Page 28 of Power Play

That rule had been easy enough when Charm was eighteen and I could pretend her crush would fade. It became harder once I got to know her.

She was funny as hell when she forgot to be careful. Dry, sharp, and capable of saying something absolutely vicious in the same soft tone she used to thank a waiter. She hated raisins with a level of resentment usually reserved for personal betrayal. She reorganized things when she was anxious, defended people before they asked for it, and could spend forty minutes explaining why the construction of a dress mattered without noticing I’d stopped understanding half the terminology ten minutes earlier.

She cared about everybody, sometimes so much that she disappeared beneath it.

I’d also learned that the Charm I liked best appeared whenever she temporarily forgot somebody might be judging her.

Barefoot Charm sitting cross-legged on a couch with her hair piled on top of her head. Laughing-too-loud Charm. Pissed-off Charm. Charm swearing when Aura pushed her far enough, then looking mildly horrified with herself afterward. Charm talking about clothes with both hands moving because she got excited enough to forget she’d been taught to keep them neatly folded in her lap.

That woman came out in pieces. Then something inside her remembered the cage, and she climbed right back into it.

Last night at the Sin Bin, she’d spent twenty minutes defending an elective she didn’t even need because her father thought it belonged on her résumé. She had reorganized condiment bottles without realizing she was touching them, barely eaten the fries Bliss put in front of her, and looked at me like I’d handed her a life raft when I told her interpretation didn’t require somebody else’s permission.

Helping her should’ve been simple.

The fact that I wanted to put my mouth on her had complicated the plan. The fact that she seemed increasingly interested in letting me was becoming a much bigger problem.

I pulled into the Book Nook parking lot with ten minutes to spare and killed the engine. The cardboard box on the passenger seat held enough books, old essays, notebooks, and study guides to embarrass both of us.

I looked at it, then at my reflection in the windshield.

“Books,” I reminded myself. “You like books.”

Unfortunately, I also liked Charm’s ass.

I grabbed the box and headed inside before that train of thought got any more specific.

The Book Nook smelled like espresso, old paper, and air-conditioning cold enough to make people regret wearing shorts. I claimed a table near the back windows and covered half of it with books from my apartment. Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre. Frankenstein. A battered Norton anthology with enough notes in the margins to qualify as a second narrator. Two composition notebooks, three study guides, and a folder of old essays from Klein’s classes that I’d kept because throwing away work I’d bled over felt wrong.

I’d lost enough things growing up to get weird about keeping what belonged to me.

Clothes disappeared between foster homes. Shoes got left behind. Cheap toys mattered more than they should’ve because sometimes a social worker handed you a trash bag and ten minutes to decide which pieces of your life fit inside it.

Books had been different.

Libraries carried the same stories no matter where I ended up. I could leave one copy behind in a house I never wanted to see again and find another somewhere else with the same characters waiting exactly where I remembered them. Nobody rewrote the ending because my address changed.

By college, I’d started buying my own copies whenever I had money.

I didn’t get rid of them.

Charm stopped beside the table at twelve-oh-three wearing cream shorts, a coral-colored tank, and sunglasses pushed into her hair.

Her gaze moved over the books before landing on me.

“You brought a small liberal arts department.”

I leaned back in the chair and adjusted my backward cap with one finger. “You said you wanted help.”

“I thought that meant coffee and emotional support.”

“It means work.”

She set her bag on the empty chair and stared at the stacks again. “This feels threatening.”

“You’re intimidated by books?”

“I’m intimidated by anyone who brings notebooks in four colors.”