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He opened his eyes and grinned at me, but I just nodded and looked away, hoping he didn’t think it was weird how I’d been staring at him.
“Why are you so quiet?” He lifted his leg and tapped my calf with his foot. Shit, I was really close to him.
“I’m always quiet,” I replied, earning a chuckle.
“Hmm…that’s true. You’re like this, I guess.”
“Like what?”
“Everything around us…there’s a lot to see and a lot going on…animals and bugs and the wind shifting the leaves…but it’s peaceful. That’s like you, I think. There’s a lot going on inside, but to the rest of us, you’re calming.”
I stared at him, words eluding me even more than usual. No one had ever said anything like that to me. No one had seen anything like that in me, compared me to this place I loved so much. It made the hairs on my arms stand on end, but not in a bad way. I just couldn’t make sense of how someone could see that in me…or care enough to look.
“I should, um, check the food,” I replied because how in the fuck did I address what he’d said? I didn’t have the words for it.
“It’s been on like five seconds. You just don’t want to respond to me.”
“Thanks for pointin’ that out.”
Charles laughed, and surprisingly, I did too. With a sigh, I fell into the chair beside him. “Don’t know how to be anything other than what I am.”
“I’m not asking you to. I like you how you are.” He gave me a grin and a wink. “I just have a big mouth.”
I wanted to say something to show him how much I appreciated this evening, but all I could come up with was, “Strangely, I like you too,” and hoped that didn’t sound bad. The loud laugh that jumped out of Charles’s mouth almost startled me out of my chair.
“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
“I can actually see where I went wrong on makin’ it sound like one. That’s not what I meant.”
Charles lifted his bottle of beer to his lips and took a drink. I didn’t know why I kept staring at him when he did it, but like a few minutes before, I couldn’t seem to stop…and I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“How’d you get into playing guitar?”
“Been doin’ it as long as I can remember. Got my first one at eight. It’s the first thing I ever remember really wantin’. My parents made it happen for Christmas. I was already in love before I played, but fell even deeper after I started. You? With the piano, I mean?”
“My parents wanted us to be well-rounded. They wanted us to play an instrument, learn a language and things like that, but they did give us a choice—I picked piano. Paul played the saxophone.”
“Our parents weren’t like that. They didn’t think about stuff like being well-rounded, but they tried real hard to do their best by us. They both passed—guess you know that, though, since I raised Sutton after…” I pushed to my feet and went to check the food. It always hurt to talk about them. “Did you try to put people in prison or try and keep ’em out?” I asked.
“Tried to keep them out. Paul went into finance. It was stressful as hell on him.” I was quiet, wondering if it was rude to ask how he’d passed. I didn’t have the chance before Charles continued. “He had to be the best at everything. He put a lot of pressure on himself. We always knew it, but we didn’t realize how bad it was. We told ourselves he was an overachiever and laughed it off. I’ll always regret that, not knowing what it was doing to him.”
Charles had finished his beer, so I grabbed another out of the cooler, opened it, and handed it to him.
“Thanks. Anyway, he was severely depressed. None of us knew. We were a close family, saw each other all the time, and yet my brother was losing his battle with mental illness and we didn’t know it.” Charles turned and looked at me, eyes watery with emotion he didn’t seem embarrassed to share. “He didn’t show up to a lunch date with me. I thought it was Paul being Paul, getting busy with work and forgetting. I went back to the office, told Mom to give him hell for me because I knew they were having dinner that night. She went to check on him instead and found him… He’d taken pills. When we cleaned out his apartment afterward, we found his journals. He was struggling so much, and I just didn’t see. I don’t know that I can ever forgive myself for missing it, ya know? Or for not going to check on him. My mom…she shouldn’t have had to see that.”
