Everything I Need

Part 18

“It’s okay if you have,” Oliver continues. “Shela sleeps with a lot of people. Probably more than you’d think. Pretty sure she’s slept with most of the guys here.” He gestures to his friends behind him. “She usually keeps the girls on the down low—” He gives an exaggerated wink. “—But your secret’s safe with me.”

Charlotte shakes her head, swallows thickly and frowns. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Oliver just laughs. “Yes, you do. And I’d have to say I’m surprised that she slept with you of all people. What was it they used to call you?” he looks off to the side, remembering. “The Robot?”

Charlotte tucks in her chin and clenches her hands around the thermos. She’s mere seconds away from smashing it around Oliver’s head because she hates that nickname. She hates how it’s followed her around for the past year and a half. People she’s never even met before call her it.

Oliver doesn’t seem to notice her anger and chuckles to himself.

“I’m surprised she slept with someone she used to think was such an insufferable b***h, but…” Oliver eyes her up and down before reaching to grab an unopened beer from the counter beside her. “Maybe you don’t know everything like Shela thought, because you didn’t figure out the little game she plays. Did you?”

Charlotte swallows and grits her jaw. Oliver won’t stop smirking and she wants to snarl at him but she also wants to listen to what he has to say.

“Sometimes I’m pretty sure she doesn’t even realize she does it.” He pauses and sadly shakes his head like Charlotte’s an i***t, a fool. “Don’t you know that Shela gets off on feeling needed?”

Charlotte feels like she’s been kicked in the stomach. She lived in children’s homes with bullies and assholes for most of her life but none of the words they said hurt as much as these words suddenly seem to. Ridiculously, she thinks she’s going to cry and she can’t remember doing that in such a long time. Not properly anyway. Not the full body, broken sobs that she feels welling deeply inside of her.

Oliver snorts on a mouthful of his beer.

“Oh,” he chuckles. “You thought you were different, didn’t you?”

Charlotte lowers her head and furrows her brow. She swallows back the sobs and manages to pull herself together enough to fill her thermos with hot water. She ignores the way that Oliver happily grins at her, and screws on the cap before slipping it into her bag. Oliver watches her as she silently walks away, and she somehow manages to make it all the way to the darkened, unused archway between two buildings before the sobs itch up and out of her throat.

Because she didn’t think she was the one who was different.

She was sure that Shela was.

//

She goes for breakfast with Sana and Harper and doesn’t say much as they talk about the party the night before. It was late when they woke up and most of the people who had gone to the party had crawled their way back home by the time they rolled out of Shela’s dorm.

She’d managed to fall back to sleep for a few more hours, nose buried in Charlotte’s pillow with the scent enough to make Shela believe that she was still there with her. Harper had woken her up with a pillow to the face, looking at her questioningly as if to ask why she was asleep in Charlotte’s bed. She’d thoughtlessly reeled off an excuse about how she’d slept on the floor and got into Charlotte’s bed once she’d gone to the library, but Sana had looked at her dubiously while Harper had seemed relieved.

It’s stupid how preoccupied she is and she doesn’t remember ever feeling like this before. She knows why she feels this way and it’s scary. She’d barely experienced this when things first started happening with Oliver. Her feelings for him built slowly and steadily, until they were ruined by the revelation that her new best friend had loved him and been led on by him her entire life. They’d burned out quickly and irreparably.

The things she’d felt aware of when she woke up this morning are something else entirely.

They don’t feel as new as they should. They feel fast and slow at the same time and she doesn’t know how she never noticed them before now. Except maybe she does. She doesn’t understand how she could get to this point without realizing that her heart won’t stop pounding every time she thinks about her.

She doesn’t know when Charlotte Kavell became the only thought rolling around in her mind.

It’s hit her all so suddenly that she feels like she can’t even catch her breath.

“Where the hell is your head at?” Sana snaps and Shela looks up to find that Harper’s gone and it’s just the two of them.

Shela shakes her head to clear it. “Where’s Harper?”

“You know her,” Sana says bitterly. “Gotta top off a night of drinking with a booty call from her long list of special friends. Now answer the question. You’ve been off all morning.”

Shela feels the words bubble up her throat but she swallows them back and shakes her head. “It’s nothing.”

Sana gives her a look. “It’s totally something.”

Shela rubs at her forehead and toys with the handle of her coffee cup. “I’m just worried about Charlotte,” she half-lies. “I don’t want her burning herself out and getting sick again. I should go check on her.”

She moves to get up but Sana grabs her by the wrist and pulls her back down to her chair. She gives her a look that Shela hates. It scares her and she worries her bottom lip between her teeth as Sana refuses to let go.

