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1

Charlie was soft-spoken, but when he sang, he could transform his voice to sound like anyone—Tom Waits, Frank Sinatra, David Bowie. The first time I heard him sing, I couldn’t believe that something so loud and powerful was coming from him. We met in Madison, Wisconsin, while I was getting my MFA in fiction writing. I was twenty-five years old. Charlie was thirty-one. He had studied creative writing, too, as an undergrad, but when I met him he was working in construction. He was tall and boyish-looking. He had the most beautiful face I’d ever seen.

We met waiting on the same checkout line at the grocery store. I noticed him before he noticed me. As soon as we looked at each other, it seemed obvious what was going to happen. First he complimented my cereal choice—Raisin Bran—and then he asked if I’d ever tried Raisin Bran Crunch. I shook my head no. I could feel how insanely I was blushing, and I was mortified at how easily I gave myself away.

He smiled a little and held up the purple-and-blue box in his basket.

I pretended not to notice the way the woman behind the register was smirking at us, like she was watching the opening scene of a romantic comedy. I agreed to meet him the next night. Our first date was in mid-October at a pub called the Weary Traveler.

I got there first. The pub was warm and dimly lit, and pretty full for a Thursday night. It was all dark wood inside, except for the tin ceiling, copper and embossed. The walls were covered with weird art, simple paintings of random people, and there were built-in shelves lined with old books and board games.

The waitress sat me at a table facing the door. When he walked in, he was wearing a T-shirt and no coat even though it was freezing outside. His hands were stuffed inside his pockets, his shoulders hunched, like he was cold. When he spotted me, he looked surprised to see me sitting there waiting for him. He raised his eyebrows and lifted one hand from his pocket to wave.
I got shy when I saw him. He was so much better-looking than me. It seemed uneven. I was wearing jeans and my favorite black sweater, my hair down.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said, sliding into the seat across from me. “I see you got started.” He nodded to my rum and Coke.

“I hope that’s okay.” I’d already drunk half of it.

“Of course. I should have texted saying I was running behind. I ended up cooking dinner for my mom, and the traffic coming from the other side of town was worse than I expected.”

“That’s nice of you,” I said. “That you cooked dinner for your mom.”

“I like to do it when I have the time. Do you cook?”

“Not really.”

“I didn’t really start till a few years ago. Nothing too fancy. I make a pretty decent quesadilla.”
He smiled then, and his whole face opened up—bright and sweet. His smile made him look like a kid.

I don’t remember much of what we talked about that night, except that he made me laugh a lot, and I could tell he was observant.

He spent a long time picking out a certain IPA on the menu but once it arrived he barely touched it. I worried this meant he wasn’t having a good time, but he didn’t seem in a rush, and he wasn’t doing the thing that some people did—glancing around to see who else might walk in. He didn’t pull out his phone once.

At some point during the evening he told me that his father had left his mother before he was born, but when Charlie was a teenager, he’d looked his father up on the internet and confronted him at his place of work—a pharmacy in Janesville, Wisconsin. When his father realized who Charlie was, Charlie leaned over the pharmacy counter and said, “Don’t worry, Dad, I’m not here to kill you.” Then he’d clapped his father on the shoulder and walked out. He reached over and clapped my shoulder, to show me how he’d done it. It was the first time he touched me. I could feel where his hand had just been, reverberating on my shoulder, even after he’d pulled it away.

“Wow,” I said. “What was it like to see him?”

“One of his ears was really fucked up. It was kind of shriveled and pinched and there was this piece of dead skin growing out of it. I might have stayed longer but I couldn’t stand looking at his ear. Do you think that’s weird?” he asked me. “That what I remember most is his ear?”

“I don’t think it’s weird,” I said. “I feel like it’s usually those small things that you’re not expecting that hit you the hardest.”

He nodded vehemently. “That’s exactly it. The details.”

Then I told him that I hadn’t seen my mom since I was thirteen.

He sat back in his seat and looked at me, as if seeing me for the first time. “Is that why you write?”

It was startling, to be looked at like that. I felt like I could tell him anything, but I held back. I was already scared that I might never see him again. Nobody had ever asked me that question.
I shrugged. “I’m sure it has something to do with it.”

