“Oh, please.” She shakes her head. “You’re a fucking hypocrite, Charlie Waybill.”
Her smile falters for a moment as she registers the bite to her words. She isn’t sure when that indignation crept into her tone, but it’s certainly there. Disguising the hurt that would otherwise slip out. The hurt she tries to deny whenever Charlie accuses her of being a fraud. Because for some reason, she wants him to think the best of her and he’s only ever thought the worst. Anger about it is safer, but that it affects her at all has been weighing so heavily on her over the past week. He can see through her so well; she wonders if he can also see how much she craves his approval.
Maybe he can, because Charlie moves his hands to Gretchen’s upper arms, and his eyes lock on hers. The regular hazel is closer to a uniform gold in the dim, pink-tinged light of the bar parking lot. There’s no question about what’s making her heart pound now. It’s definitely the way Charlie’s body is a mere inch from hers, how his heat radiates into her bones. His quick breaths encourage hers to come faster too, as if they’re testing whether she can keep up.
And this is her moment, she realizes. This is the moment to make her move, to do what needs to be done. Everett is right that time isn’t on their side, and if not now, then when?
“You pretend you’re so honorable. That you’re such astand-up guy,” Gretchen says quietly. The back of her head rests against the truck’s window as she looks up at Charlie, so very close, knowing it’s a matter of seconds before he caves and kisses her. “But deepdown, you’re as flawed as the rest of us. You’re just better at hiding it.”
“Not always,” he whispers.
His lips crash against hers, forceful and hungry. Gretchen makes a needy sound she isn’t exactly proud of as his tongue slips into the opening she offers. His hands travel down to grasp her hips, pressing her between him and the truck, enabling her to feel every inch of his body, including the ridge of his growing erection. This evidence of his arousal drives her wild, the success of winning him over in at least one way a delicious hum that reverberates through her bones.
Her fingers scramble over his arms, his back, digging nails through his shirt and into his muscles in hopes she’ll make a mark. She wants to leave a reminder of what it’s like to give in to her so that he’ll want to do it again and again. She bites his lower lip, soothes it with the tip of her tongue. That’s the extent of her artful seduction, though, as her brain succumbs to overwhelming, uncontrollable feeling. Gretchen wants—needs—Charlie to pour all of himself into this, into her, and she wraps one leg around his, making small sounds of approval when he squeezes her thigh and pushes up the hem of her dress. The truck is cold against her ass without the extra layer of fabric until his warm palm cups one cheek low, fingers playing at the seam of her underwear (and oh, how she’s glad she chose one of the lacy pairs tonight even though the ones he bought her are frankly much more comfortable) as he lowers his head further to lick along the side of Gretchen’s throat, and oh god, she’s going to let this man fuck her right here in this dive bar’s parking lot, isn’t she?
She cants her pelvis forward, desperate, trying to find a sourceof friction to relieve this ache that’s building inside her, and Charlie moves one of his muscular thighs between her legs, giving her something solid to rock against as he finds her mouth again. It’s still not nearly enough.
It isn’t supposed to be this way. She’s vaguely aware that she’s supposed to be in control, the one to bring him to his knees. And yet if he didn’t have her pinned to the truck’s door, she’s fairly certain she would be kneeling on the asphalt.
“Charlie,” she sobs. It’s as if his name is synonymous with the swell of need threatening to overtake her and a plea for rescue all in one.
Yet he doesn’t hear it that way. Or maybe he does and simply returns to his senses. Everywhere Gretchen is pressed against him goes tense. He pulls back, looking at her wide-eyed, like a deer on high alert after hearing a twig snap.
“I...” Charlie shakes his head. “I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be sorry. I wanted, I want—”
He holds up a hand, stopping her from saying more. “No, I mean that we...” Then both hands come to his head, gripping at his hair as he turns his back to Gretchen. She reaches out to touch his shoulder, but he shrugs her away. “That won’t happen again,” he says, the declaration gruff and final-sounding.
“Charlie—”
“It won’t, and... and it’s getting late. We should get back to the farm.”
Gretchen sighs, hoping it might expel some of the frustration and hurt he’s left her with. Not to mention the bafflement at how quickly she forgot herself—and the point of what she was supposed to be doing—as soon as he kissed her. “Okay,” she says as she opens the truck’s door and climbs into the passenger seat.
—
The silence during the thirty-minute drive back to Gilded Creek is so thick Gretchen worries she might choke on it. The miasma is like another passenger, shoved between them in the front seat, hoarding all of the extra oxygen. A few times, she opens her mouth, the courage to try to push through it on the tip of her tongue. But ultimately, she can’t help but swallow it down again. It’s the determined set of Charlie’s brow, the tightness in his jaw that tells her it isn’t worth attempting right now. So she says nothing, and he says nothing.This is how rejection feels. This is how failure feels.As much as she tries to divorce herself from the actual sensations, they linger stubbornly in the corners.
She isn’t sure what she’ll tell Everett when she gets home.Charlie and I almost banged in a bar parking lot and I forgot my own name much less what I was supposed to be accomplishing, and then he got mad at me and I’m not sure what to do now?Not exactly a conversation she wants to have with the ghost tonight. Or ever.
The long, winding driveway seems six times longer than when they left, but it eventually delivers them to the farmhouse. Gretchen clumsily slides down from the too-high passenger seat again. This time, she forgets to hold her dress down and gives any goats awake in the barn quite a show. Bonnie and Clyde bark in greeting. It’s a cloudy night, only a few stars visible but still many more than she ever saw in the city. As picturesque as Gilded Creek is during the day, something about the darkness makes it otherworldly. Beautiful in a way Gretchen wishes she could bottle and take back to DC to somehow use in her séances.
Charlie walks straight to the door, inserts his key, and opens it. She follows him inside, where they observe their progress inremoving their shoes with a feigned sense of fascination that keeps them from having to make eye contact. The TV plays an episode ofTaxi. Everett doesn’t poke his head up from the couch to greet them, so Gretchen assumes he’s either elsewhere or ignoring her too. Well, if no one in this house is going to acknowledge her existence right now, she might as well head up to her bedroom so she can be sexually frustrated in peace.
She’s halfway up the stairs when Charlie clears his throat. “Acorn?”
Gretchen clutches the banister, suddenly a little dizzy. Probably from the half a pint she had at Tipsy Lou’s. “Yeah?”
“Um, thank you again for earlier. With my grandfather, I mean. And I’m... I’m sorry again for...” He trails off. “Anyway. Good night.”
“Good night,” she responds, perplexed. Because it seems like what she assumed was anger toward her might actually be anger toward himself.
Anyway, so much for peace. Everett is waiting on her bed. “My, my, my,” he says, looking her up and down from where he hover-lies prone with his legs in the air like a possessed preteen girl at a slumber party. Gretchen hasn’t seen herself in a mirror or any other reflective surface since making out with Charlie outside the bar, so who knows what her hair looks like, how swollen her lips might be. “Someonelooks like she had a good time.”
Gretchen face-plants onto the mattress beside Everett and groans.
“Or... maybe... not?”
