When it came to moving, it was a pretty painless process. Charlie didn’t need to bring any of her furniture. Zeke’s penthouse was already fully equipped and even if he decided he needed something in the future, it was definitely going to involve him buying something a bit higher quality than Charlie’s thrift store chic furnishings. She was content to sell some of it, let her coworkers and Sam pick what they wanted from the rest, and donate whatever remained to a charity shop.
Really, all she needed to pack was her clothing and a few pictures and knick-knacks that she couldn’t part with. With Sam agreeing to help—because Zeke’s convertible was not large, to say the least—it only took one trip to get all of Charlie’s stuff to Zeke’s penthouse.
Even so, Charlie was tired afterwards. It seemed… enormous, letting go of the duplex. Like she had shrugged off a weight she hadn’t even realized she was carrying around.
It left her drained, albeit in a sort of pleasant way. After apologizing to Sam for not being particularly fun, Charlie excused herself to the bedroom to take an unexpected nap. She could unpack her stuff and find places for all of it later.
*
Despite her assertion that she was going to take a nap, sleep did not come easily to Charlie that afternoon. Instead, she lay on the bed, curled up beneath the blanket and staring at the sliver of light that spilled in from the main room where the bedroom door was open just a crack.
She wanted to sleep. She was tired. But her head was too busy, as if it had no chance of slowing down no matter how she tried to calm it.
So instead she listened to the conversation taking place in the main room. It occurred to her rather belatedly that Sam had never properly met Zeke before that day. She had never had a chance to talk to him. And it sounded, from where Charlie was listening, as if she intended on very thoroughly sussing Zeke out while she had the chance.
If nothing else, that gave Charlie an excuse not to let them know she wasn’t actually asleep yet. She wanted to hear how the conversation was going to go.
“You’re thirty, right?” Sam sounded more serious than Charlie had heard her for a long time.
“Yes…?” Zeke, by contrast, mostly sounded sort of bewildered.
“Thirty. Well off. And… interested in a twenty-three-year-old girl,” Sam continued, and Charlie couldn’t help but to roll her eyes. Honestly, she was a grown ass woman. She had stopped being a girl the instant she decided to leave home on her own and not look back.
To Zeke’s credit, he seemed perfectly aware of that. “Are you implying she’s a kid, still?”
“What—? No, of course not,” Sam returned hastily, flustered.
“Because you sound like you think she isn’t old enough to make her own decisions,” Zeke carried on blandly.
“Don’t put words in my mouth!” Sam snapped, and Charlie could hear the sound of her tapping one foot against the floor.
“Then maybe actually put some thought into the words coming out of your mouth,” Zeke suggested flatly. “I’m an adult, but so is Charlie. She’s perfectly capable of making her own choices.”
“I just—” Sam sighed out a blustering breath. “I want to make sure she’s alright. That’s all. She’s been through a lot.”
“I love her,” Zeke stated simply, and Charlie covered her mouth to keep herself from giggling like a love-struck girl. “If anyone wants to hurt her, they’ll need to go through me.”
There was silence from the other room for a moment and Charlie smothered the urge to creep closer to the door to peer through the crack. She had never been particularly stealthy and she had no doubt that they would notice her in an instant.
Finally, Sam sighed, softer that time. “Alright,” she offered quietly. “But if anything happens to her, I’m coming after you.”
“I have no doubts about that,” Zeke assured her. “But it’s not something you need to worry about.”
Sam snorted. “Of course, it is. It’s always something I need to worry about.”
Zeke huffed out a quiet laugh. “Fair enough.”
Maybe, Charlie mused to herself, she should drag Sam out for lunch at some point. It had been a while since they got to sit down, just the two of them, without one of them needing to rush off a moment later. And Sam deserved good things.
*
Getting accustomed to living in the penthouse was surprisingly easy, and the days bled together, one into the next. Charlie was… unexpectedly content, all things considered. Not that she had expected to be miserable. She had just expected to need an adjustment period. Instead, she just… fell into life in the penthouse as easily as if she had always lived there.
Zeke did actually have a job that took him out of the apartment on a daily basis. Charlie quizzed him playfully on it, and it turned out that he wasn’t so much hiding it from her, as it was just that real estate was not particularly exciting to anyone who wasn’t involved in it. Either way, even in an apartment that wasn’t enormous, they didn’t need to worry about living out of each other’s pockets or driving each other crazy.
