“I’m just not a bar person,” she said. “Does that make me weird?”
“What would you rather be doing?” Johanna asked.
“Playing board games with my friends in the dorm.”
“You’ll be able to soon enough,” Charlie said. “Break is almost over.”
Too long a pause, then, “Yeah.”
Charlie and Johanna exchanged glances.
“That sounded like more than a yeah. What’s up, Char?”
His daughter picked at the already-chipped polish on her thumbnail. “I’ve been thinking.”
“About?”
She looked up. “School.”
“I should go.” Johanna started to rise, but Charlotte shook her head.
“No, you’re kind of the straw that broke the camel’s back. Stay.”
“Uh-oh.”
“No, it’s good.” Charlotte’s laughter trembled. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. I don’t think early childhood education is for me. I…I want to go to culinary school.”
“You’ve got two years into this degree—” Charlie began, but she cut him off.
“I know, Dad. It’s a lot of money spent, but most of it was on scholarship, and I’ll pay off the rest. This is my gig. I’ll cover it. Spending two more years working and paying for a degree I don’t want seems like even more of a waste, don’t you think?”
“It’s a degree that will always get you a job.”
“And that’s really the only reason I went for it to begin with. It’s not the reason to become a teacher, Dad. It should be my passion, and it’s not. Baking is.”
Charlie rose from the couch. Part-time caretaking at the cemetery was not lucrative, especially in a small town like Bitterly. He’d always worked as a handyman to compensate. It had been enough to support his family. Period. Scholarships and loans were the only way his kids were going to college, and now Charlotte spoke of tossing two years aside to start over again.
“It’s not as bad as you think, Daddy,” Charlotte told him gently. “I already looked into the CIA in Hyde Park. It’s in New York—state, not city. A lot of my credits will transfer, so instead of getting an Associate degree in baking and pastry arts, I can get a Bachelor’s. And there are grants and scholarships I can apply for.”
“Isn’t it a bit late to do that now?”
“For the spring semester, yes,” Charlotte said. “But my classes in New Paltz haven’t been paid for yet. That’s money I won’t have to put out. I’ll apply to the CIA for the fall.”
“So you’re not going back to school after break.”
“Just to get my stuff. Say good-bye to some friends.”
“You’ve already made your decision, then.”
“I want you to be okay with it.”
“And if I’m not?”
Charlotte’s chin went up in that way she had since earliest toddlerhood. “This isn’t a whim, Dad. I’ve really thought it out. It’s what I want more than anything.”
Charlie blew a breath through his lips. Paused on the screen, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost battled zombies frozen mid-shamble.
“I know it’s not a whim,” he said. “I trust your judgment, baby.”
Charlotte launched into him from her perch on the couch. “Thank you, Daddy.”
Holding his daughter, Charlie was overwhelmed by the sensation of time spinning away from him. She didn’t need his approval, or his consent. Charlotte was a woman grown, one who knew her mind. He trusted her completely and always had. It wasn’t the change in schools or money lost, it was acknowledging she no longer needed him that grabbed his gut in a fist and squeezed.
* * * *
Johanna tried to imagine the thoughts racing through Charlie’s head as he held his daughter tight. Parenthood was an alien thing, one she had never aspired to or understood. Her own parents had known nothing about children, about the care they required. No matter how much they loved their girls, in the end, it had not been enough. Wonky genes aside, the notion of loving so much only to lose it one day had helped to quell any inkling she ever had when she held a baby in her arms and thought, maybe.
Until now.
Cool heat rose to her cheeks. All the years denying herself any real and binding love had not been able to withstand Charlie McCallan’s freedom, his smile, the place she’d been holding for him in her life. Was it the same with children?
“I hope you really do want me to work with you, Jo.” Charlotte bounced onto the couch beside her. “It’s a prerequisite to attending the CIA, working in the food industry. I mean, I worked in the coffeehouse for three years, so that counts too, but an actual bakery is going to look great on my application.”
