Dissonance (16 page)

“I’m headed uptown anyway. It’s nothing.”

“Fine.”

He sighed, but didn’t say anything else about it. “I’ll just grab some shoes and we can go.”

I decided to stretch a bit while I waited for him, knowing that once I pulled up at the park, the desire to immediately take off would be too great.

After stretching out my arms, calves, hamstrings, and quads, I dropped into a toe-touch. Relishing the pull in my muscles, I leaned down further, lowering my forearms onto the ground. As I released a breath to relax the muscles in their taught position, I head Logan’s footsteps behind me. It hadn’t occurred to me that I had bent with my back to the hallway he would be coming back through, but I relished the opportunity that presented itself for me to appear unaffected. The steps came to an abrupt stop at the mouth of the hall. Righting myself slowly – in order to effectively stretch my whole back as much as torture Logan – I turned to see him standing there, hunger evident in his eyes.

Keeping my face emotionless, I said, “Let’s go.”

The drive wasn’t long, but could hardly have been more awkward. Neither of us mentioned the events of the previous night. I was sure from the moment that he said he was heading uptown that he was going to see Eli. At least I could be sure that he would not dare breathe a word of what had happened between us to my brother, both of us knowing that Eli would kill him.

Logan broke my reverie. “We need to talk.”

“I’d really rather not.” What could we talk about? How I had been stupid enough to fall into bed with him, to nearly have sex with him like innumerable other mindless conquests before me? How it was not going to happen again? Damn right it would not happen again! There was a vague twinge of disappointment at the idea of never feeling the intoxication of his hands and lips on me again, but I pushed it down. As gorgeous as he was, I had enough going on without adding emotionally devoid sex with my roommate and brother’s best friend to the platter.

It hit me then why I was feeling so devastated. Meaningless. If I had had sex with him, it would have meant nothing to him. I’d be just another notch in his mental bedpost. But, to me, it would have left me emotionally raw. Even having stopped short of sex had left me feeling disgustingly exposed.
Maybe Eli is right
, I thought,
maybe I am a naïve fool that needs looking after.

We pulled up to the park just in time, as I could feel myself starting to quake from the barrage of suppressed emotion. I would not let him see what he had done to me. If it could be meaningless to him, it would be meaningless to me, too. Or I could pretend that it was.

“Seriously, Logan, drop it.” I unbuckled myself and got out. “Say hi to Eli for me.” The car door closed with more vigor than I had planned, which was satisfying.

Turning on my iPod, I headed towards the line of trees, music pounding in my ears. I couldn’t make what had happened disappear, but I could run my emotions out with the sweat.

I was still reeling from a tumultuous 24 hours with Charlotte when I pulled up in front of Eli’s apartment. I had hoped that my meeting with him would remain our little secret, but it was my own fault for admitting that I was heading up that way. Why else would I have been? But she’d been so infuriating, implying that she’d take transit all the way to Discovery Park – and in those skin-tight pants no less!
Jesus
. I had scarcely wanted to leave her at the park alone.

The look she gave me as she slammed the car door haunted me. She thought I was a complete scumbag. Hell, I
was
a complete scumbag, but not for the reason that she thought. I should never have touched her – least of all without telling her how I felt first. I’d thought I had really managed to stay away until she appeared at the end of the piano. How was I supposed to deal with that? Even Odysseus had to be tied to his mast to avoid the draw of the siren’s song. I’m a hell of a lot weaker than him.

Charlotte… just her heavenly name affected me, let alone that voice.

It was my fault she believed that last night was just physical. That if we had had sex, it would have meant nothing to me. I had no idea how to show her that it wasn’t true. There had to be a way to make her see how much she already meant to me. I had never in my life been this drawn to anything but music. It wasn’t just my dick, either. I was consumed by a desperate desire to just hold her, to feel the warmth of her body radiate against me, to chase away the demons that haunted her mind, but she was so guarded. I would have to fight an uphill battle to get her to let me in.

That’s why I had gone to Eli’s. I needed to get into her head, and I hoped that he could give me a better indication of what I was dealing with.

Sprawled out on his couch, Eli took a drag off a cigarette. Smoking had been an on-again, off-again habit of his for a long time. It was one of mine too if I was being honest, though it had been off for a while. Charlotte’s criticism of smoking came back to me then. She’d mentioned it briefly her first night in my apartment, when I asked if she was a smoker. She’d also been none too shy about chastising her brother’s smoking habits.

“What?” he asked.

“Charlotte hates that shit,” I said.

“Yeah, I know. She always has.”

Nervous as I was to plunge in, I knew there was no time like the present. It was like ripping off a band-aid. “What’s her story?” I feigned nonchalance.

“What do you mean?”

“You suddenly
had
to move her out here, and now she barely sleeps, I haven’t seen her eat a real meal since Sunday, she spaces out like no one I’ve ever met, and she nearly freaked out on me when I threatened to call you after picking her up at a bar last night.”

“Bar?”

“That’s where she was when I sent that text to you.”

“She was alone?” I nodded. “How much did she drink?”

“Based on the smell of tequila on her…”

“Tequila?” He put his hand over his eyes, muttering a curse under his breath.

“She seems fine today,” I explained, ignoring her less-than-stellar mood and focusing on her apparent physical health instead. “I just dropped her off at Discovery Park. She said she needed to go for a run.”

