Lovers Like Us (Like Us 2)

We’re on the same figurative side, fighting for the same purpose. But our past still wedges between us like a crater that we’ve never known how to fill.

Charlie drums his armrest and stares out the airplane window. I fold my paperback of Aristotle’s The Nicomachean Ethics, barely able to read with the tense silence.

And as soon as his eyes drift to me, I take a chance and start talking.

“Do you remember junior year? When we had to do that video together on The Iliad?” I ask, trying to be casual.

Charlie nods once.

“You played Apollo,” I say. “I was Achilles, and it was actually pretty damn good.” I smile at the memory and then grimace. “That is until our dads had to get the lawyers involved.”

They were afraid that students or teachers would publicly share the video and then the media would have a field day. Understandable since I was pretending to slay my classmates as Achilles. They thought that kind of negative press would hurt me.

Charlie doesn’t say a thing.

So I continue, “You remember how Faye Jones had such a crush on you? She kept insisting that you play Paris—”

“You don’t have to do this,” Charlie says, and he messes his already messy hair.

My palms sweat on my paperback. “Do what?”

“Bring up high school. The good ol’ times.” Charlie holds my gaze. “I realize there was a time when we were friends.”

“Yeah?” I tuck my paperback in the seat. “I remember us being close until that summer bash on the yacht. You know Harvard?” I inch towards the question. The one that I’ve never edged near. My tongue feels thick in my mouth. “You never really told me why you didn’t want to go.” I stop myself for a second.

I’m afraid.

And I don’t know what worries me. The actual answer or the aftermath of knowing it. My heart practically bangs against my ribcage.

I find some fucking words. “What changed?”

“Me,” he says without pause or extra thought.

My brows knit together and shock engulfs me. I’d always thought he’d blame me. “What do you mean?”

Charlie winces and sits up a bit more. Not slouching like usual. “You really want to talk about this? We’re on our way to deal with a manipulative motherfucker, who could be a narcissist or a sociopath, and if things don’t end well between you and me, we’ll be walking in with welts and bloody noses.”

I’d rather take the chance to do more damage than never try to repair what we broke. The hardest part was opening this door.

I’m not shutting it now.

“I don’t plan on punching you,” I tell him, “so that’s not going to happen.”

The corner of his mouth rises. “I never plan on hitting you either, but it still happens. You have a punchable face.”

“Thank you,” I say dryly.

His smile lifts more, but then morphs into a bitter cringe. “I wasn’t lying that day on the dock. When I said I couldn’t stand being around you, I meant it.”

A knife slowly sinks into my gut, but I listen. I wait. I don’t lash out. “Yeah?” I lick my lips, trying to form the right words. “So you bailed on Harvard because you didn’t want to be around me. That’s it?”

He lets out an exasperated breath. “You make it sound so simple. But it’s not like that to me.”

“Then explain it to me,” I plead.

He leans forward in his chair and then back, and I think he’s about to brush me off. But then he starts talking. Eyes on me. Not breaking. “I hate what I feel when I’m near you sometimes. I hate who I become.” Charlie rubs his mouth, then sits forward again. “We’re both living beneath the shadows of our fathers, but just imagine, for a second, what it’s like to live beneath yours.”

I go cold. It can’t be easy for him. I get that, and I want to help make it better.

But I don’t know how.

I inhale a sharp breath. “What is it like?”

Charlie shifts in his seat.

The topic is uncomfortable. The air is tight, and we’re passing a bomb back and forth. But for the first time, I feel like we have the tools to disable it.

He looks me right in the eye. “Fourth of July five years ago, my little sister burns her arm on a sparkler. She doesn’t go to my parents. Doesn’t even search for Jane. The first person she turns to is you.”

I want to cut in, to tell him that I was probably just near her in proximity, but he’s quickly spouting off to the next one.

“Halloween two years ago, Eliot crushes on the girl in that old local, corner bookstore. But I don’t learn this from him. My little brother chose to ask you for advice about approaching her, even though you and I both have the same amount of experience with girls.”

“Charlie—”

“Seven years ago,” he says, still going. “Winona falls into the creek behind the lake house, and she starts sinking in that quicksand mud. I’m halfway to her. Already ankle-deep in water, but you come out of God-knows where with your shining white armor and ten foot rope.”