“Of course I want you to work with me.” The cool heat altered, making her belly a little queasy. Summer, Cape May, leaving Bitterly and Charlie and her sisters. “It’ll be great.”
“Oh, I just realized, I could—” Charlotte’s fair cheeks pinked. “Crap. Now I’m being presumptuous.”
“What do you mean?”
Charlotte pressed palms to her cheeks. “I was going to say I could go back with you when you go and help from now. But you probably don’t need help this time of year, and I can get some hours with the coffeehouse, and I didn’t mean to…and you and my dad and…” She bit her lip. “And I’m rambling. Sorry, Jo.”
“Don’t be silly. I can definitely use your help when I reopen, only…”
“Only?” Charlie asked.
Johanna gathered her courage along with a deep breath. She met Charlie’s eyes, held them, and let the words fall. “It’s really slow this time of year. When I came north, I closed for the season. I figured on opening again in the spring.”
Charlie’s smile was sunrise breaking the horizon. He moved closer, took her hands one at a time, studying each of them before lacing his fingers through hers. Johanna’s heart hammered something like fear, like joy. Charlotte muttered something that might have been goodnight, and beat a hasty retreat.
Charlie asked, “Does this mean I have a date for New Year’s Eve?”
Johanna nodded.
“And Valentine’s Day?”
Those blasted tears stung, blurring his image. A lump formed in her throat. His hand came up, fingers caressing her neck, under her chin, along her cheekbone. “Johanna,” he whispered her name like a wish before kissing her tenderly, releasing the tightness in her body. The fear that kept her from letting go with other men she might have loved did not stand a chance against Charlie. What she felt for him was too old, too strong, what she wanted too intense to crush. The choices of her youth had not saved her grief, only changed its guise. Maybe it wasn’t too late to make it right.
Charlie pulled her back into the couch only recently vacated by Charlotte. A passing thought to her self-conscious retreat was all Johanna spared her. Kissing Charlie was the only thought in her head, and it was not so much thought as carnal, euphoric instinct.
Arms wound about his neck, fingers caught in his thick hair, Johanna gloried in the feel of his weight pressing her into the cushions, of his hands on her face, her shoulders, her breasts. He shifted only long enough to push his hands up under her sweater, his mouth finding the pulse in her throat. Johanna’s back arched to him. It was easy, so easy, to lose herself. In this. In him. At last. She pulled at his shirt. He yanked it off. Muscle and hair and sweat-slicked skin. Charlie straddled her hips, breathing heavily, waiting.
Johanna’s heart swelled. Desire and need mingled with the overwhelming love his hesitation inspired. She wiggled underneath him, freed her sweater and lifted it over her head.
He smiled. “You still don’t wear a bra.”
“You remember that?”
“It’s not something a guy forgets.” He ran his hands up her ribs. “You are so beautiful.”
Johanna reached for him and he fell gently to her, their lips meeting before bare skin touched bare skin.
“Ouch! Oh
!” Charlie pulled away, rubbing at his chest.
“What is it? What’s wrong? Are you having a heart attack?”
“No.” He laughed. Leaning over her, he picked up the chain to her locket in his teeth. “You shtabbed me.”
Watching the locket swing, Johanna tried to breathe without gasping. A sensation like cold water dripped all over her skin. She reached up, took the locket from his clenched teeth. He lowered himself on top of her again, but the euphoria of his weight pressing her into the cushions had ebbed to comfort.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Johanna dragged her gaze from the locket in her hand, to the concern in Charlie’s eyes. She brushed the hair from his face. He caught her fingers with a kiss. It would have been easy enough to lose herself in him again, to forget the fear of the past that never left her, but it would rise up again. And again. Until she told him. Until he knew.
“Charlie.” She stopped the trail of his kisses moving from her wrist and along the inside of her arm. “What do you know about my parents? About my childhood?”
“I don’t know anything.” He shifted his weight so he was bearing most of it, without moving off her. “Why?”
“Because you should know, before you get in too deep.”