“You like her,” she says and it’s not a question.

Shela rubs her forehead and shakes her head. She hides her face because she’s sure she’s going to cry and she doesn’t understand why.

“Nope,” she says in an attempt to be firm. Instead, it just comes out limp and breathless. “No. Nope. Nothing like that.”

“Shela,” Sana says and she hates the concern in her friend’s voice.

She shakes her head and manages to free her wrist from Sana’s grip. She mumbles an apology and grabs her coat before fleeing. She doesn’t know where she’s going at first and she wanders around aimlessly until she realizes she’s thinking of all the places Charlotte could be. She paces up and down the aisles of the library and then walks around campus for hours. It’s practically dark by the time she decides to head back to their room and she doesn’t understand why she’s so surprised when she opens the door to find Charlotte sitting at her desk.

Her shoulders drop and there’s that urge again—the one that makes her want to kiss Charlotte so that she can breathe—but she bites it back because she doesn’t know what to do with it.

It feels ridiculously natural to step over to Charlotte and bend down to bury her head in the soft crook of her neck. It feels perfect and she hates how Charlotte’s body stiffens at her touch.

“Shela,” Charlotte whispers and her voice doesn’t sound right. She sounds like the Old Charlotte and not like the Charlotte that Shela feels like she knows down to her bones. “Please don’t touch me.”

Shela pulls away and she hates how words fail her. She steps backwards to sit on the edge of Charlotte’s bed and, when Charlotte doesn’t turn around to tell her off for wearing a wet coat inside, she knows something’s wrong. She sits there for ages, watching as Charlotte just keeps typing at her laptop and never looking at her. She wants Charlotte to look at her. She wants Charlotte to give her that secret smile she’s never seen her give anyone else. She wants Charlotte to look at her in that way that makes Shela feel like she’ll never have to explain or excuse herself again.

“What are we watching tonight?” she whispers.

Charlotte doesn’t stop typing and it takes her a long time to speak. Shela waits anyway.

“I have work to do, Shela,” she whispers.

“But later on?”

When Charlotte stops typing, she doesn’t know how but she knows what’s coming. She should have known—she should have seen—that something like this would happen. She knew that she was going too far. She knew that she should have stopped it. She buries her head in her hands and shakes her head because she’s done what she always does and ruined the relationships that mean most to her.

“Shela, I can’t do this,” Charlotte whispers and it still hurts. “I can’t—” A hand swipes over Charlotte’s cheeks but she still doesn’t turn around. “Shela, I can’t let you do this with me,” she whispers. “I’m not like everyone else. I won’t bounce back when it all inevitably goes wrong. I won’t find someone else to trust. You’ll take everything and it’ll ruin me and I don’t want to do this, okay? I can’t do it. I respect you enough to accept that this is what you do and what you like but I don’t want to be part of it. I just want to be on my own.”

Shela breathes out unsteadily. “Charlotte—” she tries but Charlotte shakes her head and carries on.

“I’m not a toy, Shela,” Charlotte whispers and her hands swipe more furiously over her face. “I can’t do this thing you do. I don’t know how to be close to people without trusting them. I’m not going to sit around and wait for you to get bored of me and find something else to play with.”

Shela shakes her head and she’s ready to argue until Charlotte turns to her with red, puffy eyes and pale cheeks. She looks so much different to the girl Shela woke up with this morning. That girl was the prettiest thing Shela had ever seen. That girl was everything.

“I can’t be your—your whatever this is—in my bed and nothing to you everywhere else,” she shakes her head. “I don’t want that. I don’t want to be a secret. I don’t want to be a joke. I just want to be by myself like I always have been for as long as I can remember. I want everything to be how it was before.”

Shela lets her expression fall and feels the fight drain out of her. She feels herself nodding and she doesn’t understand why. She feels herself standing up even though she doesn’t want to. All she knows is that she should have seen this coming. For a long time, she should have expected that something like this would happen to her after everything she’s done.

Charlotte doesn’t say anything as Shela leaves and she doesn’t stop moving until she’s pressing the buzzer on Sana and Harper’s dorm building.

Sana stands alone and confused at the door when she heads upstairs and doesn’t say anything when Shela falls to lie on Harper’s bed. She doesn’t say anything when Shela just keeps rubbing her face like she’s waiting for something to happen, she just watches her until Shela glances at her like she doesn’t understand.

“I…” she says and she intends on telling Sana everything. She wants to tell her everything that happened, everything she feels, but she can’t.

//