Darien’s thin brows rose a couple of inches. “I didn’t have anything in the books.”
“It’s not for work.”
“Oh, okay, all right. Some after-work fun, then.” He cocked a hip, matching the slant of his grin. “With the toothy blonde CoverGirl downstairs?”
I looked up from the instructions, narrowing my gaze. “I’m just meeting him to talk about something. No ‘fun’ involved… How’d you know my meeting was with him?”
“I saw you two bumping into each other. I don’t need to be a drag queen named Claire Voyant to see there was something between you two.”
I laughed again. Darien had that gift and could make an entire auditorium crack up with the smallest and most sarcastic quip anyone had ever heard.
“Well, maybe we need that drag queen mediating us.” I stood up, rubbing the dirt off the knees of my dark jeans. “Charlie and I do have history, and it isn’t the good kind.”
Not all of it, at least.
“Did you break his heart?” Darien asked. From my silence, he figured out the answer to his question. “He broke yours.”
“That’s putting it lightly,” I said. Talking about my past with Charlie was enough to get my anger bubbling up. It was a warm sensation that bloomed out from my chest, made my breathing feel tighter. “He broke my heart and then rammed it through a paper shredder. It felt like there was nothing left of me when he was done. It’s a big reason why I moved to New York in the first place.”
Darien’s brows pushed together. “Well… shit.”
I checked my wristwatch. It was three minutes past Charlie’s shift being over. “Yeah,” I said. I put a hand on Darien’s shoulder, the two of us appearing like Jack and the Giant Beanstalk with our size difference. “Don’t fuck with the boys in this town. They’re all heartless douche-heads.”
“Sounds just like my type.” Darien offered a wide grin. “All right, go take your haunting trip down memory lane. I’ll clean up a bit up here.”
I grabbed my keys and looked around my office, surprisingly spacious for being above a pet store/liquor stop hybrid. “Don’t stay in for too long. Go explore.”
I left Darien behind, happy that he’d be the one I’d be working with on a daily basis. Leaving the city was a choice I knew I had to make, but I wasn’t happy about leaving behind the friends I had made over the seven years I’d been there. Darien helped bridge that, and for that I was grateful.
Downstairs, the pet store was closing up shop, one of the employees shuffling a large broom through the aisles while another organized the fridge of beer and wine. I looked around and spotted Charlie outside, waiting with his phone in hand, blond hair catching some of the setting sun.
He was taller than I remembered. And more solid, too. He filled in his T-shirt and khaki pants, especially the rear of those khaki pants. I pried my eyes off his perky bubble butt and looked back up to that face.
A face I wanted to never see again.
I thought I’d be able to handle it—seeing Charlie—I had expected it, so I mentally prepared for it. But the uncontrolled anger that started to claw its way up my chest told me that all the preparation was for nothing. All I could see was the betrayal and heart-wrenching pain Charlie inflicted on me, and that made my blood boil.
He looked up from his phone and through the glass doors. He smiled and waved and seemed completely oblivious, as if our history didn’t weigh him down the same way it did me. As I walked toward him, I felt as if an anchor had been tied around my neck and it was working overtime to try and drag me back into the dark depths that Charlie had dumped me in all those years ago.
I opened the door, greeted by a swoosh of fresh air, carrying with it some of Charlie’s cologne. A leather-and-pine scent that went straight to my brain, reminding me of the way Charlie would smell after we got cleaned up from soccer practice.
On the days we’d work extra hard to just get dirty all over again.
Charlie put a hand out. Another formal greeting that felt so wrong with the past that linked us.
I took it and shook, trying to find a bead of recognition inside those bright blue eyes.
Nothing.
“Thanks for waiting for my shift to finish,” he said. “Want to go to Juno Pine’s Diner? They’ve got some bomb-ass cheeseburgers. Plus, I’ve got a booth practically reserved for me.”
“The one all the way at the end, next to the karaoke machine?”
Charlie’s brows drew up. “That’s the one. How’d you know?”
I fought the urge to grab him by the shoulders and shake him, telling him to stop this facade, to just open up and talk about the shit that went down between us. It was starting to make me feel like I was losing it. As if I had somehow imagined everything that happened between us.