Page 56 of The Keeper
I bark out a laugh, spitting water out of my mouth in the process.
“NO!”I shout with more forcefulness than is probably necessary, thankful that there isn’t anyone sitting in front of me. “No, we haven’t been…boinking.” I chuckle under my breath. “We just decided last night to try and navigate everything.”
“But there’s been kissing right?” Her face is far too hopeful for me to withhold the information about my handful of kisses with Mack.
When I blush and nod, she squeals and starts bouncing in her chair, again.
“You have to tell me. Everything. I want all the details. I want to know what he smells like and where his hands were and how many times you thought about doing it and…”
“I’m not telling you all of that!”
“Oh come on, RJ! My sex life is like a desert right now. A barren wasteland. I don’t even see any mirages on the horizon. You have to give me this sip of water to tide me over until I find the well of sexual healing.”
I laugh again, tucking myself further into my seat and training my eyes on the field. The game hasn’t even started yet, the players still passing the ball around a bit before the whistle blows.
“Well,” I clear my throat. “You remember how you went to O’Reilly’s last weekend and I was going to come with and never showed?” She nods. “It’s because Mack came by.” Her mouth drops open. “And we had our first kiss. And it was… I can’t even explain to you how absolutely divine it was. It was out-of-this-world, heaven, pure bliss.”
Her smile is so big it practically dominates her whole face.
“Why didn’t you tell me before? This totally makes more sense now!” I narrow my eyes in confusion. Her smile drops just a bit when she clarifies. “When you found out he was your coach, you were so broken-hearted and upset. I was still assuming you hadn’t gotten any lip-love. But if you had the all-consuming kissfirst, andthenfound out he was your coach, I can see how that would shake you up.”
I nod.
“Well, that isn’t even the whole story.” As the game begins, I tell Charlie everything she’s missed over the past five days. She’s been so busy, we’ve been like ships passing in the night.
But she reacts exactly like I think she will with every up and down. She fumes when I tell her about spotting Mack with Ronnie in Hollywood, and she aww’s when she hears about him showing up at my house. She gives me her dirty-girl smile when I tell her that we basically dry humped on the floor. She’s right there with me as I talk about practice and his moody behavior, my dad at the game, my argument with Jeremy. And I round it out with our conversation and kiss at the high school last night.
“Damn, girl. Your life is like a telenovela. I’m sorry I’ve been so busy for the past week and haven’t been there for you.”
Her words are said calmly, but I know she’s feeling regretful. Charlie prides herself on being an ‘invested friend’ - those are the words she uses to describe it. She doesn’t just want to be on the sidelines of your life. She wants to be in the game.
Some of that stems from her inherent need to know everything. She’s not a gossip by any means, but this girl does love her some drama. But mostly, it comes from the fact that her heart is huge and her compassion is endless.
Charlie’s in her last year of the nursing program at Glendale. Her hours are weird, her schedule throwing her all over the place. I’m not joking when I say we’ve been ships passing in the night. Sometimes she’s heading to sleep just as I’m waking up.
I wrap my arm around her shoulders and squeeze her tight to me.
“You know what you just said is dumb, so I’m not even going to dignify it with a response.” I plant a loud wet kiss on her forehead, then release her. “Besides, I was able to figure it all out on my own.”
Her head tilts a bit to the side as she looks at me.
“Did you, though?”
“What do you mean?”
“I just mean, like, you said you guys are going to ‘figure it out’.” she replies, using air quotes. “What does that even mean?”
I shrug.
“I’m trying not to think too hard about it. There are obviously things in the way, and we will just have to take it a day at a time. Neither or us wants to risk a disaster if people find out, but we don’t want to not see where this is going, either.”
She nods, her eyes trained on the field, lost in thought. After a moment she continues. “I know I was the one to suggest the sweaty locker room sex.”
“Thanks for that, by the way. He knows about that conversation and I was thoroughly red-faced and embarrassed.”
She laughs.
“Well, it sounds hot. And now that he knows about that idea, maybe it will actually happen.” She wiggles her eyebrows up and down. “But I just want to say this one thing, and then I will be nothing but supportive, okay?”