Eli whipped out his phone and picked out a number. A minute later, he was talking. “Don’t give me that tone, Lottie … No, I’m not calling to lecture you … Yes, he did tell me … Look, just don’t over-do it, alright? … And if you showed more regard for your own well being, I wouldn’t have to, damn it!” He sighed. “Okay, I’ll pick you up when you’re done … Bye.”

“Is she always so stubborn?” I asked.

He looked grim. “You have no idea.”

Eli leaned forward and put his head in his hands. “Look, I’ll explain to the best of my ability, but you have to understand that Charlotte is a very internal person. To this day, I rarely know what she’s thinking. And then there’s Alex running around covering more shit up. I really can’t fill in all the gaps.”

“You know that Alex covers things up for her?” I asked, surprised.

“Oh yeah. She’s been doing that since they’ve been friends. I think it was just hiding the fact that they were going out and drinking at first, but it’s become more than that. Even how they met. I know what they told me isn’t true. I just never push it because she must be telling Alex something, at least. I’d rather have that than her holding everything in.”

I didn’t tell him that Alex still doesn’t know much from what I’ve gathered, or that I knew how the two met.

Eli was quiet for a long time, seeming to search for a starting place.

“When our dad finally walked out, Char was eleven. I was admittedly a fucking mess. I spent most of high school drunk, high and sleeping with any girl that would have me. But Char, you’d hardly know anything had happened to her. While I was barely scrapping out a diploma, she was bringing home straight A’s. She was way more mature than her peers, so she never had a lot of friends her age. Most of the people she hung out with tended to be my friends. She spent most of her free time alone, though – usually reading and working on her music. She trained so hard, spent hours perfecting her voice. She’s an incredible singer, always has been.”

“Yeah, I know.” He looked bewildered. “It was karaoke night last night. I showed up just before she went on.” There was no keeping the awe out of my voice.

“What song?”

I recounted her angelic rendition of Dylan, glossing over the wayward thoughts I’d had during it. And after.

Eli grinned. “Yeah, she’s got a penchant for those really emotional songs, and knows how to make them even more intense.” If that wasn’t an understatement, I don’t know what is.

He took a deep breath before continuing. “Our mom always worried that she was just holding in all of her emotions, not actually coping. But Charlotte insisted that she was alright, so we left well enough alone. It wasn’t until we lost Mom that I realized how closed off my sister was.”

I knew the story about them losing their mom. The doctors found a tumor in her frontal lobe when Eli was nineteen. Charlotte would have been in high school. The doctors gave her six months to live. She only made it four. So before he could even buy alcohol legally, Eli took over responsibility for his sister.

“Char cried at least, when we lost mom – which was more than she’d done when our scumbag father ran out – but, by the time we had the funeral she was ‘fine.’” Eli used his fingers to put quotes around the word “fine,” which he uttered with obvious disgust. “God, I hate that damn word. It’s always her answer. ‘I’m fine.’ The day she gives me a real fucking response, I’ll probably faint.

“She continued on the same way in high school. Perfect student, never in trouble, always the over-achiever. I used to get so pissed at her. I couldn’t handle the fact that she seemed so indifferent to the whole damn situation. We fought about it a lot. Or, better yet, I’d yell and rant at her about it, and she would just sit stoically through my tirades. I realize now that I was probably making the whole thing worse, but I just couldn’t deal with it.

“Then, one night during her junior year I came home from a late shift at work and she was on the floor of her room…” Eli trailed off and swallowed before shakily continuing. “She was in the fetal position, crying. There was broken glass everywhere and blood pooling from her arm.” Eli was ghostly pale, and I could only imagine how I looked.

“I tried to find out what was wrong but she wouldn’t say a thing. It wasn’t until we got it closed up at the hospital that she even responded to me again.”

For a long time, we both just sat there. Eli was hunched over, his head hanging dejectedly in his hands. “To this day, I don’t know what broke her that night. I think I may have had something to do with the guy she was seeing, Derek,” his voice had turned threateningly dark. “After that, I never saw the little prick again.”

Rubbing roughly at his face, he persisted on. “For a while, she was more withdrawn than I’d ever experienced. I didn’t know what to do. Then she met Alex, and I think she started a sort of party stage for Lottie. The two became inseparable, and they had a tendency to disappear until all hours of the morning, claiming to be at Alex’s house. Now I know that they were never at Alex’s house, since Alex did everything she could to avoid her family. Maybe I should have intervened, but she seemed to be staying safe enough, so I let it continue. It all pretty much stopped when Alex and I got together. Then, things seemed okay. Char had started her undergrad. The college lifestyle seemed to fit her better. Charlotte was in a good place, so Alex and I finally started making concrete plans to move out here like we’d always wanted to.

“I was hesitant to go through with it, but Char insisted that we should. I didn’t want to hold Alex back from her dream city, so I gave in. The fear that Charlotte would struggle without us around nagged at me, but things didn’t immediately fall apart, so I thought we were in the clear.

“After college, she enrolled in her Master’s right away. She flourished under the pressure of grad school. She got her degree in two years with a perfect 4.0 GPA while working as a teaching assistant. I think she did so well because it gave her something to focus all of her attention on.” Eli couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. “When it ended, the lack of distraction caused things to fall apart quickly.”

I remembered his overwhelming excitement in May about going back to Chicago for her graduation. He wouldn’t shut up about it, before or after. Then, one day in the beginning of June, he called and begged me to get him some time off. He told me he had to go back to Chicago; that something had come up with Charlotte.