Three hours earlier
Reese
I wished I never quit smoking.
My body itched for the sweet relief of nicotine as I flicked the wheel of my lighter, on and off, watching as flame after flame was lit and then snuffed just as easily. At first, I’d counted each one, but I’d lost count somewhere around two hundred, and now I simply watched numbly as I rubbed my thumb raw on the lighter.
It wasn’t that I was nervous. It was that I was impatient.
Right now, Charlie was likely across town, telling Cameron that their marriage was over. I knew when she got to me, she’d be a mess. She’d be crying, she’d be mourning the loss of him and what they built together, and all I wanted was to fast-forward to when she was in my arms. I wanted to hold her, to rock her, to assure her the choice she made was the right one.
I wanted to love her — without him — and I couldn’t wait much longer.
I started counting the flames again, and somewhere around seventy-two, there was a knock at my door.
I jumped up like my couch was on fire, sprinting to the door and flinging it open in one fell swoop. And then she was there, on my porch, just like she had been the first night I’d had her as my own. She looked just as sad, her eyes just as dark, face just as long.
For a solid minute, I just held the door open, my eyes tracing every single feature. I wanted to remember that moment, the one right before she was mine. I took in her long, dark hair, the waves of it broken by the wind. My eyes traveled down her slim waist, catching on the jean shorts she wore, though it was cooling down now that the sun had set. She trembled a little as my eyes devoured her legs, trailing all the way back up slowly to connect with her brown irises, and then I held the door open wider.
“Come in.”
She stepped in slowly, crossing her arms over her middle as another shiver traveled through her.
“Here,” I said, reaching in the closet near my door for one of my hoodies. I ripped it from the hanger and passed it to her. “I’ll get us some wine. White or red?”
Charlie pulled the hoodie over her head, letting it fall down to her mid-thigh. It swallowed her, and I loved her in it. There was something about the way she looked so small in my sweater, how something I wore so often felt brand new against her skin.
She didn’t answer once the hoodie was on, just watched me with those same sad eyes. And I knew she was hurting, knew she was in pain for the choice she’d had to make, so I took the burden of any more decision-making off her shoulders.
“White,” I said, and then I turned for the kitchen.
I was already lighter with her in my home, already riding the high that came from having her back. I was only gone a few minutes before I returned with two glasses and the bottle. I nodded toward the room where my piano waited, and Charlie wrapped her arms around herself, following me with her eyes on the floor.
“Hop up,” I said, patting the top of the piano. I’d already put the lid down before she arrived, anticipating the night.
She climbed up slowly as I filled both of our glasses, and I handed one to her, holding mine up for a toast.
“To new beginnings,” I said. “And to us.”
We clinked our glasses together, my eyes watching her as she watched our glasses. I took the first drink, but Charlie just lowered hers again, the glass trembling slightly in her hand.
She wasn’t ready to talk yet.
I could feel the pain without even touching her, without even holding her, and all I wanted was to make it go away. So, I set my glass next to her on the piano, took my seat, and floated my fingers over the keys.
I played nothing at first, just warming up, letting the smooth notes flow between us. Once Charlie took another sip of wine, I transitioned into the song I’d written for her — for us — the one I’d been saving for tonight.
It was a piece I’d started the night I’d come back into town, and the beginning was soft and slow. It took me back to the day she walked into the teachers’ lounge, that old book in her hands. I saw her eyes when they first met mine, how empty they were, how I wasn’t even sure she recognized me at all. That woman seemed so far away now from the Charlie who had come back to me. She was full of life again, full of love, and I wanted to continue making her happy — so much so that she’d spill over.
As the song progressed, the melody turned darker, emotional, for all the nights I longed to touch her, all the days I wished for her to be mine. I built up the crescendo gently, bringing the song to a grand, expressive and dramatic climax. It was the night we gave in, the night our worlds collided, our stars uniting under one universal sky. The melody only grew louder as I mirrored my emotions watching her with Cameron, knowing he was trying to win her back. My fingers flew over the keys, my eyes closed as I felt every note.
And then, everything ceased.
I kept my eyes closed during that pause, feeling the weight of that silence, of the past two months. Slowly, I brought the song back to life, filling the room with the same melodic notes that mirrored the beginning, only they were happier now — comfortable and sure. It was our coming together, making it through the storm.
The river meeting the ocean once more, just like it always would.
When I finished, the last notes floating from the piano, I carefully opened my eyes to find Charlie.
She was crying.
Her cries were silent, tears streaming down her cheeks and running toward each other at the apex of her chin before they fell to her lap. She held her wine glass, still full, her eyes on me, lips trembling.
“I named it, Where the River Meets the Sea.”
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered, but her tears still fell, one after the other.
I took her calves in my hands, pulling her closer to me as I looked up into her eyes. “I know you’re feeling a lot right now,” I said. “I know these past few months have been hard on you. And I know what you did tonight wasn’t easy.”
Her face crumpled at that, and she let her head drop, shaking it where it fell between her shoulders.
I squeezed her legs, smoothing my hands over the skin there. “It’s okay. You don’t have to talk right now. Come, let me hold you.”
