Page 47 of The One I Hate
“I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, junior year we didn’t hang out a ton. And if you never went to the coffee shop, that could be why.”
“I guess,” he says. “And I don’t blame you for hanging out with her. She’s cool as hell. Cute too. And her sense of humor? Holy shit, I was cracking up.”
I try to hold it down, but I can feel jealousy creeping over my body as Emmett sings Charlie’s many virtues.
“Oh…I see,” Emmett drawls, abandoning his burger to send me a knowing look. “It finally became more than friends, didn’t it?”
My face doesn’t budge. If anything, I only get more angry.
“Goddamn it, Simon! When did you sleep with her?”
I drop my tasty burger. “About a month ago.”
“A month ago?” he squawks.
“That’s not the important part of this story,” I say.
“I think it is.”
I shake my head. “I’ll go back to it. But I need to finish the first part.”
Emmett sits up a little straighter. “Consider me intrigued.”
“Anyway. We hung out for months. For most of it, we were just friends, which I was okay with. I really was. Like you said, she’s cool as hell. And funny. And, I don’t know, I liked being with her.”
I swallow the frog in my throat as I transport myself back to that moment fifteen years ago. “It was the last night before move-out day. We were having a party at the house.”
“I remember that party,” he says. “Hell of a send-off. Cops showed up, didn’t they?”
“Yup,” I say. “I asked Charlie to come to our parties all semester, and she finally came. I was so excited. We laughed. We drank. It was probably the best night of my whole college experience. And then we kissed.”
I can still see everything so clearly. Us sneaking up to my roof to get away from the noise. Talking like I only could with her. Then the kiss. The one that is forever seared into my memory.
“What happened next?” Emmett asks.
“I was going back to Rolling Hills for the summer. But I wanted to see her before I left,” I say. “Except when I tried to call her the next day, she never answered. I texted. I called. I even drove back to Knoxville to the coffee shop to see if she was working. They said she’d quit. It’s like she had just vanished.”
“Like vanished as in gone?”
“Poof. Like a ghost.”
“Wow,” he says. “She never told you what happened?”
“Nope. I never saw her again. Until I went to a wedding last spring. And then a month ago.”
I fill Emmett in on the gaps between April and now. And the bare minimum details of our night together. Motherfucker doesn’t need to know that Charlie’s naked body still keeps me up at night and has been the vision of multiple individual sessions.
“Okay, let me see if I can get this all straight,” Emmett says. “A girl you had a thing for fifteen years ago, who ghosted you after one kiss?—"
“Oneepickiss.”
“Apologies. A girl who ghosted you after oneepickiss?—”
“Thank you.”
“Quit interrupting. She’s back in your life. And you’ve had sex with her. Yet, after all of that, you still don’t know the answer to the biggest unknown of your life: why she left. So instead of trying to have a nice and normal conversation with her, you go and pull strings like a puppet master to make sure she gets a restaurant in your town so you can have her close, therefore allowing to you to get the answer to a question that’s been digging in your craw for more than a decade.”
“Yes.” I say with a firm nod. “But in my defense, she won’t talk to me. The first time she ran away. The second I made her cry. The next time we had sex.”
