment.
Charli put her arm around him. “We can play that way.”
She thought maybe, with a little practice, he would get better, but that wasn’t the case. They were constantly letting people go around them, and by the eighth hole, they decided to call it quits.
Christopher dragged her inside the arcade for a game of Pacman.
“I have to redeem myself somehow,” he said. “This is more my thing.” He smoked her, even beating the arcade record.
“Wow,” Charli said. “I’m impressed!”
“So impressed that you might consider giving me that second kiss even though you won at putt-putt?”
“Only if I get my massage,” she said.
“Fair enough.” Christopher led her outside and sat her down on a bench. She had tons of knots in her back from the stress of the past few weeks, and it felt nice to have Christopher knead them out one by one. He worked on her for a good five minutes or so and then she reached behind her and grabbed his hand.
“All right,” she said. “A deal’s a deal.”
It took Christopher less than a second to sit down beside her. He smoothed her hair out of her face and gave her a grin that hinted this was the highlight of his month. Maybe even his year. She couldn’t help feeling flattered as she closed her eyes, blocking out the flashing lights coming from the arcade, trying to be in the moment. This kiss was similar to the first one—gentle, not too long or too short—and Charli decided that it was a nice end to a wonderful evening.
Christopher drove her home and after parking his bike, he walked her up to her front door in true gentleman form.
“I had a great time tonight,” Charli told him, relieved that she actually meant it. Perhaps this was the start of something promising.
“Me too,” Christopher said. “Maybe we could do it again sometime.”
“I’d like that.” She gave him a kiss on the cheek, wished him a safe drive home, and then let herself inside and leaned against her door, listening as he started up his engine. When she could no longer hear the Harley, she walked down the hall to get ready for bed. Rebecca had insisted that Charli call her once the date was over, but she was too tired. She would wait until the morning. Sleep was calling to her, and she couldn’t wait to climb in bed and curl up underneath her covers. She brushed her teeth and then changed out of her dress into a t-shirt and shorts and flipped off her lamp, flooding her bedroom with darkness. Once her head hit the pillow, she sighed deeply.
Christopher was all she wanted to think about while she drifted off—his curly hair, his deep brown eyes, how much he seemed to care that she was enjoying herself. She replayed the date in her head and smiled to herself, imagining that she’d have sweet dreams about the two of them together. But once she started to drift off, her mind drifted too, back to a familiar place.
That was so different from a date with Jack—not in terms of what we did, but in terms of how I felt doing it all!
It was so strange to not be able to fully explain her history to someone she could end up being intimate with. And those kisses . . . they were not even close to the type of kisses Jack used to give her. Where were the butterflies? Where was that crazy head-over-heels feeling?
Damn it. She rolled onto her back. What was that all about? Her subconscious must have been taking notes all evening, and the darkness and the silence had given it a voice. Frustrated, she picked up her phone from her bedside table and called Rebecca.
“Tell me everything!” Rebecca said.
Charli switched on her lamp and propped herself up with a pillow. “It went great,” she said.
“But?” Rebecca must have picked up on the frustrated tone of her voice.
“But just as I was falling asleep, all these thoughts about Jack popped into my head.”
“So?” Rebecca surprised her. “That’s normal.”
“You think?” She said, feeling immediate reli
ef.
“Hell yeah. You’ve just had your heart broken. It will take time for you to stop thinking about Jack and for you to only think about Christopher. You have to give yourself that time.”
Maybe Rebecca was right. Perhaps she’d overreacted.
“So, you don’t think it’s wrong for me to keep seeing Christopher?”
“Are you kidding? Of course, I don’t think it’s wrong. If you had fun tonight, then you should keep giving the relationship a shot.”
“I just don’t want to ever hurt him the same way Jack hurt me.”
“Hurting people and getting hurt is part of the dating game. Just take things slow. You two have a lot in common. There’s a chance this could work out, and you’ll live happily ever after.”
Happily ever after. That was how things were supposed to turn out with Jack. But he’d thrown her a curveball with that letter. Maybe happily ever afters couldn’t be planned. Maybe they just happened, unexpectedly.
“I’m going to try and get some rest,” she said. She was too tired to keep analyzing.
“Dream about the genius babies you and Christopher will have if you get hitched,” Rebecca said.
Charli smiled into the phone, relieved for the lighthearted moment. “I’ll try my best.” She hung up and turned off her lamp again. Then she lay back down and pulled her covers up underneath her chin.
Despite how badly she wanted to fall right to sleep, she tossed and turned for the next hour or so. Was it possible for her to feel the same way about Christopher that she once had about Jack? Or was trying to move on pointless? Had she loved Jack so much that every other relationship would pale in comparison? Charli realized that most people did not end up with their first loves. First loves generally served the purpose of teaching people about themselves, helping them grow, enabling them to open up and be completely vulnerable with another human being for the first time. Maybe those were Jack’s only roles in her life, and she needed to accept that. Was it possible? Had the last time she’d seen him been it?
Charli understood that time was the only variable that would shed some light on the answers to her questions. But the scientist in her hated the fact that time was a variable she couldn’t control.
twenty-two
THEN
“WHERE’S YOUR HEAD at?” Christopher asked.
Charli blinked, snapping out of a reverie. “Nowhere,” she lied.
“Yeah right,” he said, scooting closer to her on their picnic blanket. “You haven’t said a word since we finished eating ten minutes ago, and I think the seagulls are full.” He took what was left of their French baguette out of her hands. “Talk to me.”
It was a sunny Saturday in late March, and they’d come to the beach to bask in the sunshine and take a break from schoolwork. She and Christopher had been dating for five months now, and it felt like he was always getting on her for being distant—not that she could blame him; a lot of the time she was.
