My efforts are rewarded with a gentle smile.
“I like how your skin is smooth, but your stubble is prickly, and your jaw is so strong. And I like how you like my grandmother.” I know how I sound, but I feel like human glitter, shimmering effervescence. Like nothing is wrong, like nothingcouldgo wrong under this roof with Charlie. I run my finger over the bow of his top lip. “I like your mouth, too. These two mountaintops.”
“Alice,” Charlie says, sitting up, so that we’re facing each other, legs crossed. He stares at me intensely, but it doesn’t bother me that he might be able to peer into my soul. It makes me feel brave.
“Can I show you something?” I’ve been waiting for the right time to do it.
He frowns but says, “Of course.”
I get up, jelly-legged, and dig the photo out of the kitchen drawer.
“Promise not to freak out?” I ask, holding it to my chest as I return to the floor. Charlie puts a hand on my bobbing knee.
“Not much freaks me out.” He takes his hand away when I go still.
I pass him the photo, and a hurricane of emotions crashes across his face. Confusion. Disbelief. Shock.
Finally, he lifts wonder-filled eyes to mine. “I can’t believe it was you.”
I blink at him. “What?”
Charlie bends closer to the photo. “Of course it was you,” he says to himself. “It makes sense. I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out.”
“Charlie?”
“You took this.” He fixes his gaze on me, piercing and bright. Fresh as new spring leaves.
“The summer I stayed here,” I confirm.
He shakes his head, and then suddenly, he grabs his phone, thumbing through his photos. When he finds what he’s looking for, he passes it to me. It’s a picture ofmyphoto,thisphoto, displayed on a wall in a black frame.
“It hangs in a boardroom of a bank where my buddy works,” Charlie explains. “He thought it looked like me. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It’s me, it’s us.”
It’s the print I sold back when I was a student. I blew it up more than I should have, making it slightly grainy. But I liked that. I thought it added a sense of nostalgia.
I peel my eyes away from the phone, stunned.
“You, Sam, and Percy?” I assumed it was them the night we watched the fireworks, but I want to be sure.
“Yeah.” Charlie rubs his forehead. “It was so wild. My friend sent it a few years ago. It was right after Percy and Sam had gotten back together. It felt like a message from the universe or fate or some shit. Like things were as they were supposed to be.” He searches my face. “You really took this?”
I stare into Charlie’s eyes, and for a moment I’m entranced.Green grapes. Kiwi fruit. Lime juice. Bands of impossibly bright light rippling across a black sky.
“Yeah, I really took it.
“This photo means a lot to me,” I say softly as we study it together. “It made me think I might be good one day. It helped me get into photography school. It was the first shot I ever sold.” I pause. “It changed my life.”
Charlie turns to face me. “I’ve gone to see it,” he says. “And I tried to find you, but there was no signature. I wanted to buy a print. I wanted to remember us like this, when things were simple.”
“I think that’s one of the reasons I feel so connected to it now,” I say. “When I look at it, I feel like I’m seventeen again.”
“So you do remember us?” Charlie puts his hand on my leg when it starts vibrating again, but this time it stays there.
“I remember you,” I whisper.
His eyes travel across my face so slowly. I don’t recognize the feeling in my chest, full yet weightless. Like there’s a hot-air balloon about to set sail beneath my sternum.
“You should have said hi,” Charlie says, voice low.