I slid my hand up to grab hers, but when I tugged, she pulled it away, still shaking her head.
“It’s okay,” I repeated. “We can talk tomorrow. Tonight, let’s just be.”
“I can’t.” Her voice was meek, muffled by her cries.
“I know,” I said quickly. “I know you can’t talk right now.”
“No.”
Charlie jumped up from the piano, abandoning her wine as she moved for my bay window. Her hands flew to her hair, her shoulders trembling.
“Charlie?” I asked, making my way toward her.
“Please, just, I need a minute.”
“Okay.” I held up my hands, and when she turned, I kept them there. Slowly, I stepped toward her, and the more I watched her face, the more it twisted with grief, the more my stomach knotted. “What’s wrong?”
She cried more, shaking her head.
“He’ll be okay,” I tried. “I know it was hard. I can’t imagine how you’re feeling but I’m here. I’m right here,” I told her. “Just let me hold you, let me take the pain away.”
“It’s not Cameron.”
I paused, still holding my hands up. “What is it then?”
“I haven’t gone to him,” she whispered. “I haven’t been home yet.”
“Oh,” I answered, confusion sweeping over me. “Well, did you want to talk before you go? Do you want me to go with you?”
Her bottom lip slipped between her teeth. “Reese…”
At the sound of my name, the coldest chill of my life swept over me in a rush.
It was the way she said it, the way her face crumpled as it tumbled from her lips, the way the syllable rolled off like an apology.
My confidence was zapped like a bug drawn to a false light, one designed to kill, and the truth settled in like the darkest death.
“It’s him.”
My voice broke with the words, with the way Charlie’s hands flew to cover her mouth when I said them.
“It’s him, isn’t it? You’re choosing him.”
“Reese—”
She reached for me, her small hand wrapping around my forearm, and my instinct was to pull away. But once she touched me, I knew I couldn’t.
I would never be able to.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, my eyes searching hers. “Charlie, you can’t. You can’t choose him. It’s us, it’s always been us. I make you happy, can’t you see? I love you. I love you. Don’t you love me?”
“I do,” she cried. “Reese, I love you so much it hurts.”
“But you love him more?”
She pressed her lips together, squeezing her eyes shut just the same as she set more tears free.
Black invaded my vision, and I moved back to the piano bench, falling down into it harder than I intended. One hand braced on the keys, sounding a loud, abrasive collision of notes, and the other found my bouncing knee.
“He hurt you,” I whispered. “He cheated on you, Charlie.”
“He didn’t.”
I looked up, watching as she moved slowly toward me.
“He never slept with her.”
My mouth fell open. “What? How…”
“I walked in when she was on top of him, but he had already told her to get off. She told him she wanted him, and he said no.” Charlie shrugged. “Yes, he betrayed me. He found comfort in another woman when he should have come to me. But he never slept with her,” she said. “It was me who cheated, Reese. And only me.”
“But he still left you. He wasn’t there when you needed him, when you were grieving.”
“But I wasn’t there for him either.”
Charlie took the seat next to me, wrapping her hand around mine.
“Reese, Cameron hurt me. And I hurt him. Neither of us is perfect.” She squeezed my hand. “But he’s my husband. I made vows to him, the same as he made to me, and I can’t turn my back on those vows at the first warning sign. Every couple has challenges they face — and those challenges either make or break them. Sometimes we run from our problems, and other times, we hold hands and go through them together.”
“And you don’t want to run.”
“I can’t,” she said easily. “And I know if you were in my shoes, you wouldn’t either.”
I sat there as disbelief colored every inch of me, hitting me in different waves. One moment I was angry, the next I was in shock, and somewhere underneath it, maybe I knew it all along. Maybe I saw it coming.
“I love you,” she whispered. “And I know you love me, too. But it’s a different kind of love than the one I have with Cameron. You and I, we’re friendship and forbidden want. We’re late night music and talks. We’re the kind of love that burns bright and fast, but fizzles out just the same. We’re a comet — a shooting star. We can’t last, Reese.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head.
“It’s true, and you know it. We want each other, we always have. And when we have each other?” She laughed. “It’s… explosive. Catastrophic, maybe. I’ve never felt passion like that, the way I have with you. But it was born out of years of want, years of being told no, and at the base of it all, you’re looking for something that doesn’t truly exist in me,” she said. “The same way I looked to you for something I should have found in my husband.”
My heart ached with her words, so much so that I doubled over.
“I remind you of home,” she said. “I remind you of your family, of Mallory, of your parents. I remind you of your youth, of a simpler time when you had them, when you had time to figure everything out in your life. I’m a piece of your life before it hurt. But now, you’re thirty-five, your family is gone, and no matter where you end up — whether it’s here in Mount Lebanon or back in the city or somewhere completely different — no place or person will ever bring them back,” she said, and her voice dropped lower with her next words. “Not even me. Not even as much as I wish I could.”
Emotion pricked my eyes, and I blinked against it, the ache in my chest growing stronger with every second. Oxygen hurt just as much as not taking a breath at all.
It was true, every word she said, and the truth had never hurt so badly.