In an unexpected turn of events, Charlie started to work less. She didn’t quit her job at the restaurant—she liked her coworkers and her boss and a sizeable amount of the regulars too much for that, and she knew she would go crazy if she just decided to lounge around the penthouse all day long—but she did rather drastically decrease the number of hours she was working each week.
It was just… Zeke was perfectly willing to pay for just about anything she needed, and now that she was living in his space, none of the bills were really hers. Suddenly, she had nothing but disposable income. Suddenly, she had as much time as she could ever really want to paint and not feel like she was wasting time, because her time was hers to waste as she wanted.
The balcony rather quickly became her space. It was easy to set up a chair out there and drag her easel out so she could work, and if it started to rain, then there was a door just a few steps away to pull her easel back inside.
When she wasn’t working, that was where she was, with a paintbrush in hand and the city spread out in front of her. It seemed natural, then, that the cityscape was the first thing she painted. She was a bit out of practice, after all. She needed to start with something relatively simple to get herself back up to where she knew her skills could be.
It came together in bits and pieces, starting with the basic sketch. She didn’t know if it was good—she always chased Zeke away from it, not wanting to get discouraged by anything he might say about it when it was only half-finished—but she knew it was coming along.
She had been living in the apartment for nearly three weeks when at last it was finished. Indeed, it was the cityscape that spread out ahead of her. Or… something like it, at any rate. The sky was a shocking burst of violet, with clouds in an almost electric shade of silver. The buildings were dark, almost featureless monoliths, save for the countless maws that their windows had become, all in flaming, hellish shades of red and orange. Littered across the rooftops were silhouettes of people, each one a shocking, almost blinding burst of stark white.
The shapes of the painting were recognizable, if the picture was compared to the view. But the painting itself was an entirely different world. As it was supposed to be, really. She could have just painted the skyline as it appeared to her. It probably would have been good. But it would have been boring. It would have been dentist office fare, and that wasn’t what she wanted. It wasn’t what she wanted to add her name to. It wasn’t what she wanted to be known for. If she was going to be known for anything, it wasn’t going to be safe.
She gave it a last, thorough once over before she dabbed her thinnest brush into the same silver that made the clouds, and she scrawled her name in the bottom right corner of the picture. Satisfied at last, she dragged the easel back inside to let it finish drying.
She supposed she could finally let Zeke see what she had been working on. He had been getting awfully nosy, after all, and she supposed she could throw him a bone.
*
Slowly, Zeke looked back and forth between the canvas and the view out the window, at one point even backing up a few paces so he could see the view from the balcony before he looked back to the canvas once again.
He was silent for a few moments as Charlie shifted back and forth behind him, bouncing on her toes and rocking back on the balls of her feet. “Well?” she finally asked, sharp and expectant.
“This is really good,” he finally replied, sounding faintly at a loss as to how exactly he was supposed to phrase it. “It’s weird and creepy as hell, don’t get me wrong, but it’s really good.”
Charlie beamed at him, standing up on her toes for a second and linking her hands together in front of herself. “So I haven’t lost my touch,” she sighed contently.
“Not at all.” He glanced away from the canvas to look at her. “You’re going to keep painting, I’m assuming.”
Charlie nodded quickly. “Oh, yeah,” she hurried to add. “I’ve always got tons of ideas for things I want to do. I’ve just… lacked the time to really put any of them on the canvas.” She scratched the back of her head with one hand before she shrugged her shoulders loosely. “Not much of an issue anymore, though.”
“Are you going to herd me away from future projects like an overzealous corgi, too?” Zeke asked dryly.
Primly, Charlie stuck her nose in the air. “Yes,” she insisted. “I need peace while I’m working. Besides, if you see it halfway through, then it’s not really a surprise when it’s done, now, is it?”
Zeke held his hands up, feigning a gesture of surrender. “Right, right. Of course.”
All things considered, life was going pretty well. Charlie was more content than she could remember being.
*
There was an upright piano in the main living area in the penthouse, tucked away into a corner as if it was trying to hide from the rest of the apartment. It was beautiful, with dark stained wood and a bench padded with an elegant bronze cushion. Charlie liked to tap at the keys now and then, but she had no idea how to play, and even just getting her hands to do two entirely separate things was a bit more of a challenge than she expected it to be.
