“Honestly, I’m having trouble keeping up.” Charlie put a gentle hand to my face. “Could you, maybe, start at the beginning? I promise I’ll listen.”
At his touch, something in me loosened, and my eyes met his. He was asking me to trust him with what I knew, to lay it all out on the table. So I did.
Over the next few minutes, I caught him up on everything I knew, which was a kind of trust fall for me.
He listened without jotting down notes, keeping his gaze fixed on mine the entire time.
“And the two people on the case are a gorgeous deputy and my boyfriend who—” I stopped mid-sentence, realizing that I’d used a word for Charlie that I’d never used before. I tried to recover. “And now I have to decide what to do with you,” I finished, putting my elbow on the window.
Out the window, the deputy was staring at our car, likely trying to see why it had stalled.
Charlie’s lips turned up on the right side and he narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean that you have to decide what to do with me?” Despite all of the information I’d just spewed, his expression was actually amused.
“I don’t know,” I breathed out. “Like, what if we break up? Or what if we aren’t even a… an item.”
“An item?” He cocked his head. “Is this the 1950s?”
I frowned at him. “I mean, despite the fact that I just humiliatingly called you my boyfriend, we haven’t actually defined anything.”
Charlie tapped a hand against the steering wheel. “I thought we were too old and wise to need to put a label on things, but, sure, I can do that if you want.”
A label? If I want?Who didn’t want to define a relationship at some point? Although, I guess I hadn’t been in a hurry until this weekend had threatened to topple us.
“I do want,” I said simply, straightening my shoulders as if about to enter an official meeting.
He lifted a shoulder. “Okay.”
This sounded too easy, and it made me suspicious, especially after how hard life had been for the last two years. But before I had time to think about it for long, he wrapped his palm around my fingers until the back of my hand was smothered by his own.
“I’m only interested in datingyou. In fact, I’ve only been dating you for the past four months because I thought we were exclusive,” Charlie said. “I guess I’m old-fashioned like that, but since you’d like to be officially asked, Dakota Green, would you go steady with me?”
Despite my swirling mind and the fact that him asking this question didn’t actually fix any of my real problems, I let out a soft laugh for the first time. “Do I get your class ring?”
“You can have anything you want from me,” he said, his voice husky with intent. Almost like he loved me.
I shook off the intensity of his stare. Calling him my boyfriend was enough for now.
I nodded toward the deputy, who appeared to have given up on figuring out what was happening inside the car and was opening the front door to go back inside. “What about her?”
“Jill?”
“The very one,” I said. “And please don’t tell me that you have no idea she’s interested in you.”
He made an expression that said he’d been avoiding thinking about that very thing. “Lately, I’ve been wondering, but we’ve worked together for so long that I didn’t want to assume—and, to be clear, I don’t feel the same way about her.” He stole a glance at me to make sure I believed him. “Jill was a great partner and she’s doing well as a second-in-command, but I swear, that’s it for me.”
I wanted to believe him.
He took a second to figure out what to say next. I was afraid that he was about to backtrack, to tell me that actually he wasn’t sure about her, about me, about any of this. Instead, he surprised me with his next few words.
“She doesn’t like dogs,” he said, as if that should be explanation enough.
It was not.
So he continued. “Jill’s parents take her on a two-week vacation to the Swiss Alps every winter to ski, and she doesn’t like to read anything exceptPeoplemagazine. She won’t try new foods—it’s always buttered pasta and grilled chicken when she eats out—and she only listens to classical music. She became a police officer because she didn’t like college and she said she wanted to find out what it’s like to be a ‘working person.’ She’s good at her job, and she’s a great person… for someone else, who will fall madly in love with her someday.” His look begged me to believe him. “As for me and you, I guess I think of you as my girlfriend even though we’ve never said that out loud. I can’t do anything about what you decide to do next with your career, butas for me, I’m…” Here, a smile crept into his intense focus, and I knew he was about to say something cheesy. “I’m in it to win it.”
I couldn’t help but laugh out loud that time. After a moment, I lifted my hand so that our fingers were entwined.
He lifted my hand and kissed the back of it. “I’m open to figuring out a way to make this work, Dakota Green, but you’ve got to figure out what makes you happy—not what other people think looks like success. Remember what you told me when I was trying so hard to get the good people of Aubergine to like me?”
