God invented books for days like this, Magpie told herself as she settled into her couch and flipped through the stack of paperbacks on her end table. She couldn’t remember the last time she had read anything longer than a magazine article. She loved books—always had—and frequently shipped new titles to herself from Amazon. Books that stacked up in that pile but never got read. Magpie was always too busy running from one place to another to be bogged down with a stack of paperbacks and a story line.
She’d begged off on family dinner tonight, telling her mother and sisters that she had a deadline to meet. But her laptop sat on the end table, the lid shut. She needed to get back to work, to answer emails, file this week’s story. But she didn’t do any of that. She sat on her couch, turning pages in the latest Harlan Coben novel. She lost the plot five minutes into starting the first chapter.
The apartment was quiet, the city winding down outside her windows. The dog had gone to live with Nora and the kids, and Magpie had to admit she kinda missed the furry moron. For her twenty-six years of life, Magpie had mostly been a loner, living out of a backpack as she traveled from assignment to assignment, never staying long enough in any one place to connect.
Except with Charlie. He’d been different somehow, more fun, less serious and less competitive than the other journalists she hung around with. Charlie lived by the seat of his pants, greeting every day as if it was a new adventure. He never took anything too seriously—which was something she appreciated.
Until something serious happened.
Her doorbell rang. She debated ignoring it and then heard Charlie through the door. What was he, Beetlejuice? Did the mere thought of his name deliver him to her doorstep?
“Maggie, you’re starting to make me wonder if I need to buy new cologne or mouthwash,” he called through the oak separating them. “Or maybe you think I have cooties? I assure you, I got my malaria shots.”
She laughed. Damn that man for making her laugh and dissolving her resolve. Magpie swung off the couch and padded over to the door. When she opened it, there was Charlie, with a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a bottle of bourbon in the other.
“Let’s make some bad decisions together tonight,” he said, hoisting the Maker’s Mark. His smile was tempting. Very, very tempting.
She shook her head. “I’ve made enough bad decisions with you.”
He leaned in, his brown eyes sparkling, his smile warm. “And some pretty damned good memories. So let me in and let’s have some fun.”
“I’m not in the mood for that, sorry. Thanks for coming by.” She started to shut the door, but he put his hand up and stopped her.
“What’s up? Seriously. You went from sixty to zero with me. You disappear from the hotel without a word, barely talk to me in the last month and a half. Did I piss you off somehow and not know?”
He wasn’t going to give up. The dogged determination that was at the core of his career success would mean he’d be on her doorstep again in a few days. When Charlie wanted something, he went after it. And right now, he wanted her. Magpie sighed and opened the door again. “Come on in. We need to talk anyway.”
“Talk?” He gave her that charming, joking wink. “Since when have we done much of that?”
Magpie flicked on a light, muted the TV, and then sat on the sofa. Charlie laid the flowers on the end table before he headed into the kitchen. “Do you want yours on the rocks or neat?” he called over his shoulder.
“None for me, thanks.”
Charlie stopped and turned back. “No bourbon? Did I just hear that from the woman who drank me under the table in Venezuela? And Turkey, if I remember right.”
“I’ve got a drink, thanks.”
He shrugged, grabbed a tumbler from the cabinet, and filled it halfway with bourbon before returning to the sofa. He sat down beside her, and Magpie shifted to put her back to the arm of the sofa and cross her legs on the cushion.
The humor dropped from Charlie’s face. “I get the feeling this isn’t a talk I want to have. Is this because I said all that I love you bullshit? Because we can just erase that, if you want, go back to the way it was.” He made a hand motion as if wiping away the words. “I know that kind of thing freaks you out. I don’t know what got into me. Maybe some kind of love bug when I was in Italy.” His chuckle died into a sigh when she didn’t join in on the joke.
Magpie wished she had talked to Nora first. There’d never seemed to be a good time when she was at the beach house. No, that was a lie. There’d been hundreds of opportunities. She’d chosen not to use any of them because talking to Nora would mean facing reality, and as long as she could, Magpie wanted to pretend none of this was happening.
But here was Charlie, in the flesh again and as eager as a new puppy, completely unaware of what had happened in Magpie’s life. He deserved to know, regardless of what her decision would be. And maybe once she told him, he’d leave and she could go back to existing on her own. With no one to answer to, no one to worry about…
And no one to tell her what to do with her own fucked-up life.
She waited while he took a sip of the bourbon. “Okay, so, you know me. I’m not a small-talk, beat-around-the-bush kind of girl.” She took in a deep breath, let it out. “Remember that night in Caracas? The party at that bar and all those shots we did?”
