Best Kept Secret: A Novel

“SO IT DOESN’T MATTER that now I’ve seen you naked?” Charlie says, keeping her voice low, turning her head toward me, teasing.

“You didn’t just see me naked,” I say, still talking half into her hair. “You’ve experienced me naked.”

“The Naked Daniel Experience sounds like a band,” she says. “They’d play psychedelic rock and they wouldn’t be very good.”

“Unlike the actual experience,” I say, and she laughs, tilts her head back over my shoulder so she’s facing me.

“Right,” she says, and her eyes search my face.

And then, simply: “That was good.”

Good isn’t a big word or a fancy word, but right now, Charlie’s eyes looking into mine in the dark afterglow, it feels like it encompasses the universe. I know exactly what she means, and I know what she’s trying to say, and yes, yes, yes to all of it.

“It was really good,” I agree.

Charlie curls into me even more, her face against my shoulder, her hair tickling my neck. She rubs back and forth once, twice, adjusts, rubs her face on me again.

“What are you doing?” I finally ask, and she stops.

Then she looks at me.

“My forehead itched,” she says.

She’s trying not to laugh.

“You’ve got hands,” I point out, also trying not to laugh.

“They’re far away.”

“They’re literally attached to you.”

Now she’s laughing, biting her lips, still trying to quell it.

“I didn’t think you’d notice.”

“You thought I wouldn’t notice you rubbing on me like a cat?”

“Sometimes you don’t notice things,” she laughs.

“Is this how it’s gonna be now?” I tease. “We have sex and suddenly you get super weird?”

“You think that’s super weird?” Charlie says. “I’ll show you super weird.”

“You don’t have — are you biting me?”

She’s got her teeth on my shoulder, not hard enough to hurt.

“Grrr?”

“Oh, my God,” I mutter, laughing. “I’ve unleashed a psychopath with the power of my dick.”

That gets a snort-laugh out of her, her shoulder shaking under my arm.

“Sorry,” she finally murmurs, and kisses the spot she just bit, still laughing.

“If I go get rid of this condom can you be normal for three minutes?” I tease.

“One way to find out.”

I kiss the top of her head again and then pull myself away from her and throw on pajama pants.

“SHIT.”

I come awake all at once, already up on one elbow, always primed for middle-of-the-night problems.

“What?”

“I fell asleep,” Charlie says, pushing herself to sitting, facing away from me on the edge of the bed. She’s naked, her wild hair a halo around her head, both hands already in it. “Fuck. Shit.”

I roll over enough to see my alarm clock glowing green on my bedside table: 5:45 a.m.

“I gotta go,” Charlie’s already saying, whispering at me in the quarter-light of early morning. “Shit, I didn’t mean to fall asleep, I just meant to stay a little while…”

She bends down, comes up with her bra, wraps it around herself. Somehow, she does the clasps behind her own back, without looking. I’m impressed.

I toss off the sheets, get up myself, get dressed as Charlie tosses the purple dress back over her head.

“Where’s my underwear?” she whispers.

“Floor?”

I pull on boxers, pants.

“I can’t find it.”

“It didn’t disappear into a wormhole.”

I open a drawer, grab the first t-shirt inside.

“Fuck it, I’ll grab it later,” she hisses. “I gotta go.”

I pull the shirt on, my body still half a step ahead of my brain.

“You good?” she whispers, hand on my doorknob.

“No,” I say. She frowns at me, but I cross the room, bend down, kiss her. We’re both still foggy with sleep, both rushed, slightly rattled but we kiss slowly, deeply, softly.

“We still haven’t talked,” she murmurs when it ends.

“We talked for like two hours last night,” I point out.

“I mean about us,” she says. “Not about how big a rubber duck would need to be before it doesn’t float anymore.”

“I still think any size would float.”

“But you couldn’t make it out of rubber, at some point it would collapse in on itself, and — no. We’re not having this conversation again,” she says.

I lean forward and steal another kiss. She’s soft and warm in the morning, yielding. I never knew that before. I like it.

“All right, get outta here,” I whisper. “Before Rusty wakes up.”

Charlie opens the door silently, peeks out into the hallway. All clear. We both tread downstairs lightly, she grabs her phone and purse from where she left them last night, and we step onto the front porch, the cool morning air raising goosebumps on my arms.

Then we both stop short at the same time.

“Fuck,” hisses Charlie, right as the same realization hits me.

I gave her a ride here yesterday. Her car’s still at her apartment.

“Crap,” she says.

“It’s okay,” I say, pushing a hand through my hair, trying to think. Rusty’s still asleep upstairs, so we’ve got time, but probably not all that much. “I’ll just…”

I glance back at the house, and for precisely one second I consider just giving Charlie a ride home right now, before Rusty wakes up. Chances are, she’ll never know she was home alone.

But then I imagine what would happen if she woke up and I wasn’t there, and I wipe that possibility from my mind.

“Look, we’re engaged, remember?” I say. “We’ll just wait for her to wake up and then we’ll take you home.”

She’s already shaking her head.

“Rusty thinks it’s fake,” she says.

“We’re going to tell her, aren’t we?”

“Not like this,” Charlie says, urgently. “She can’t just wake up with me here wearing the same outfit as yesterday with no underwear on—”

“You didn’t find it?”

“It’s there somewhere, I was in a hurry, but Daniel, we can’t just spring this on her.”

“She doesn’t have to know about the underwear.”

Charlie just gives me a look.

“Sorry,” I say.

“We need to at least plan how to tell Rusty,” she says. “We can’t just be like, hey, Charlie’s banging your dad now, by the way has anyone told you what sex is yet? Well, they did it while you were asleep.”

“I don’t think I’d go about it that way, but I see your point,” I say.

“I’m calling Elizabeth,” she says, already scrolling through her phone. “She’s a teacher, she’s probably awake right now. And if she’s not she has to forgive me.”

Charlie holds her phone to her ear and waits. And waits.

“I got her voicemail,” she says, and dials again.

Same result. Charlie makes a face, goes to dial her phone again, but I shake my head.

“Levi’s awake,” I say, pulling mine out.

Charlie looks doubtful for a moment, but then she nods.

He answers on the second ring. I keep it short and simply ask him if he can swing by the house and give Charlie a ride home.

“A ride home from Mom’s house?” he asks, his gruff voice full of unasked questions.

“Right,” I say.

There’s a moment of quiet, and I can practically hear him stroking his beard.

“Be there in twenty,” he says, and hangs up.

“Twenty minutes,” I tell Charlie, and she exhales. “You want coffee?”