Rebecca had been wrong when she said that time would make her think of Jack less. He still crossed her mind often. Sometimes, out of nowhere, an intense longing for him would come over her. Other times, she’d see or hear something that would remind her of him, and she couldn’t help but think of their past. Just a few minutes ago, she’d seen a couple down the beach throwing a baseball around, and that had made her nostalgic.
Thinking about Jack while dating Christopher filled Charli with the worst guilt, and she’d considered breaking things off with him multiple times since they got together. But Rebecca stopped her whenever she got close.
“If I had a Christopher in my life, there’s no way I’d let him go,” she’d told Charli just the other day. “Since you have feelings developing for him, why not hang in there?”
Charli did have feelings developing for Christopher. How could she not? He was just like her in so many ways. And everything with him was easy. They agreed on how to spend a free evening and what to talk about, and he understood her need to work on her dissertation as much as she did because he was equally as busy with his.
Physically things had progressed since their first kiss too. She hadn’t slept with him yet, but they’d fooled around quite a bit, and it was safe to say there was chemistry between them. It wasn’t out-of-this-world chemistry. When Christopher touched her, she didn’t get lost in the sensation the way she used to when Jack put his hands well . . . anywhere—through her hair, up and down her arms, along her stomach, between her slightly parted legs. But she reminded herself that no two relationships were alike and also that Jack had been the first guy she’d been intimate with. Maybe that was part of what had made everything with him feel so much more exciting.
She believed that logic some days. Other days she wasn’t quite as convinced it was the truth, afraid that it was just something she told herself to keep her guilt at bay.
She watched Christopher now, watching her, and she tried to decide what to tell him. Did she come out and say that Jack was on her mind, fess up, get it out in the open? Or did she lie like she had in the past when he caught her daydreaming and tell him that she was preoccupied with her dissertation. Or that she was lost in a memory. Or that she was just having a moment.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” Christopher said, catching her off guard. “It’s Jack. He’s who your mind drifts to. Am I right?”
Charli felt her face turn bright red. “What?” She couldn’t believe he’d nailed it.
“You know,” he went on, “part of me has thought this whole time that you weren’t in this relationship one hundred percent. I just wanted to believe that one day you would be.”
Tears welled up in her eyes. “I wanted that too,” she said, fighting them back. “That’s why I’ve hung in here as long as I have. You don’t know how much I enjoy the time we spend together. I kept thinking that in time I’d forget about Jack. Or at least not think of him as often. But for some reason, he’s still on my mind . . . a lot.”
“And in your heart?” Christopher said. “Is he still there too?”
As much as Charli wished she could tell him no, the truth was Jack still had a big part of her heart. Maybe all of it.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
Christopher picked up a handful of sand and watched it slide through his fingers. “Me too. But mostly, for you.”
Charli squinted at him in the sunlight, confused, waiting for an explanation.
“To not be able to let go of someone, to hang onto the past, that’s a terrible way to have to live,” he said.
She wiped her eyes. Falling for Christopher would have made her life a whole lot easier. But she realized now that she couldn’t force something she wasn’t ready for. As much as she’d wanted to.
“I hope one day I can let go completely,” she told him.
Christopher shifted his gaze from the sand to the brilliant blue water. “I guess I swooped in too early. Bad timing, huh?” he laughed slightly at his misfortune.
Bad timing, Charli thought as she leaned back on her hands. Now where had she heard that before?
—
AFTER ENDING THINGS with Christopher, Charli poured herself into her studies, rising early and leaving her house for the lab by six a.m. and often not returning until as late as one o’clock in the morning.
Rebecca worried about her. For weeks she left care packages on Charli’s doorstep filled with magazines, flowers, chocolates, and notes, and whenever she saw her in the lab, she let her know that she was around if Charli needed to talk.
Charli thanked her but explained that working in the lab was the only thing that made her feel better at the moment. By staying busy she was able to forget about how much she missed Jack. She needed that. She was hurting, and being in the lab took the pain away. Rebecca seemed to understand and left her alone for a while. But after about a month, she surprised Charli on a Friday night and pulled up a stool beside her at her work station.
“I know we’ve always joked that the lab is our second home,” she said, �
��but you’ve taken that to a whole new level. I’m afraid the university’s going to start asking you to pay rent.”
Charli wasn’t feeling chummy. She simply shrugged her shoulders and continued to look through her microscope.
“Do you want to come and have a beer downtown with me?” Rebecca asked. “A change of scenery might do you good.”
“I’m okay,” Charli said. Although she wasn’t really. Both of them knew that.
“What about doing something together tomorrow?” Rebecca suggested. “Maybe in the morning we could go out to Cypress Gardens like we’ve always talked about. I bet the flowers are beautiful this time of year.”
“I appreciate the offer, but I have too much work to do.”
Charli felt Rebecca’s hand come down on top of her shoulder.
“I’m seeing someone,” Rebecca said.
“What?” That got Charli to look up. She couldn’t believe she’d been so wrapped up in her own problems that this was the first she was hearing about this. For the first time in weeks, she felt herself smile. “Rebecca, this is exciting!”
“Is it?” Rebecca asked, tearing up. “Seeing you like this . . . it makes me afraid to fall in love.”
“Oh, no, don’t say that,” Charli reached over and draped an arm around her shoulder. “You didn’t get to see the good parts. I wouldn’t trade the years I had with Jack for anything—not even to get rid of how I’m feeling right now. Falling in love . . . it’s magical. Really, it’s the greatest feeling in the world—scary and exciting and intoxicating—all at once. I want you to experience that.”
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