“Are you offering to hold my hand while my ass explodes?” I ask.
“I mean, no,” she says. “I might have been joking about that part, but if you need a hand to hold on the bed in between dashes to the bathroom, I’m your girl. I was raised on oysters on Sundays in the New Orleans heat, baby. I know the pain and suffering of a betrayal of the ass. Intimately.”
Lips twitching despite the stress gnawing at my brain, I open the door. She looks up, worried green eyes searching mine. “You’re too good,” I whisper, hating that I made her worry about me, even for a few minutes.
“No, I’m not,” she says. “I’m just more than a fair-weather friend.”
“You really are.” I reach for her, pulling her in for a hug, resting my chin on her head with a sigh. “But I’m fine. I promise.”
After a beat, she leans back, frowning up at me. “No, you’re not. What’s wrong? This is more than nachos. Bea’s showering before we start episode four. We have time to talk.”
I nod, chewing my bottom lip as I decide how much to tell her, but Charlotte is too sharp to let me get away with that.
“Uh-un,” she says, stepping away with a wag of her finger. “Don’t lie. That’s rule number one. We both agreed.”
“I’m not lying,” I say, sighing as I admit, “I was…editing.”
She shakes her head. “Nope. Not okay. No editing. I need to know the truth and nothing but the truth. If I don’t know what’s really wrong, how can I help?”
It’s so close to what I texted Blue that I have no choice but to pull her deeper into the bedroom, close the door, and spill it all.
When I’m done, she’s pacing the same path I was wearing in the carpet in front of the bed ten minutes before, shaking her head and muttering beneath her breath. “I don’t know why I’m even a little surprised. Men are the fucking worst! No offense.”
“None taken,” I say, meaning it. I’ve truly never understood why so many men see women as something less than fully human, something it’s acceptable for them to treat like animals. Or worse. “But yeah, he’s even more of a monster than I thought. We can’t let her go to Mobile now, right?”
She spins to face me, her hands propped on her hips. “That isn’t our decision to make, Nix. Beatrice isn’t a kid. She’s twenty-eight and fully capable of making her own decisions.”
I wince, hating the thought of telling Bea, even as a part of me admits that Charlotte’s right. “But won’t something like this make it harder for her to trust herself in the future? That’s what Blue said, and he’s no dummy.”
Charlotte’s forehead furrows. “Oh, honey, it’s already going to be almost impossible. Even without this. The man who betrayed me fucked my assistant.Afterwe were broken up.” She breaks off with a deeper humming sound. “At least I assumed it started after we broke up. Though now that I think about it…”
She trails off with a shake of her head. “Anyway! It doesn’t matter. He fucked my much younger assistant. Tale as old astime, betrayal as old as rhyme, not all that surprising or terrible in the scheme of things. But itstillmade it hard for me to trust myself. I was so busy coming up with reasons I shouldn’t bother trying that I almost missed out on meeting a very nice man.”
I gather her into my arms, chest warming as she comes without a hint of resistance. She just twines around me like a vine, the way she does now that she’s stopped fighting this. Fighting us. “Oh yeah? Do I know this guy? This very nice man?”
She lifts her chin with a laugh. “Yes, I think you might.”
“But I’m not really all that nice, Char,” I add, smile fading. “I certainly don’t feel like being ‘nice’ right now.”
“Which is understandable,” she agrees. “And ‘nice’ was the wrong word. You’re not always nice, but you’re kind. And fair. And a good person who I, for one, would like to keep from behind bars.”
“Because you like fucking me so much?” I shift a hand down to squeeze her ass through her silky-soft cashmere pants.
God, these pants…
They are so soft, so sexy, and Isocan’t wait to get them off her as soon as we head to bed. She’s staying over for the first time tonight. I washed my sheets this morning in honor of the momentous occasion and bought mangos to make fresh mango crepes for her in the morning before we head to work.
“Yes.” She shifts her hips forward, nudging against the erection she’s already inspired. “But also, because we need men like you on the outside.” She shrugs. “You would be way too popular in prison. I’d never stand a chance of hanging on to you. You’d find a hot prison boyfriend and forget all about me.”
I arch a brow. “Pretty sure I’m straight.”
“That’s what they all say. Until they’re in prison. Or until women are too hard to get to. My girlfriend grew up in Saudi Arabia, and she swears, all the young men there have parties where they just go at each other all night. The culturalsegregation of men and women is so intensely enforced, it’s just easier to have fun with other guys.”
“Isn’t that illegal there, though?” I ask. “Don’t they…killpeople for being gay?”
Charlotte nods. “Yeah, but not for the past decade or so, I guess? And you know men. If they’re young and horny, they’re probably not thinking about the consequences of their actions. Not in the heat of the moment anyway.”
I grunt. “Wow.”
