I can’t believe I played the alcoholic card, or, indeed, that the alcoholic card could ever be useful.
Charlie’s expression softened. She reached into the pocket on the side of her leggings, pulled out a headlamp, and told me to keep up.
Red’s map sent us down a track into a wood, dense with ferns. It was dark enough between the trees that I kept stumbling and grazed a palm, not helped by the fact that only Charlie had a light, and every time she looked around she’d send the beam shooting off in random directions, e.g., directly in my eyes.
We crossed a stream—I heard it rather than saw it, the undergrowth was that thick—and then the path seemed to hug its way around the curve of a cliff. The only hint I had that we were nearthe sea was the sound of waves, and the fact that the ground to my left dropped away so sharply I’d only need to take one wrong step to go tumbling. Then, suddenly, the woods opened out to reveal a beach below us.
It was a tiny cove, with the stream that had run through the woods dissecting the sand in a dark line, reaching for the sea. There were a few groups gathered on blankets or camping chairs with lanterns, and plenty of people on their own, too, everyone looking out to the water.
Charlie and I headed down the steep steps in the rock. We hadn’t said a word to each other since leaving the Rue. By the end it was a scramble, but then we were on the sand, and it was sinking beneath my heels. Someone was playing a guitar, just riffing quietly. A few people raised their heads as we went by, but nobody spoke to us.
“This is…” Charlie began, then trailed off.
I didn’t know what to call it, either. It reminded me, oddly, of walking into a church.
Charlie asked if we should sit. I hadn’t planned to spend the evening with her, but what else was there to do, now that we were both here?
She loosed her hair from its ponytail, looking out at the sea as we sat down together. I wished I had a bottle of something—a crisp, cold lager; a hoppy IPA. I don’t think I really know how to do moments like that without a drink.
“I assume you’re keeping everyone at a distance because Rosie’s right,” Charlie said eventually. “That you’re heartbroken. Grieving, maybe. She said we both have ‘bruised souls,’ but I sense you’re not into the woo-woo stuff, so I’m paraphrasing.”
“I’m not into the woo-woo stuff, you’re right.”
“Much too manly for that.”
I frowned and protested, then stopped—Charlie was biting back a smile. She brushed the sand from her palms and reached to tug off her trainers and socks so she could sink her toes in. I copied her. The sand was cold. The need for a drink became a little quieter, so I buried my feet deeper. Beside me, Charlie did the same.
“You should know,” Charlie went on, “you don’t get the monopoly on miserable.”
I looked sideways at her. She was drawing Xs in the sand with her finger. Whenever I look at Charlie, I think it’ll make the need go away—the urge to take her in, see a little more of her. But it doesn’t. Looking away is even harder than not looking at all.
“Heartbroken and grieving, too?” I said.
“Rosie’s a great reader of people.”
“And you’re telling me this because…”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Charlie said. “Because you could really screw up my life, and I’d rather you didn’t?”
“You want me to like you.”
She flinched.
“I want you to remember I’m a person,” she said. “Maybe you do deserve this beautiful opportunity, after whatever it is you’ve been through. But maybe I do, too.”
I thought of the moment I’d had her quivering in my arms, up against the wall. Not just how good it had felt—though that came to my mind, too—but the way she’d suddenly seemedreal.
It’s a problem that comes with sadness, I think—you lose the ability to see someone else’s pain through the haze of your own. She’s right: I’ve not let myself believe that she really might need this opportunity in the same way I do.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
She looked at me in surprise.
“Before,” I clarified. “What brought you here? What’s got you so bruised, as Rosie would say?”
“That’s a very personal question from a man determined not to get to know anybody. What are you asking for—want to compare traumas? See who needs this fresh start the most?”
I guess I deserved that. The guitar player had shifted to a song I recognized—it took me a minute to realize it was Noah Kahan’s “Call Your Mom.” The music caught the bittersweet feeling in my chest and seemed to make it bigger, the way a great song can.