“Johanna.” He brushed her lips with a kiss. “Too late for that. Twenty years too late. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. Charlie, listen to me. Please.”
“All right. I’m listening.”
She thought about moving out from under him, thought about facing him with clothes on and at a safe distance, but Johanna stayed in the comfort of his weight, of his skin on her skin.
“They were cra…mentally ill,” she began. “As far as I can tell, my mom was bi-polar, Daddy was schizophrenic. I honestly don’t know for certain. They met in a psychiatric hospital in the early 1970s. I don’t know if they were ever legally married but they called themselves husband and wife. When my mom got pregnant with Nina, they ran away. I don’t know where my sister was born, but by the time I came along, we lived in a condemned farmhouse somewhere in the back-of-beyond in New Hampshire. They weren’t abusive or anything. They loved us. I know they did. They just weren’t capable of taking care of little girls. Neither of us had birth certificates when Gram and Poppy came to get us at the home in Massachusetts.”
“After the fire,” he said. Johanna’s heart lurched. She felt as if she would vomit, but Charlie pushed her hair back from her face just then, and she eased.
“They left us alone a lot,” she said. “Sometimes it was to go hunting or foraging, or garbage picking. I remember being cold, and hungry, and scared. Nina’s not much older than I am, but she always took care of me. I remember that too. The day of the fire, I only wanted…”
She fell silent then, closed her eyes. Her little hands. The burning stick she threw when Nina came home with more wood. The pile of dry leaves and debris that caught instantly. There, in those memories, behind her lids, that fire burned. Charlie did not press. He simply waited, caressing a spot just below her ear. Johanna took slow breaths until she could speak without weeping.
“The firemen came and found Nina and me outside, watching our house burn. I remember crying and crying, so afraid Mom and Dad would be angry with me. The next days are kind of a blur. I was so scared. I didn’t know it then, but when my parents finally showed up to claim us, there was trouble and they both ended up being taken into custody. Mom must have given them her parents’ information, because Gram came to get me and Nina. She told us who she was and that we’d be living with her until our parents were able to come get us. Eight years later, Gram and Poppy got a call in the middle of the night. She was gone when we got up the next morning, and didn’t come home for days. When she did, she had Emma and Julietta with her.”
“I remember when they came to Bitterly,” Charlie told her. “We were eleven.”
“We were. I can’t believe you remember.”
“I was pretty much obsessed with you, Johanna.”
“Even then?”
“From first grade, the day you kicked me in the shin because you thought I purposely stepped on your foot.”
She could almost laugh. Almost. But she wasn’t finished with her story, and he needed to hear it. She needed him to hear it.
“Apparently, my parents escaped again or were released at some point in those eight years, but if they ever came for me and Nina, I don’t know about it. They had two more daughters. Nina and I had it good compared to Emma and Jules. From the little I’ve been able to get out of Gram over the years, my dad got much worse and mom just wasn’t right enough to understand. He was convinced the government was after him, trying to take his family and lock him up. He died in a car crash that left my mom severely injured. Julietta was pretty banged up, but Emma had hardly a scratch. The authorities called Gram and Pop again, and you can figure out the rest.”
“What about your mom?”
The big question, one Johanna had been asking and hiding from most of her life. She lifted the locket from her chest, clicked it open and showed him inside. “This is her,” she said. “Carolina Coco.”
“You look like her.”
“And it has always scared the shit out of me.”
“Why?”
“Because I thought it made me like her. I was afraid I’d be crazy too. It could still happen.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re safe at this point.”
“No one is ever safe from mental illness, Charlie. You never know when it’s going to hit. When the person you thought you were becomes someone you can never know. I’m terrified. I’ve always been.”
“And you’re telling me all this now because you are warning me of what might come, or because you’re going to vanish before it can?”
Johanna swallowed hard. “Which do you want it to be?”
