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The thing was that Tatum didn’t want to be charmed by a pretty charming guy—handsome or otherwise. The most obvious reason? She didn’t have the time for it. But there was more to it than that. She hated to get into it and rarely did, but she just didn’t have the heart for it anymore, either. People you loved let you down. No getting around that, so in Tatum’s opinion, no point in getting involved and risking the heartache.
Still, she wondered if Adele had done that, called out to him knowing Tatum would hear her, on purpose. Charlie Murphy had been making eyes at her since the first day she’d happened in here looking for coffee. He was obvious about it, too, like maybe he wasn’t used to not getting what he wanted.
He glanced at her now, but Tatum jerked her gaze away from his. Wasn’t her business if he had herpes or he was having trouble gettin’ it up.
“No, Mom, I haven’t talked to my doctor about my insomnia,” he answered his mom, but Tatum still felt his eyes on her.
Insomnia.
Well, if he was telling the truth, they had something in common after all. Most likely, he had pulled that out of his ass to save face.
Adele laughed softly, but even from where she sat, Tatum could read the concern on the woman’s face. Maybe he was having trouble sleeping. After all, if he had a problem that involved his plumbing, she highly doubted he would be talking to his mom about it.
“Insomnia,” he repeated, drawing Tatum’s focus from her laptop and back to him.
“Might be all the caffeine you inhale here,” she suggested, her tone frosty to her own ears.
“I mean, sometimes I don’t sleep,” he continued as if she hadn’t offered a possible reason for the insomnia. As if he were embarrassed that she might be thinking something else. “No reason to run to my doctor about that, right?”
Tatum flicked her eyes to the counter, hoping, expecting Adele to say something, to rescue her. But the woman had vanished, leaving her alone with Charlie.
“Working?” he asked her with a nod at her laptop.
She wasn’t. She had been for a while, but she’d stopped to look at an email that dropped and gotten distracted.
“No.”
“Hey!” He held his coffee cup up in a toast. “Finally taking a few minutes to yourself, huh? Good for you.”
She wasn’t. Tatum didn’t know what time to herself even meant. She wasn’t sure she ever had.
“Need a refill?” He nodded at her cup. His offer, his smile, seemed sincere. So sincere, she almost gave in. But she caught herself just in time and answered with a small shake of her head. Still, Charlie approached her table, pulled out the chair across from her, and sat as if she had invited him to do so.
“What’re you doing?”
“What state was the asylum in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in?”
“What?” Tatum scooted her chair back a smidge, even though Charlie wasn’t anywhere near being too close. He was far enough from the table that he couldn’t comfortably rest his elbows on it. Still, sharing a table with him was closer than she’d ever been to him, and up close like this, it was hard to deny how hot he was. His intense blue eyes were fringed with thick, dark lashes and dark brows, too. His smile wasn’t perfect; Tatum had looked too closely and noticed a tiny chip in his front tooth. Unfortunately, that little chip and the dimple in his chin only made him more real.
“Have you seen it?”
“Of course I’ve seen it,” she snapped. She’d watched the movie with her dad. Years and years ago, and she didn’t want to think about the movie or her dad or the years that had come between them.
“Do you know?” he prompted her, his head tipped just slightly, his lips curved upward in a smile.
“No.” She shook her head and smoothed her fingertips over her forehead.
“Oregon.”
Clueless as to why this was important, Tatum answered with a slow nod. “Great.”
“I got it wrong,” he continued. “I was playing this trivia game on my phone. Had a perfect streak going. Thirty-seven questions right, and then I got that wrong.”
Tatum stared at him silently, wondering what he had answered.
“After that crushing loss, I played Toon Blast for a while.”
“You’re supposed to taper screen time off in the evening. The blue light messes with your melatonin.”
