Frenched Series Bundle (74 page)

We agreed to meet for coffee at Starbucks on the second. Neutral space. I thought it best to avoid my house, where I might be tempted to A) drink or B) get naked.

When I pulled into the parking lot, the sight of Charlie’s car set a mass of butterflies loose in my belly. But it was nothing compared to what the sight of him standing near the door waiting for me did to my heart. It stopped, cranked out a few erratic beats, then settled into a patter like hummingbird wings. I parked my car and walked toward him on unsteady legs.

“Hi.” He moved toward me as if he were about to kiss my cheek but aborted the mission.

Oh, God. We were back to awkward.

“Hi.”

He opened the door for me, and we waited in line silently before ordering drinks and choosing a table in the back. At two in the afternoon, the place wasn’t that crowded—just a few people with laptops and a few pairs of friends.

“How have you been?” he asked quietly. No sign of the teasing, cocky Charlie I met last fall, nor was he the cold, defensive Charlie he’d been the night we fought. Today he just looked sad.

Miserable without you.
“OK.”

“How was your Christmas and New Year’s?”

Horseshit.
I shrugged. “Decent. Yours?”

“Decent.” He took a sip from his cup before setting it down and putting both hands on the table. “There’s a lot I want to say.”

“There’s a lot I want to hear.”

“But first I need to apologize for my behavior the last time we met. I shouldn’t have reacted that way. I get…frustrated with myself and my bad decisions, and I take it out on others sometimes. It’s something I need to work on. Forgive me.”

Moved by his simple request, some of my self-righteousness dissipated. “I didn’t behave very well either. I was hurt and angry and felt betrayed—but I should have given you a chance to explain without all the yelling and accusations. I owe you an apology too.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

I put a hand over his. “Then just let me offer it, OK? I’m sorry. And I’m ready to listen.” I sat back, hoping that was true. “So. You have a daughter.”

“Yes. Her name is Madison. She’s seven.”

“Do you have a picture of her?”

He pulled out his phone and flipped through his photos until he found what he was looking for. For some reason, I was so nervous I could barely breathe. “Here she is.” He turned the screen toward me, and I took in the image of an angel-faced little girl with chin-length honey-blonde hair and Charlie’s blue eyes. She was grinning up at the camera with a missing-tooth smile and proudly displaying her right arm, which was covered with temporary tattoos.

“She’s beautiful.”

“Thanks.”

I leaned closer. “Are those…frogs?”

“Yeah. She’s crazy about frogs, for some reason.” He looked at the photo again, unable to keep a smile from his face. It was a different kind of smile than I’d ever seen on him—affectionate and prideful. He even sounded different when he talked about her.

I leaned back again. “My mother heard about her from someone at church who keeps in touch with your mom.”

Charlie closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I figured that would happen eventually. I was going to tell you, Erin. I wanted to tell you. So many times. In fact, I was going to tell you the weekend we fought about it.”

I stiffened.
Of course he was.
“That’s two months too late, Charlie. You should have told me right from the start.”

“I know that now. But there’s a reason I didn’t say anything right away, and then the more time that passed, the more difficult it got. But I don’t want you to think it’s something I take lightly, or that the reason I didn’t tell you has anything to do with you personally.”

I shook my head. “I’m confused, Charlie. How could it not have anything to do with me? From my perspective, you didn’t care enough about me or about us to disclose who you really are. Being a father is a serious thing.”

“It is, and I came to that realization way too late. I’ll tell you everything if you’ll hear me out.”

I took a breath.
Steady. Steady.
“OK.”

“I once told you I have a bad track record with nice girls. Junior year at Purdue, I took advantage of one.”

“How so?”

“Laura was the ex-girlfriend of a guy in my fraternity I didn’t get along with. He was always complaining that she didn’t put out, and I bet him I could succeed where he had failed.”

My stomach turned. “Ew. So you slept with her?”

He grimaced. “Eventually. First, I got her to fall for me. Trust me.”

“Why?” I shook my head, disgusted. “Just so you could win a bet?”

His tone grew slightly defensive.“At the beginning it was that, yes. But she was pretty and fun and smart, and I liked her a lot. We ended up dating for a while, but I was never a good boyfriend.” He paused, his shoulders slouching. “Then she got pregnant.”

“I see.”

“When she told me, I freaked out. Accused her of doing it on purpose to trap me.”

“God,” I said, folding my arms over my churning insides. My good will was diminishing quicker than I’d hoped. “That’s revolting.”

“I know.”

“Go on. What happened after she got pregnant?”

Charlie stared at the table top as he continued. “Laura didn’t believe in abortion, which was what I wanted her to do. I offered to pay for it.”

“How nice of you.”

He winced at my sarcasm but went on. “She told her family, and her father came down to school and demanded that I take responsibility for my actions like a man. My father said the same thing. Then my grandfather called—same thing.”

“Oh good, you actually have a grandfather. I wondered.”

He raised his eyes from the table. “Of course I have a grandfather. And he is important to me—I didn’t lie about that.”

Great, that’s one thing, at least. But it’s not enough.
“So you married this girl.”

“Yes. I married her, dropped out of school and took a job to support her and Madison, but I was a terrible husband and father. I was twenty-one and angry and resentful that this thing had ruined my life. All my plans.”

“That’s pretty callous, Charlie.”

