Chapter Five

 

Dante

“Dante, you got a postcard!”

Postcard. Who does that nowadays? I look up from the glass I’ve been polishing behind the bar and blink at my sister. “Lisa? What are you doing here?”

“Are you deaf? I said you had a postcard.” She grins at me and slaps it down on the bar. She waggles her thin brows. “From your girl.”

“I don’t have a girl,” I say automatically.

“From Charlie. Come on, Dante.”

Charlie.

I take the postcard, stare at it. It’s the third one this month. There was one from the Cincinnati, one from Detroit… and this one is from Chicago.

“You know what this means,” Lisa tells me. She leans over the bar, winking at me. “Charlie’s closer. She’s coming back.”

Heat rolls through me. Just hearing her name—Charlie—makes me hard.

It was just one night, dammit. The next day she was gone, leaving me her phone number and her scent on my sheets. Leaving before I had decided what to do, whether or not I could just abandon everything and go with her, she’d hit the road.

“She didn’t wait for me,” I grumble, mostly to myself, but Lisa laughs.

“Smart girl. She’d have waited forever.”

“No idea what you mean.”

“She means you’re stuck here, fucker,” Zane, one of the regulars here at the bar, says. He slurps some Sprite. He never drinks, which is weird for someone hanging around a bar with his buddies so often. “You don’t wanna move your ass and do the things you wanna do. But you should. And by leaving, she’s forced you to seriously consider it.”

“Yeah,” his friend Rafe chimes in, raising his beer bottle. “You should go after her. Wait, is the girl hot?” He winces when Zane elbows him. “What? It’s important.”

Another of their friends slaps him upside the head. I think his name’s Micah, a tall blond guy. “You’re drunker than usual, man. Of course his girl is pretty. Now, come play some pool before you pass out.”

He drags Rafe away, and Zane follows to the large group of guys and girls who often gather here on weekend evenings to shoot the shit. Inked Brotherhood, Zane’s gang call themselves, and Damage Boyz are Micah’s friends.

Micah winks at me from the pool table. “Go get her,” he mouths at me.

Jesus. I glance back down at the card.

Then I grab my phone and shoot Charlie a text: ‘Thanks for the postcard.’

Her reply comes about three seconds later. ‘How about a picture?’

Picture?

It loads before I even have time to reply. In the photo, she’s wearing an oversized T-shirt, her curves barely covered underneath, her long legs bare. Goddamn, the thin white fabric does little to cover the shape of her tits, and I curse out loud, fully hard now, and pissed at her for not being here.

Or at myself, for not being there, with her.

Then I realize I know that T-shirt.

‘You stole my clothes?’ I type, fighting laughter. ‘Anything else I should know about?’

The next picture robs me of breath. She has taken off my T-shirt and is leaning back on a bed, full tits and hard nipples and a wide smile.

Fuck.

‘Want your clothes?’ she writes. ‘Come and get them.’

I’m laughing. She’s fucking killing me.

“What is it?” Lisa is trying to see my phone, and I lift it away from her. “What’s going on?”

“None of your business.” I sober up. “She wants me to join her.”

I remember just how she felt, so warm and pliant. Right there with me, thinking, questioning. Accepting.

Pushing me to follow me dreams and live my life.

“Go,” my sister says. “Finally get off your ass and go find her, Dante. God knows you’ve been moping ever since you met her, and besides, you need a break.”

I rub my jaw, thinking. Maybe I should. Charlie’s fun. And I can’t stop thinking about her.

About the damn hot sex.

And her controlling parents.

And the fact she left her ex to travel and decide what she wants to do.

She asked me to join her. That night, and with every postcard, and text message ever since.

What do I have to lose? This trip has been on my mind since forever, and Charlie has meshed with it, becoming part of it. Of the plan. Of the dream.

“Go,” Lisa says more gently, smiling at me. “Go find her, and be happy, little brother.”

“I barely know her.”

“So what? Take a risk. Give her a chance. Give yourself a chance.

I nod.

I want it. And I’m gonna do it. Why the hell not?

“It’s funny,” I mutter as Malcom wanders in from the backroom with a crate of beers. “Such a coincidence that she came in the night I went home early.”

“Uh, I thought you two would hit it off,” Malcom says sheepishly, putting down the crate, not looking at me.

I blink at him. “You set this up? Like, a blind date?”

“Hey, it worked, right? You like her.” He smirks. “And if you wanna kick someone’s ass, try Logan’s, because he was the one who convinced me it was a good idea.”

Grinning, I turn the postcard over in my hand, my mind filled with Charlie. Sure I like her. I miss her, her smile, her voice. How can you miss someone you only met once?

But dammit, I do. I wanna see her again.

Charlie spread on my bed, her smile lighting up the world.

Charlie wrapped around me, her head on my chest.

Her eyes, her mouth, her body, her words. Every shape flowing into the next. She’s like water, flowing around me, embracing me like the sea, ever changing, ever new and yet the same.

She may well be the shape of my future.