He didn’t try to kiss me at the end of the night, and at the time I took that to mean he didn’t like me. But he called me the next day. When I saw his name on my phone, I panicked and almost didn’t answer. I figured it must be an accident.

“I know I’m supposed to make you wait three days,” he said when I picked up, and the softness of his voice, his slightly monotone rasp, was so sexy to me that I could feel my whole body warm, as if a switch had been turned on. “So that you’ll think I’m busy,” he continued, “and maybe not that into you. But I’m more straightforward than that.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, thanks.”

“Are you free tonight?”

I told him I was busy—which was a lie—but free the night after.

“Great,” he said. “So what do you have going on? Another date?”

“No. I’m hanging out with my friends.”

“Must be nice, having friends to hang out with.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking, but I laughed.

“On Saturday can I pick you up at eight?”

“Sure,” I said.

I was confused. I didn’t know things could be so easy. I didn’t know why he liked me. I also couldn’t fathom why he thought I had dates lined up. I hung up the phone and masturbated.

...

When he called back, not even an hour later, I was still lying on my bed thinking about him.

“Hi,” I said.

“I started to write you a text but it was getting really long, so I thought it would be better to call.”

I grew tense. “Okay.”

“I was wondering if you’d be up for hanging out at my place tomorrow.” He paused. “I know it’s a weird thing to ask since we just met, and I didn’t want you to think I was creepily trying to lure you over or anything. The thing is, I’m a little tight on money at the moment and I don’t love spending ten dollars on a beer at a bar when it’s pretty much the same amount to have a six-pack at home, you know? But, all of that to say, if you don’t feel comfortable, I totally understand, given that we’ve only known each other for, like, twenty-four hours.”

I sat up in bed. “Right. That’s fine. I feel comfortable.”

“How about I give you my address? So you can text it to your friends or look it up, just so you know I am who I say I am.”

He told me his address and I wrote it down on the inside cover of a book.

“My last name is Nelson, by the way.”

“Mine is Kempler,” I told him. “Are you going to look me up, too?”

“Should I?” he asked, and I could hear him smiling. “If I google you, am I going to find your mug shot or something?”

I laughed. “No.”

“Leah Kempler,” he said thoughtfully, as if testing out the sound of my name.

“Yeah?”

“Your voice is cute on the phone.”

I was sweating, even though I was alone in the room. “So is yours.”

The next night, I was ready and waiting for him by seven-thirty. He didn’t show up at eight like he said, but he texted saying he was running late. When he finally did call to say he was outside, it was after nine. I glanced at myself once more in the mirror. I was wearing my good jeans and another sweater—navy, ribbed, with a mock-turtleneck. This time my hair was up, for some variation. When I got into his car, it reeked of cigarettes. After thinking about him a lot for the past two days, I had forgotten what he looked like. Like studying something up close for too long, my memory of him had become blurry. But, sliding into the passenger seat, I was stunned all over again. He was beautiful. A mix between Johnny Depp and Jake Gyllenhaal. This time he was wearing a multicolored pullover fleece, like a dad.

“Hello,” I said.

“How’s it going?” His voice was even softer and less animated than it had been on the phone. Neither one of us knew what to say after that, and we made small talk; the kind that made me feel uninteresting. We didn’t laugh or seem to have anything in common this time. The drive was longer that I expected it to be, and at some point I realized that we were leaving the city and driving into the suburbs. When we pulled up to a large, split-level house with stone siding, a two-car garage attached, and a nice lawn out front, I was confused. “You live here?”
He nodded.

“By yourself?”

“I live with my mom and stepdad.”

I let the information settle. When he had invited me over, I’d assumed he lived alone. And he was pretty old.

“They’re asleep,” he said softly, when he led me inside. “We can go to the den.”

All the lights were off, but I could see that the house was very neat. There was no clutter. It smelled clean, too—like fresh laundry and lemon soap. The state of the house was in such opposition to the inside of Charlie’s car—with the stench of cigarettes, the layer of trash and empty soda cans and paper bags on the floor—that it was hard to connect the two spaces to the same person.