He looked pained. “I know. But at the time, I was too young and stupid to realize what I was throwing away. I wasn’t there for Laura at all when Madison was born, or when she was a baby. I missed almost everything.”

“So Laura left you?”

He nodded. “Yes, when Madison was three. And much to the dismay of my family, I acted like I didn’t care. I partied and carried on with women and tried to go back to school and finish up. But I was miserable. Because I knew what Laura’s dad and my dad and my grandfather said was true—I wasn’t being a man. I was being a child, a selfish brat. I hadn’t owned up to my actions. I hadn’t taken responsibility.”

This selfish brat Charlie sounded a lot like the one I remembered from childhood. Had he really changed? Or was that person still hiding somewhere inside him? “So then what happened?”

“A series of things that made me re-evaluate my life.”

“Such as?”

Charlie took a breath. “When Madison was five, Laura remarried and moved up here to Ann Arbor. I didn’t argue it at the time, and I came up to see Madison only sparingly.” He shook his head. “I don’t even know why Laura allowed it. And the worst thing was, Madison would be so happy to see me, this stranger who bought her things and let her eat candy and doted on her only when it was convenient. I could tell it drove Laura and Blake—that’s her new husband—crazy.”

“And then?”

“Laura and Madison were in a car accident last winter, about a year ago. Some asshole drunk ran a red light at three in the afternoon, crashed into the passenger side of their car, where Madison’s little seat was. Laura was fine but Maddie had broken bones and swelling in her brain. I raced up here and sat by her side for two days, begging God to give me another chance.”

I stared, wide-eyed, jolted by the unexpected turn of his story. “Was she OK?”

He nodded. “But when she woke up, she didn’t recognize me. It was like a bullet to the chest. Then Laura told me Blake wanted to adopt Madison. She wasn’t mean about it. She just said that I hadn’t been a good father and Madison needed stability, especially as she recovered. The best thing I could do for her would be to give her up. Stop confusing her.” Charlie looked at me, and honest to God, his eyes were wet. “She’d started calling Blake Daddy.”

I didn’t have it in me to say
good, you deserved it
. But I sort of felt it.

“It hit me hard. Here I had brought this child into the world, and I hadn’t been grateful enough. Hadn’t been good enough. Hadn’t been man enough.”

Damn right.
“She recovered?”

He nodded. “She did, thank God. And I kept my promise. I moved up here and begged Laura to give me another chance to be Madison’s dad.”

“What did she say?”

“She said no, at first. She said I had given up my rights and I should just sign the papers and let Blake adopt her. They were having another baby, and I could see it would be the perfect little family. Blake loves her like his own, I know he does, but she isn’t his own. She’s
my
own.”

“Fine. So you moved here to be a dad. That still doesn’t explain why you felt like you had to hide it from me.”

“I didn’t do it to hurt you, Erin. I did it because one of Laura’s stipulations for time with Madison is that there can’t be any women around. That’s why I don’t date.”

I bristled a little. “That doesn’t seem fair, not that you deserve any breaks from her.”

“That’s what she wanted. And I had no room to argue.” He looked uncomfortable. “After Laura and I were separated but before we divorced, there were times that Madison saw other women at my house.”

Nauseated, I put a hand over my mouth.

“It confused her, and she asked her mom about them. Of course, Laura was livid. Rightfully so.”

I didn’t even know what to say.

Charlie rolled his shoulders as if to relieve tension or shrug off the shame of the memory. “So in order to prove I was serious about being a father, I had to promise that there wouldn’t be any women coming and going around Madison. And there haven’t been.”

“Not that you’ve been celibate,” I said archly.

“I’d be lying if I said that. I don’t want to lie anymore.”

Ugh. At least he looked me in the eye.

“But there hasn’t been some sort of parade of women in and out of my bed, either, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he went on. “I have Madison every other weekend now, and I’ve been really focused on her, adjusting everything in my life to be a better father—and enjoying it too. In fact, until you, it had been months. And if you’re wondering, no—there hasn’t been anyone since I met you.”

“Not even Krista with a K?” I couldn’t resist asking.

That brought a cautious smile. “Especially not Krista with a K.” He lowered his voice. “After that rainy night in your kitchen, I told myself to leave you alone—I knew I couldn’t offer you what you wanted, what you deserved.”

“But you
didn’t
leave me alone,” I said pointedly.

He shook his head. “I couldn’t. I wanted to see you again so badly, and I figured if I took a date to your class, I’d be safe.”

I blinked—
that
was his plan? Boy, had he botched it. “You might have been safe. Except that you came back later.”

He closed his eyes and exhaled, and I wondered if the sight of me crawling toward him on the studio floor was going through his mind like it was mine. “I did.” He met my eyes. “And I don’t regret it.”

I crossed my legs.

Lowering his voice to a whisper, he leaned forward. “I thought maybe we could just do it once, get it out of our systems. I didn’t know how good it was going to be.”

My arms and legs prickled with goose bumps. It had been good. More than good.

“Afterward, when I went outside to throw the trash away, I was so mad at myself. Because I could feel something happening with us, and I didn’t want it to. I couldn’t let it.”

I nodded. “I remember. It felt like forever before you came back inside.”

“I was out there beating myself up. Because I
hadn’t
gotten you out of my system—in fact, it was the opposite—you were completely under my skin. But I had to go back in and act like it was no big deal. Give you the lines I’d rehearsed.” He shook his head. “Believe me, I didn’t feel that way.”