For her first three weeks in the apartment, she never heard anyone play it, as if it was just a ghost expected to lurk silently in the corner.
That changed on a quiet Saturday morning. She didn’t have to work until later that afternoon and Zeke typically had weekends to himself. Even so, he was more of an early riser than Charlie so he was usually out of bed by the time she got up when she didn’t have to work in the morning.
On that particular day, Charlie woke to the sound of music playing. It was a slow, peaceful melody, simple but pretty and not entirely unlike a lullaby. It almost lulled her right back to sleep until she realized that there was really only one explanation for where the music was coming from.
Charlie sat up, pulled on a shirt, and trotted out of the bedroom to see Zeke seated at the piano, hands dancing over the keys in a manner that almost seemed absentminded. If he heard Charlie approaching, he didn’t say anything, but he also didn’t react when she sat down on the bench beside him, so she doubted that he hadn’t noticed her approach.
It was a slow song, but not particularly long, as Zeke was playing the last, lingering note not long after Charlie sat down, letting it hang in the air before it quietly faded away.
For a moment, neither of them spoke, until eventually Zeke explained, “I heard that song when I was a kid. Maybe ten years old? And I decided I wanted to play it. That song is why I know how to play the piano.”
Charlie hummed in acknowledgement, sitting sideways on the bench so she could lean back against his shoulder. “When I was little, I went to an art museum. For a school field trip; my dad would never have cared enough to take any of us to a museum. And the teacher and the chaperones kept trying to point us towards all the lighter, fluffier pictures and sculptures. But all the art that really caught my attention…well.” She gestured towards where her easel was set up. “So I figured it was my job to put less light, fluffy art into the world.” She snorted. “It’s really easy to decide something is your job when you’re, like… eight.”
“At least it’s a job you excel at,” he assured her.
Charlie bonked her head back against his shoulder and scoffed. “You are such a kiss ass.” Not that she was going to argue with him. He was, after all, free to have his own opinion, and it was an opinion she happened to appreciate.
*
It was strange how easy it was to just… forget that there was supposed to be a wedding in the not-so-distant future. Apparently, they had a venue. Charlie hadn’t known that. She had seen pictures of it after the fact and it was a very pretty venue, but she was still sort of amazed that it had completely slipped her mind.
Not forever, though. On an otherwise average Thursday evening, not long after Charlie got back from work, she stepped out of the elevator into the penthouse and found a small crowd of people in the living area. Zeke seemed to be keeping most of them busy, but one young man was waiting patiently off to one side. His expression brightened as soon as he spotted her.
“Are you Charlie?” he asked, and then immediately plowed onwards with, “I was told to just sit tight until you got here, since you’re picking out the flowers.”
“Oh. Uh. Right.” Charlie tossed her bag in the general direction of the nearest end table, not even caring when it landed on the floor instead. She hung up her apron and stepped out of her shoes, and made her way over to the apparent florist.
Immediately, he presented her with binders. Several of them. And as Charlie paged through them, looking at various flowers and arrangements, she could feel her thoughts beginning to spin.
Before she could get overwhelmed, though, she took a deep breath, held it, and let it out. She already knew what she wanted for flowers, more or less. Being presented with pictures didn’t change that.
“How do you feel about unconventional arrangements?” she wondered, glancing up from a picture of stargazer lilies.
Like an excited puppy, his expression brightened once again. “I love getting the chance to do different things,” he assured her. “What did you have in mind?”
While the actual arrangements hadn’t crossed Charlie’s mind, she did know what she wanted when it came to the flowers themselves. No roses. No tulips. No baby’s breath. None of the standard wedding fare. She wanted stargazer lilies, tiger lilies, poppies, halonium, daisies in every shade of pink and orange imaginable, and primrose in pink and orange and magenta. She wanted her wedding to be colorful. It wasn’t going to be a celebration of purity. It was going to be a celebration of life and everything that could be done with it.
By the time she was finished making her selections for the flowers, the florist looked like he was going to pass out he was so excited. Charlie was willing to guess that most wedding arrangements tended to fit within the same mold. And really, if she could make other people happy with her wedding, too, then she wasn’t going to argue about it.
By the time all of the unexpected guests—the caterers, the decorators, the people in charge of the music, and of course the florist—were leaving, the florist was still babbling cheerfully about what he planned on doing.