His eyes are bloodshot, and he says, “It’s all these little moments that have made you. You mean everything to my siblings. To the Meadows girls, to your sisters and brother, and that makes you a shadow I can’t escape. Because I can’t be anything to them when you’re every fucking thing. So who am I?” Charlie points at his chest. “Who am I? And what the hell do I become if I go to Harvard with you? Lost and confused? I was already self-loathing and bitter, but I’d just be more resentful, more bitter—a guy who wakes up and hates himself for not being more like Maximoff Hale.”

What…

“You’re not self-loathing,” I argue.

At least, that’s what I’ve seen.

He tilts his head. “I don’t always lash out at you because I hate you. I lash out because I hate how I feel when I’m around you. I hate that I want to become you.”

I never knew this.

I never saw this or understood this. I think about everything all the goddamn time, but I never even fathomed that someone like Charlie, a Cobalt, could be less than confident, less than colossally self-assured.

Charlie shakes his head. “I’m not a natural born leader. I don’t want to be one, but sometimes it feels like that’s my only path to be someone or something to the people I love. Then maybe they’d need me like they need you.”

My eyes burn and stomach knots. “Charlie—”

“No,” he cuts me off again. “I don’t want to morph into someone else. I want to be me, whoever that person is, he’s not like you or anyone else, and I’m fighting to find him. You make that impossible sometimes.”

A rock lodges in my throat, an apology sitting on the edge of my tongue.

Charlie flips his phone in his hand. “And I’m not even blaming you. I needed to deal with these feelings, but I couldn’t be your sidekick or live in your shadow.”

Realization gradually sinks in. “Harvard…”

He takes a tight breath. “That night on the yacht, I decided right then that to escape your soul-sucking shadow, I’d have to escape you. No Harvard. No answering your calls or texts. You be you, and I…try to rediscover who I am.” His voice cracks.

He almost always lets me see his emotion. You think he’s brick-walled, but he’s not like his dad. He doesn’t contain a thing.

I thought ditching on Harvard was premeditated, but he said he decided to bail right then. In

the moment.

I swallow, my heart beating fast. I want to reach out, but how do you extend a hand when you’re the cause of someone’s pain? “I can move out of the way for you,” I say. “I’ll try—”

“No. This is why I didn’t tell you back then. You can’t fix it, Moffy. Because I don’t want my siblings to lose you, and I don’t want to be you. There’s nothing you can do, and look at your face. I know it hurts…”

My chest constricts like I’m stuck beneath salt water and I can’t find the surface. My eyes try to well, and I tilt my head back against the chair. Bottling my emotion, face stoic. “Do you?” I ask since he’s always lacked a certain amount of empathy for other people.

“I can see that it hurts you,” he tells me. “You know, I used to believe that we were just meant to be opposites. That for all the compassion you had, I lacked. For all the responsibility Maximoff Hale acquired, I was left with none. And in everyone’s eyes, you were the hero, and I’d become the villain.” A tear rolls slowly down his cheek, dripping off his jaw.

It almost crushes my chest. “You’re not the villain to anyone,” I tell him strongly. “If anything, you’re the anti-hero. And people usually love those more.”

Charlie rubs another fallen tear. “I don’t need anyone to love me. I can deal with hate.”

I nod, just listening.

“But when everyone fawns over you and acts like you’re indestructible, it’s grating,” Charlie says. “I can’t bite my tongue, and my gut reaction is to go for your jugular.”

“I’m not any better,” I admit.

Charlie shrugs, and silence hangs but not as heavily as it could.

I want to stand. I want to do something more for him, but he keeps looking at me like, this is it. This is the end with no solution that I’ve asked to meet.

I drop my head, thinking. And thinking. “So are you saying I’ll always make you feel like shit?” It kills me knowing that I’ve hurt him for so many years.

And that I’ll just continue being a negative impact on his life.

“I can’t see the future,” Charlie says. “I’m not six-feet-three inches full of resentment anymore. I’m not sixteen. But it’s still tough being around you. Where everyone praises you. Where I’m stuck in a shadowed place and I’m neither lost nor found. Doing my own thing makes me feel…”