“You love me for who I used to be, for the wide-eyed, untouched girl I once was. But I’m a woman now. I have scars. Cameron was there when they were made, and though he may have lost his way just as I did, he has his own scars, too. We both have them, and we both slipped into this dark hole together.” She paused, her hand sliding up from mine to grip my wrist. “We have to climb out just the same.”
Her words faded off, and the suffocating silence of my house surrounded us. It was like a weighted cloud, dark and heavy, and I let it take me under its grasp.
She wasn’t mine.
Charlie would never be mine.
It killed me — physically, I felt my heart cracking as it digested the truth. But what hurt more was that Charlie was right. I had come to Mount Lebanon searching for a home, and I’d found it in her.
But she couldn’t be my home. She was already Cameron’s.
The longer we sat there, the heavier my thoughts were, and I felt darkness slipping inside me like an old friend coming home. I tried to hold the door closed, to block it out, but it was no use.
I didn’t realize how long I’d been silent until Charlie spoke again, her words muffled with a fresh wave of tears.
“I’m sorry, Reese,” she said, breaking. “I’m so, so, sorry. I care for you so much, and it breaks my heart to break yours. I hope you’ll forgive me, I hope one day—”
“Shhh.”
I pulled her into me, wrapping my arms all the way around her as she broke in my arms. Her tears came harder, her shoulders shaking, and I smoothed a hand over her hair as I searched for the right words.
“Don’t be sorry,” I told her.
“I hurt you.” Her voice was muffled in my chest, and I held her tighter. “I never wanted to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”
“I know. I know you didn’t.” I forced a breath, kissing her hair. “In another lifetime, it could have been us, couldn’t it?”
Charlie sniffed, not answering, her hands fisting in my shirt.
“Maybe if I would have kissed you, if we would have stayed in touch. Maybe if I never would have left at all.” My heart squeezed. “Maybe my family would still be alive, then, too.”
Charlie pulled back, her eyes finding mine. We were both a mess, tears staining our faces, eyes red and puffy.
“You could never know,” she whispered. “In this lifetime or any other, everything happens for a reason, Reese. Your heart will heal, and you’ll find home again,” she promised me, as if she could possibly know for sure. “It may not seem possible right now, but you will. And something tells me the home you find will be more than you ever imagined. More than you’ve ever had before.”
She smiled then, a small, timid smile, and I returned it with as much energy as I could muster. Then, I pulled her into me again, allowing myself just a few moments more to hold her, to be with her, to pretend she was mine.
There’s nothing okay about losing the person you love.
Nothing would help ease the pain — I knew that even in the very first stage of it. There would be nothing to make it go away, nothing to numb it at all. So, in that moment, with her still in my arms — I welcomed it. I lived in it like I had after my family passed, only this time, it was a little easier.
Because I knew in the end, she was happy.
I had been wrong about Cameron. That much I knew when he fought back, when he didn’t let her go so easily. But then he’d shown me even more of who he was when he’d come to my house, when he’d told me he would bow out should she choose me. He wanted her happiness more than his own, and it was then that I realized he was a better man than I was — even if I hated admitting it.
He was fucked up, just like all of us, but he loved Charlie fiercely.
I knew he would treat her right, that he would mend what was broken, and that they would find happiness again together.
Perhaps that was what hurt the most.
Charlie was in no rush that night. She let me hold her as long as I needed to, and only when I stretched my arms and let her loose did she look at me, her eyes dry now, a soft smile on her lips.
“I will always love you,” she whispered.
I mentally traced the gold flecks in her eyes, knowing I would forever see them in my dreams.
“As will I always love you.”
I sealed that promise with one final kiss, one soft and sweet pressed to her lips.
And then, I let her go.
It was only in the exact moment that I let her walk out my door that I realized I truly did love her. Not in the selfish way I had since I was a kid, not in the empty way I had when I returned to Mount Lebanon looking for something to fill me again. I loved her in the true, genuine way.
Because I loved her enough to set her free.
In that moment, as much as my soul split open as she walked away, I put her happiness above my own. It was what Cameron had done from the start, what I wasn’t sure I could ever do, and yet here I was.
And I was thankful for that love.
If it was all I had, that one chance to love someone that much, that wholly, to care for them more than I care for myself — then I was glad to have it.
Even if it didn’t last.
It felt like an addict letting go of an addiction of sorts as Charlie pulled away, and I found myself already thinking of making amends. I owed a lot of people a lot of things after the way I’d been behaving — Blake an apology, Cameron one, too. I owed Charlie the respect and space to love her only from a distance, to never cross that line she’d redrawn between us. I owed it to my family to truly live again, to let them go, to somehow find a way to release the guilt I felt over their death.
And more than anything, I owed it to myself to build a new home — one that started with me — instead of trying to find it in someone else.
I knew the pain was far from over. I knew the race had just begun. I would spend months drowning in the bottle, in the memories, and a part of me knew I’d never fully let Charlie go.
But still, as her taillights disappeared from view, I found myself smiling.
My heart was broken, but it was still beating.
I could work with that.
The End