Charlie was actually excited to see the finished product. Maybe that shouldn’t have surprised her, but it did. She had never been one of those little girls who planned her wedding from the time she was old enough to say “wedding dress.” She had hardly ever thought about it. With her actual wedding coming closer, she had expected that same apathy to make the experience… if not boring, then at least not much different from any other party, but instead, she couldn’t wait.
If Zeke was at all confused when she grabbed him by the front of his shirt and pulled him down into a kiss, he didn’t say anything about it. Instead, he just returned the kiss.
*
The day after that was when things got interesting. Charlie didn’t need to work, though she knew Zeke had to. She was planning on using it as a chance to sleep in and she made a very valiant effort at it, ignoring the sound of the elevator dinging as it opened. Richard was expressly forbidden from coming up unless Zeke was there to personally vouch for him, so she didn’t need to worry about him trying to kill her in her sleep. So she was going to sleep through it.
Or at least that was what she told herself, until the bedroom door was flung open and Carol proclaimed, “Honestly, my dear! It is a beautiful day and you’re still in bed?”
Charlie squealed and tugged a blanket up to cover up the fact that she was incredibly naked.
Carol scoffed. “What, do you think I don’t know what you and Zeke get up to? Come on, get up. Put some clothes on. I’ll meet you at the elevator.”
Considering Charlie found Zeke’s mother slightly terrifying still, she wasn’t going to argue, and she waited just long enough for Carol to leave the room and close the door before she flung herself out of bed. She squirmed into a pair of panties and a skirt, put on a bra and a blouse, and stomped into a pair of slip-on shoes. She tugged a brush through her hair and put on her makeup in record time, and when she made it out into the main room, she was almost immediately presented with a carryout cup of coffee. She managed to take one sip and sigh appreciatively before she was being herded along.
“Come along,” Carol sighed, ushering Charlie towards the elevator. As much as Charlie wanted to ask where they were going, she wasn’t actually convinced she would get anything approaching a real answer. So she kept quiet and enjoyed her coffee as she was shepherded into a car parked along the side of the road.
Charlie stared out the window and drank her coffee as the car drove along familiar streets and then less familiar streets, into a shopping district that Charlie had never been able to afford. She could have asked Zeke, she supposed, but she had gotten so used to the idea of not being able to afford it that it had simply slipped her mind. Besides, she liked to think that she didn’t need particularly much.
When the car pulled to a halt at the curb to let them out, Carol paid the driver and hustled Charlie out of the car, Charlie stumbled out onto the sidewalk and then looked up at the sign on the building in front of them. She blinked slowly when she found herself staring up at what was very clearly a bridal shop.
She didn’t have long to gawk, though, before Carol was herding her inside the building. As soon as they were greeted by a very nicely dressed young woman, Carol declared, “Croasdell. We have an appointment for twelve thirty.”
The young woman nodded once, offered a bright smile, and ushered them along to follow her to a lounge-like area with a loveseat, a couple armchairs, and a small platform facing a trio of floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Leaving them there to get comfortable, the young woman hurried on her way, assuring them that someone would be over to help with dress selection shortly.
Charlie stared at the platform while they waited, and she wondered just how much it was going to feel like she was some sort of circus act. She was pretty sure the answer was ‘a lot.’ Either that, or she might feel like a show dog or a show horse being led through its paces.
But there was no sense in lingering on that. She needed a dress; this was a necessary part of the process. And once an assistant jogged over to get the ball rolling, Charlie largely lost track of all of her negative thoughts. As it turned out, browsing through what seemed to be countless dresses and trying on dresses that required active assistance to get her into, was very busy work and it didn’t leave much space in her head for thinking about other things.
It didn’t get off to a great start. Carol insisted on something like a ball gown as a baseline to compare things to, and it was white and shimmering and heavy, and Charlie felt and looked nothing like herself in it. If nothing else, Carol acknowledged that immediately and waved the dress away.
There was a mermaid dress that looked like it was trying a bit too hard to match its name, with glistening embroidery that resembled scales, and it made Charlie feel as if she was trying too hard. There was a strange taffeta concoction that made her feel as if she had been trapped in a cupcake factory. A sort of slip dress that was so plain it nearly sent her into sensory deprivation. And a handful of others, all of them beautiful and works of art in their own right, but none of them what Charlie was looking for.