I followed him through a hallway and down three carpeted steps to a separate wing. The room he brought me to, the den, was brown—brown carpeting, brown wallpaper, brown, lumpy furniture. There was a flat-screen TV and video game consoles sprawled in front of it. On the far side of the room was a mini-fridge and a sink and a table with a few stools. “Make yourself at home,” Charlie said. “Do you want soda or something? Water? To be honest, I don’t really drink that much.”

It occurred to me then to be nervous. I hadn’t been, up until that moment. The room itself was creepy, and I didn’t know where I was. Nobody knew where I was. I hadn’t texted Charlie’s address to my friends like he’d suggested. I hadn’t wanted anyone to tell me not to go.
The only thing that made me feel slightly comforted was that I could feel the presence of the sleeping parents in some other part of the house.

I considered asking Charlie to drive me home, but I felt bad doing that. The drive had been a good thirty-five minutes. I figured the best thing to do was stay for a little while and then ask to be taken home in an hour or two. “I’ll have some water.” I smiled politely. “Thanks.”
He brought a glass of water and a can of A&W root beer from the fridge back to the couch where I had sat down.

“Want to watch something?” he asked.

“Okay.”

He turned on the TV. Underneath my fear, I was disappointed. This all seemed boring. Especially after the date we’d had two nights before. Laughing, sharing stories. And the way he’d called me the next day; how self-assured he’d sounded on the phone. I didn’t want him to be just some guy who lived with his parents who invited me over to watch TV. I wondered, sadly, if we were two losers on a bad date. He was too handsome to be a loser, though.

“You’re really quiet tonight,” he said, turning to me.

“I guess I’m nervous.”

“Why are you nervous?” He looked offended, or maybe, I thought, he was disappointed by me. My quietness. I wasn’t sure how things had become so strange so quickly between us.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It’s just the beginning of getting to know each other, so . . .”

He seemed to consider this. “Sometimes I don’t always know how to, like . . .” He paused. “I get worried about overstepping my bounds.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, on our first date I really wanted to kiss you.”

“You did?”

“Of course.”

“Well.” I shrugged. “You should have.”

When I looked at him, a softness had come back into his eyes. He wasn’t disappointed with me, I realized; he was nervous, too.

“I’m going to try something.”

He kissed me then, and as soon as we were touching, I wasn’t scared anymore. I was no longer shy. We pulled each other closer. His hair and his clothes smelled like cigarettes. When he pulled off his fleece his hair stood straight up with static and I smoothed it down. Underneath he had on a plain white T-shirt, like the one he’d been wearing on our first date. He was so thin I could feel each of his ribs. He kissed softly, almost a little sleepily, like he wasn’t in a hurry. His lips were soft, and he tasted fresh and sour at the same time—like tobacco and toothpaste and coffee and kind of cool, like air. I’d never felt that way kissing anyone before. I desperately didn’t want it to end.

When I took my sweater off he pulled back for a moment and looked at me, his eyes moving from my eyes, down to my chest and hips. He smiled a little. “I thought there was something interesting going on underneath those sweaters of yours.”
I’d never felt so gorgeous in my life.

I woke up the next morning on the couch, which Charlie had pulled out into a sofa bed, him curled around me. We hadn’t had sex. We’d gotten naked and kissed. Touched each other a decent amount. Talked for a long time, and then fallen asleep together, in the same position we were waking up in now. Later in life, I’d come to think of this as not so different than fucking, but at the time, our restraint moved me. It was the kind of night you had with someone you liked—someone you wanted to see again.

When I opened my eyes, the room looked less menacing. There were sliding doors looking out onto a perfectly mowed backyard with lawn furniture. Sunlight poured into the room. Charlie’s arm, which had been crushed under my body for hours now, was olive-toned, almost gold, the hair on his skin fine and black. I turned over so I was facing him. He nestled his head against my breasts, tightening his arms around me. “I could live here forever,” he said, his voice morning-soft.

His words touched me somewhere deep and tender—almost painful—but all I said was, “I should get back soon. I’m meeting a friend at ten.”

For several moments he didn’t respond. Then he looked up and met my gaze. His eyes were pale blue and filled with light, his pupils massive. His eyelashes were thick and dark and longer than mine.

I brushed the back of my hand over his cheek and jaw. His face was rough with stubble that had been just a faint shadow the night before.

“Leah?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Can I see you again? Soon?”

I nodded. “Of course.”