Page 120 of The Rom-Commers

“What’s going on, Charlie?” I asked then, from across the room. “Is it— Are you sick? Is that what it is?”

This question really pissed him off. “Itoldyou,” Charlie growled. “It’sjust allergies.”

“No,” I said. “I meansicksick.”

Sometimes you intuit a thing on impulse and you turn out to be right.

This was not one of those times.

Charlie gave me an Olympic-level eye roll that involved not just his face, but his neck and shoulders, too. Then he said, “Not everybody is dying all the time, Emma.”

There was a bitterness to his voice I hadn’t heard before. “I know. I just—”

“Let’s not add your paranoid hypochondria to this situation, okay? It’s bad enough without you backing up a whole dump truck of crazy.”

I blinked.

This wasn’t about me, of course. I’d just walked into Charlie’s own personal mysterious bad moment and suffered some collateral damage. But the meanness still stung. I withdrew a bit, and then I said, “I just want to know if you’re okay.”

“Guess what? You don’t have to know everything. Yes, you’re living in my house, and yes, we’re spending a lot of time together, and yes, we get along almost stupidly well—but that doesn’t give you the right to pry into every nook and cranny of my existence. Sometimes I’m going to have shit to deal with that’s none of your damn business.”

“Fine,” I said.

“Great,” Charlie said.

“Don’t tell me, then,” I said.

“I’m not going to.”

“I just wanted to help.”

“There it is, right there,” Charlie said. “I don’t need your help, and I sure as hell don’t want it. So why don’t you just back off?”

HE MARCHED OUTafter that, and I didn’t see him again until after midnight.

I spent the day “working,” but was totally unable to concentrate, walking to the front door every time I heard a car go by. He’d left without his car, and he’d also left his cell phone in the backyard, and I just couldn’t imagine how a phoneless, carless person could be gone so long in LA.

If it wasn’t that he was sick again—what was it?

I called Logan, but he didn’t know. I called Sylvie to process, but we were just like loony birds trading nutty theories. Could he have a secret love child? Could he have been falsely accused of murder? Could his financial advisors have stolen all his money?

“My bet’s on the ex-wife getting remarried,” Sylvie said.

But I wrinkled my nose. “He doesn’t even like her. I’m telling you this was something big. Somethingcatastrophic.” But what?

I WAS ASLEEPon the sofa when Charlie finally got home—and rang the bell twenty times.

I heard the sound in my dream for a minute before realizing it was real. Then I shuffled to the door and opened it.

I think he kept ringing the bell even after I’d answered, but all I remember was the sight of his face—covered in blood. One swollen purple eye, a split lip, and a veritable goatee of blood that had gushed from a recently punched nose.

“Charlie!” I gasped at the sight. “What the hell happened?”

But Charlie just squinted at me. “What happened to what?”

“To your face! You look like somebody beat you with a two-by-four.”

Charlie touched it, like he needed to jog his memory. “Oh,” he said. “Bar fight.”

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