Carol was frank and candid in her assessment of each dress, if nothing else, and that was a relief. Everything would have taken twice as long if she had to deal with Carol trying to cushion every word out of her mouth, and frankly Charlie was in no mood for that.
It was as the assistant was getting flustered and Charlie was beginning to lose hope that they would find anything that day, though, that they finally struck gold.
The dress was a soft golden color, so pale that it was nearly white. It was only truly evident that it wasn’t white when the light caught it just right and it glowed like a Spanish doubloon. The bodice was form fitting, as if it was trying to become a second skin, and rigidly boned with a straight across neckline that then led into lace that covered her upper chest and closed around her neck like a collar. There were off-the-shoulder sleeves made of the same lace, with a small loop at the end of each sleeve to slip over her middle fingers to keep the sleeves in place.
The skirt was loose and flowing and uneven, but not in any sort of extreme way. It came to her ankles in her high heels, and then fell back to drag on the ground behind her with just enough train to give it some weight, but not to make it seem like it was trying to swallow her. The embroidery was subtle, in pale shades of green and pink, making vines and leaves and flowers, accented with iridescent beads.
Both Carol and the assistant were gushing enthusiastically, but their voices turned into white noise as Charlie tuned them out. She didn’t actually care about what either of them had to say just then; she didn’t need their opinions to know what she thought of the dress.
As she stared at her reflection in awe, she could just barely hear Carol discussing the price in the background. They didn’t even need to ask if it was the dress she wanted. There was no real need to; they could tell.
Charlie knew that she was pretty. She wasn’t so self-deprecating as to insist that she wasn’t. But it was only on very rare occasions that she felt beautiful. But standing there, staring at her reflection in that gown, she felt beautiful.
*
It was raining. Not particularly hard, but hard enough that trying to paint on the balcony would be a lost cause, and even if she wanted to risk it, Charlie was positive her hair would puff up like a dandelion in about six minutes. So, she sat on the piano bench, her back to the piano itself so she could face her easel. It offered her some measure of privacy, regardless of the fact that Zeke was right over in the kitchen.
Still, despite her assertions that he wasn’t allowed to see anything while it was still in the works, she had been less secretive about the second painting. Most of her “What if I lost my touch?” jitters had been worked out of her system after the first painting, so even if she still wasn’t seeking actual criticism for an unfinished work, if Zeke peeked over her shoulder every so often, she didn’t feel inclined to chase him off with a paintbrush.
The second painting was no less dark than the first, but of a very different subject. In the background, the sky was a deep and brilliant red with dark, murky silhouettes of trees visible like scars. Those were only visible in glimpses, though. The vast majority of the canvas was taken over by a gaping, toothy maw that blazed like hellfire, set beneath a pair of eyes like bright blue holes in the world, as if just looking into them would lead to the viewer falling through the fabric of the sky.
They didn’t talk about what it was a picture of. They didn’t need to, and they didn’t especially want to.
Besides, there were other things for them to talk about instead.
“You know,” Zeke mused eventually, rooting through the cupboards for something he actually felt like making for dinner, “I know a handful of people I could put you in touch with to look at getting gallery space when you’ve got more of a portfolio.”
Charlie looked up slowly from her easel, lowering her paintbrush so she wouldn’t accidentally tap the canvas while she wasn’t paying attention.
“Wouldn’t that be… I don’t know, some sort of cheating?” she wondered carefully. “If I rely on your influence and money, I mean.”
Zeke shrugged. “All I would be doing is getting you in touch with someone who might be able to make it happen,” he pointed out. “It would still be up to you and your art to wow them and convince them you’re worth it.” He shrugged. “Less of a springboard and more of a stepping stone.”
Charlie hummed, low and thoughtful, and turned her attention back to her easel. She didn’t reply immediately, as she turned the idea over and over in her mind. He was right, she supposed. She would still be getting things done on her own merits. He would just be helping her to get over that name-based hump, since she… didn’t really have much of a name at that point. Or a name at all, really. She was still a nobody, and she was reluctantly willing to admit that.
“I’ll think about it,” she finally decided, tapping the end of her paintbrush against her lower lip. “I figure I’ve got a while yet before it’s really a concern.”
Even so, it was food for thought.