Chapter One
Charlie --
She only wanted to catch up with some old friends. But still, he needed some convincing.
"Are
they
going to be there?" he asked.
Penny tried to look relaxed for him, but she wasn't sure that it was working. "I don't know," she said. "I haven't asked them."
Charlie put his face in his palms and sighed deeply. "Who goes to a
five year
renunion anyway? Christ."
"I just want to catch up with people. You'll be fine, you're on good terms with them anyway," she reasoned.
"I guess," he said.
Pleasant Valley High School sent the letter for the five year reunion, and Charlie did not want to go. Of course it would be nice to flaunt his small successes since graduation, but seeing all those people again gave him hives. The bullies and the stuck up dickheads were one thing. His ex-girlfriends were another.
"Charlie, I'll be there with you the whole time," she said. "I know them as well as you do, and if it gets to be too much we can leave. I promise."
"Yeah," he said. "Okay." He knew she was being perfectly reasonable, so he had no right to say no. But she just didn't understand. She was friends with all four of them, though they'd grown distant in the last five years as high school friends often do. Charlie scarcely saw anyone from their Pleasant Valley days, and he wanted to keep it that way. Penny was the only person from high school he didn't mind. In part because she simply had no idea.
"Thank you," she said, a sad look in her eyes. She grabbed his hand and rubbed it gently, then kissed him lightly on the cheek. "I have quite the boyfriend, you know."
"Yeah, well. He wouldn't be so good to you if you weren't so good to him."
Her eyes flicked from sympathetic to suggestive. "Speaking of which," she said. "I'm ordering us some pizza, and we can pick a movie."
"Which movie?"
"Doesn't matter," Penny said, smiling and inching closer to his mouth. "We won't really be watching it."
**********
Penny
--
When she met him in high school, Charlie was just beginning to turn from awkward to handsome. He'd always been charming, she heard, but his looks started to reflect his charisma quite suddenly. That was sophomore year, when he was dating Lauren.
He never talked much about Katie, his first. But Lauren she observed all throughout the year. She was beautiful, of course. But she was also good for him. Their breakup at the end of the school year shocked all their close friends.
Penny, however, saw it as an opportunity. She made every excuse to spend time with him that summer, and spent the first four weeks consoling him and trying to make good memories while she waited for the post-breakup grace period to pass. On the day she meant to ask him on a date, Alex beat her to the punch.
The
real
story was that they were lifelong friends with no sexual tension who, for no particular reason, had sex one day. Back then, Charlie described it as lightning in a bottle, something sudden and unlikely. Now he looked back with disgust, and lamented dating a girl just because of their strong sexual chemistry.
Junior year went slowly, and Alex was to blame. They were ready to break up by the first day of school, but the relationship dragged on for months as she relentlessly clung to him like wreckage in a storm, even when he slept with another girl.
Once that was finally over, he quickly settled into a slow, comfortable relationship with Lanie. She was nothing like the others. Cute, but not sexy. Smart, but not very funny. She had a warm innocence to her, and practically no dating experience before him. The relationship lasted all the way through senior year, and simply fizzled out without much fuss.
Penny had given up by then, thinking that he would never see her as anything more than a platonic friend. But luck swung her way when out of the blue, just as they started college, he asked her out on a real, romantic date. The rest was a dreamy tale of passion and perfection.
Sometimes it bothered her how good they had it.
Charlie was handsome, funny, ambitious. He'd signed up for a political science major, intending to go to law school. But when Penny asked what he
really
wanted to do, he started pursuing his passion for history the very next day.
He spent hours poring over documents and essays, but still made time to see her as often as he could. He cooked, he cleaned, he swept her off her feet and kissed her so passionately she never stopped blushing. And they never argued.
For a while, Penny started to fear that there was some horrible bombshell just waiting to drop. That he was too good to be true, and he had some kind of secret. But he put her at ease when she brought it up one night. "I just had a lot of practice with relationships," he said. "And I learned to listen, analyze, and react. That's all there is to it."
That was more than a year ago, and she rarely thought about it since. Still, every now and then, she had the faintest echo in the back of her mind, whispering,
He doesn't love you. It's all a trick to get to someone else. He's not who he says he is. Is his name even Charlie?
By now, it just made her laugh.
The truth was that Penny was hopelessly in love with this man.
**********
Charlie --
Their sex life was healthy. Not too fast, and not too slow. The kind of thing you'd see a happy couple do in a movie. Cute and playful, smooth and celebratory. Nothing like his exes.
Charlie often wondered how he got so lucky to have a girl like her. Good in bed, smart and reasonable, yes. But also so passionately in love with every piece of him. He found himself too shy since leaving high school. He thought too hard and too long about everything, anxiously psyching himself in and out of every idea he had. Writing a paper was hard enough, convincing himself it was good was another thing.
Once, he yearned to Rewire himself.
Just the thought of it made him jump out of his skin for a moment. He was alone, luckily, and starting lecturing himself. "Out of the question. It isn't even possible, of course not. You couldn't do it if you tried. And even if it were, you're not doing that anymore. No. No, no, no, no,
no!
"
After that, he'd gone straight to Penny and laid his head in her lap. She stroked his hair, and asked what was wrong. He said he didn't want to talk about it. So she hummed him a soothing melody and kissed him softly on the head. When he sat up again, she nuzzled against him and said, "I love you."
**********