“In a foggy blur, but yeah.”
She’d landed a major interview with Laverne Cox that day, a cover story that would showcase the Orange Is the New Black actress and her passionate fight for transgender people. The kind of story that would take Magpie’s career up a few notches. She and Charlie had laughed and danced and toasted her success, while the band played and the liquor poured. It was hot, the bar one of those hideaway ones only the locals knew about, lacking in atmosphere and air-conditioning but filled with the real flavor of the city. One drink had turned into two, had turned into ten…
She’d lost count of how much she’d had to drink when she’d stumbled back to the hotel with Charlie. They’d ended up in her room, in a crazy rush to tear off clothes and finish what they’d started when they’d been grinding against each other on the dance floor. They hadn’t thought—they’d just screwed.
“When we got together that night, we were both pretty drunk, and we didn’t really think—”
“All I could think about was touching you.” Charlie grinned. “You were wearing that short red dress, and my God, you were the most beautiful woman in the room.”
“And when we went to bed,” she went on, the words tumbling out of her, overlapping with Charlie’s because if she stopped talking, she’d never say it, “we didn’t use protection. And now I’m”—she blew out a breath and, with it, the last couple words she’d kept close to her heart all this time—“I’m pregnant.”
Millimeter by millimeter, his grin faded. The light dimmed in his eyes. All the laughter and fun that wrapped around Charlie like a leather jacket ebbed away. “Pregnant?”
She nodded.
“And what are you doing about it?”
“I haven’t decided yet.” That was the truth. Ever since she’d seen the two pink lines on that stick a month after she left Venezuela, she’d been debating. The list of pros and cons was as long as an airport runway, but she’d yet to sway into one column or the other.
“Well, good. Then you can just get rid of it, and we can get back to business.” He got to his feet. “I’ll get you a glass. A little bourbon won’t hurt now.”
White-hot anger rushed through Magpie at the harshness of his words, the matter-of-fact, decision-is-done tone. “I told you, I don’t want a drink. And I don’t want to get back to business. Nor do I know if I want to get rid of ‘it,’ Charlie.”
He came around to face her. “Honey, you and I live our lives out of carry-ons. We’re rarely in the same place for more than a few days. You can’t bring a kid into that. And besides, you always told me you were not the domesticated kind. That’s part of what I loved about you. You were never going to ask me for a white picket fence and a Labrador.”
“I never thought I wanted those things. I’m not sure I do now.” Her hand rested on her abdomen. She’d gained only a couple of pounds, the difference not even noticeable. It seemed impossible to believe there was a human being forming in there. She could almost convince herself it wasn’t happening; it wasn’t real.
Almost.
“You know I care about you,” Charlie said. “I think you’re awesome. But I’m not the kind of guy who does kids and a mortgage. Hell, I can barely take care of myself, never mind one or two other people.”
“I’m not expecting anything out of you.” But that was a lie. A part of Magpie had hoped for some Hollywood ending. Maybe she’d read too many novels or gotten caught up in her envy over Nora’s nearly perfect life. Maybe that silly dog and the week with her niece and nephew had given her some kind of nesting-instinct thing. Or maybe it was seeing the way Nora had dropped to her knees and hugged Sarah to her chest after they’d brought the girl home. The relief and love and protectiveness that Nora had for her daughter—the same kind of support and protection her older sister had wrapped around Magpie in all those scary years after Dad died. That was where the reality was, not in the pages of the novels on her table.
“Uh, I don’t want to be responsible,” Charlie said. “I know that’s a shitty thing to say, but, Maggie, you know me. If I have more than twenty dollars in my pocket, I figure I’m not living right.”
A part of her had known all along that this was what Charlie would say. The same devil-may-care attitude that had attracted her to him made him a lousy partner outside of the bedroom. He was the opposite of dependable and thrifty and had no life plans beyond the next assignment.
She got to her feet, ignoring the flowers on the end table. They were roses anyway, the only flowers she despised for being such common clichés. They’d wilt in a matter of hours, be dead in a couple days. She’d told Charlie that more than once and realized it said something about the man if he didn’t pay attention to her words. “I think you should go, Charlie.”
“Hey, hey, I didn’t mean to piss you off.” He put a hand on her arm, and for the first time since she met him, his touch annoyed her. “Let’s go have some fun and talk about this later. Besides, what better way is there to spend your Sunday night than with me?”
She pressed the bourbon bottle into his hands and then crossed to the door to open it. “I’ve got plans, Charlie. And they don’t include you.” She waved him out the door, then shut it against his protests. “Not anymore.”