She had no way to call her.
Taylor stumbled back into the living room, her hands shaking as she started turning over loose papers near her guitar stand, checking the edges of the coffee table. A napkin with a scribbled number. A business card tucked under a coaster. Anything.
But there was nothing. Just smooth wood beneath her searching fingers.
She stood in the middle of her apartment, stunned, her breath coming in shallow pulls.
She didn’t even know Charlotte’s last name. She’d never said it, and Taylor had been too swept up in the magic of the night together to ask.
Last night had been the most extraordinary night of Taylor’s life, and she had to face the flat, agonizing reality that she would probably never see Charlotte again.
The disbelief turned sour, curdling into anger that settled in the pit of Taylor’s stomach. She hated her for leaving so coldly in the dead of night, treating what they shared like a shameful mistake that needed to be sanitized before sunrise. But more than that, Taylor hated herself.
She had done it again.
She’d fallen headfirst for another older woman who was completely unavailable. She’d let herself believe that this one was different, maybe because of the way they met.
But she was no different than the rest of them.
Taylor was just a secret, a thrilling distraction, a piece of young, warm skin to make a recently divorced woman feel alive for six hours before she ran back to her neat, respectable life where Taylor didn’t fit.
9
THREE MONTHS LATER
The double glass doors swung shut behind Charlotte with a heavy, wheezing sigh, cutting off the dry heat of the afternoon. She let her shoulders sag for a fraction of a second in the cool shadow of the lobby.
The campus was draining fast. Everyone was more than ready to start their Labor Day weekend. Charlotte had finished her last lecture an hour ago, but the knot between her shoulder blades refused to loosen. It wasn’t just the sheer physical grind of Syllabus Week, though standing in front of eighty critical young eyes for hours at a time was brutal enough. It was the stagnant weight she’d carried across her shoulders all summer, a residue that no amount of quiet reading or coastal air had managed to scrub out.
She crossed the lobby floor, her low heels making a sharp, lonely clap against the terrazzo. Every time her mind quieted down, it wasn’t long before her thoughts went straight back to that night in June. Back to the small beach town two hours west. Back to the early morning light filtering through the curtains while she crept around, trying to leave unnoticed.
She’d spent three full months hating herself for that morning.
Leaving Taylor like that—creeping out without so much as a note, leaving the borrowed yoga pants folded on the coffee table like a dry cleaner’s delivery—had been the coldest, most coward-like act of Charlotte’s life. It was cruel. She’d known it then, and the sharp edge of that knowledge hadn’t dulled by a single degree since.
Taylor had given her everything that night. Taylor had looked at her with those warm hazel eyes, completely unshielded, and handed her an escape from the boring post divorce life she thought she was destined for. And Charlotte had run away because she was terrified of what it meant.
She reached the mid-floor landing and stopped.
The stairwell door stood two feet away, but her legs simply refused to lift for the next flight. Charlotte leaned back, letting her shoulders hit the painted cinderblock wall. The sudden, flat chill of the concrete bit through the thin silk of her blouse, a shock of cold that made the lingering heat behind her breastbone sting like spilled alcohol.
She closed her eyes and let her head tilt back against the wall.
That night still sat right behind her eyelids, so vivid it made her throat tighten. It had started so terribly. She’d gone to that bar trying to follow Diane’s ironic advice to get out and remember how to be a person again, only to end up feeling obsolete and pathetic. The woman who’d approached her there hadn’t been subtle, practically undressing her with her eyes. Charlotte had fled to the beach, convinced that intimacy was something she’d never have again.
And then she’d heard the music.
She could still hear that rich, smoky voice floating over the sound of crashing surf before she even saw the bonfire. When Taylor had walked away from the flames and sat down beside her on that cold rock, there hadn’t been a single calculated move. No practiced seduction, just raw authenticity radiatingfrom Taylor’s every gesture and word. She sat beside her, grounded and completely self-assured, listening to Charlotte fumble through her story without pity or judgment.
Then came the walk along the damp sand. Charlotte could still feel the phantom drag of cold seawater around her ankles, the shock of losing her heels to the tide, and the way Taylor’s laugh had cracked the night wide open. When Taylor had stepped close, cupping Charlotte’s face with warm, steady hands, Charlotte had felt her entire rigid world splinter.
Charlotte couldn’t think about the rest of that night without feeling a flutter in her belly. She’dd let go completely. For hours, she had abandoned every rule, every carefully curated boundary she had spent decades building. She had let Taylor take her apart on that couch, had given herself over to the slick, breathless friction of skin against skin until her lungs burned and her voice gave out. And then she had turned around and undone Taylor in her bedroom, drinking in every ragged gasp until they were both spent and tangled in damp sheets.
It was, without a shadow of a doubt, the best night of her life.
Charlotte exhaled, a long, shaky breath in the empty stairwell.
She hadn’t uttered a word about it to a single soul. How could she?