Charlie looked at her a long time, too long, his expression unreadable. Tears rolled down the sides of her face. He caught them, wiped them away. “Johanna.” He breathed her name against her lips. “You have always been a little nutty, but you are not bi-polar. You’re not schizophrenic. You are dazzling and wild and my life will never be boring, but I can’t imagine not having you in it. Not now, after all this time. I’m sorry for your past, for your parents. I wish I could take it all from you and hide it away where you never have to be afraid of it again. I can’t. All I can do is swear to you that it doesn’t matter. I can’t not love you, and I tried for a very long time.”
Johanna’s sob popped like a cork. She wrapped her arms around his neck. All his weight came to bear on her, squeezing the breath from her lungs. She held him there, held the sensation. Something burst inside her. It rushed through her like blood, like relief, like freedom after years in a cage. It was horrible and wonderful all at once, the vulnerability, and the power.
“Hey.” Charlie gently pried her arms from around his neck. He pulled her onto his lap, cradled her head against his shoulder. She stayed there for a long time, bare-chested and matching her breaths to his until she could remember the rhythm of breathing again. On the television, a screen-saver blip of frozen zombies, glided about the screen.
“Not how either of us imagined this evening going,” she said at last, her voice trembling just a little. “I didn’t mean to spoil everything.”
“You didn’t.” He lifted her chin, caught her gaze. “You didn’t, Jo.”
She turned in his arms, her naked breasts too near his face for him to avoid. “Where did you come from, Charlie McCallan?”
“I guess you wouldn’t buy the stork bit, eh?”
They laughed softly together, the rumbling of their bodies stirring what the locket had interrupted. Charlie’s hands moved up her sides. Face to face, smiles fading, Johanna leaned in to kiss him.
“I think it’d be best if we call it a night.”
Johanna startled upright. “Now?”
“Now,” he said. “Before this
happens.”
“You don’t want to…”
“I think you know I do.”
Johanna grinned. She ground against him. “I might have some inkling.”
“Then you know how hard it is for me to say that.” He kissed her nose. “Pun totally intended.”
“Very witty.”
“Thank you. I try.” He held her tighter, a moment longer, then rose from the couch, taking Johanna with him and setting her on her feet. “I can wait,” he said. “I don’t want you to have any reason to run, and taking you to bed after you just spilled your heart out doesn’t seem the best way to go about preventing that.”
Johanna opened her mouth to speak, but closed it again. He was right. Making love to him now would be too much about losing herself in him, in sex, and reburying the past. He picked her sweater up off the floor, slipped it over her head. His hands moved the material down her sides, lingered in places that made her sigh. Pulling the neck over her head, his mouth was on hers before she could move the hair from her eyes.
“Go home,” he said. “Before I can’t let you.”
He put his shirt back on as he walked her to the door. Johanna put on her fuzzy boots. Charlie helped her with her coat. He did not kiss her good night, but touched her lips with his fingertips.
“See you tomorrow?”
Johanna closed her eyes, resisted the urge to kiss those fingertips. It was more than sexual desire prickling her skin and making her body ache. Wave after wave of love for this man who had been the boy that crushed her heart had washed over her since the moment she realized it was he who pulled her into his car at the cemetery. The biggest one broke over her now, standing at his front door, wanting him and knowing he wanted her, but would wait. Had been waiting. For twenty years.
Johanna opened her eyes. She caught his hand in hers. “Charlie, I—”
Still, he waited.
Say it. Tell him. “I…will see you tomorrow.”
He seemed to deflate a little, but he smiled. “Tomorrow.”
* * * *
Johanna undressed in the dark, trying to remember the ride home. She stood naked in front of the mirror. Charlie had called her beautiful, and he wasn’t the first. She looked pretty good for thirty-eight, though a little wider in the hips than she’d been in her twenties. Her belly was no longer flat and taut, but she was one of those lucky people who could eat whatever she pleased—a very good thing for a baker. Bouncing on the balls of her feet, she was gratified to see her breasts jiggled more than they flopped. She chuckled at herself, started to turn away from the mirror, and stopped.
Seeking Carolina (Bitterly Suite Book 1) Page 12