There wasn’t anything more perfect Charlie Creagh could’ve said to Ari in that moment, and smiling despite the tear tracks on her cheeks, she wrapped her arms around him and held him tight for a few seconds. When she stepped back, she knew Charlie had read the silent promise in her eyes to not disrupt his life again.
This was goodbye for good.
She held up her hand in a frozen wave and watched him mirror the action, and with one last smile, she stepped back into the peripatos.
Once again, Jai stepped in to soothe the pain of losing Charlie Creagh all over again.
“I thought I’d seen the last of you people,” Charlie kept his voice teasing but his eyes were questioning. He’d turned his gaze from watching Mikey and his friends keep warm in the cold December air by playing basketball at Ben’s Park. Charlie sat on a bench, huddled in his thick jacket, sipping hot coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.
A week had passed since the insanity of discovering their world was filled with more mystery than the general public would ever know, and he found he’d been a lot more affected by it than he’d initially thought.
For starters, he’d grown increasingly overprotective of Mikey upon discovering what his life would be like without him. His mom had gotten pretty overbearing too, and Charlie almost felt bad for Mikey who hadn’t been able to breathe without one of them asking what he was doing, where he was going, when he’d be back, who he was with …
So Charlie spent his Sunday watching a basketball game and thanking whatever god was out there for getting them out of the jinn world as quickly as possible. This meant he didn’t really know how to feel when the wooden picnic bench he was sitting on creaked and he turned to find Fallon Roe sitting beside him in an oversized hoodie, duffel coat, and scarf.
She smirked at him. “I think you kind of mean that.”
He shrugged. “Did something happen?” He tried to slow his heart at the thought.
“Nah.” She leaned back on her hands, her silver jewelry clinking against the wood. “I’ve been deliberating for days whether to drop by or not.”
Or not might have been the way to go. Charlie winced at the thought, wondering how he was going to break it to his non-ex-girlfriend that he didn’t want anything to do with her world.
She saved him the time.
“I meant what I said before about us being totally different people now. I know this is your world and I have mine, and those two can’t mix. I don’t want them to,” she hurried to assure him. In doing so, she chipped away at the inexplicable guilt he felt about not being the guy she wanted him to be. “I came here for closure. Not mine. Yours.”
He frowned at her. “What do you mean?”
“People were telling you a lot of things about this Charlie guy you didn’t know, and most of what they were telling you didn’t sound so great. If I were you, I’d be thinking, ‘man, I hope life doesn’t throw me too many knockdowns because apparently I can’t handle that shit.’”
Charlie snorted. Because it was true. He had been thinking that.
She touched his arm, guessing his thought. When their eyes met, hers were completely serious. “Charlie, the magic did a lot to mess you up. But even through that you were still this innately good person who loved his brother enough to try to find peace and justice out of it. Some people call it obsession, revenge. Maybe it was. But I never saw that as a bad thing. I saw it as passion and strength and focus. And even without that, when you were disappointing Ari for not being the person you used to be, you were making my life better. You made me laugh and you liked me for just being me. I also knew that you would never intentionally hurt me.” She heaved a sigh. “I guess what I’m trying to say is that when some people might’ve only seen the worst in that Charlie, I saw the best, and I saw the best because it was there. It existed. That Charlie was a good guy. You need to know that.”
He was quiet a moment, head bent, hands clasping the cup. Finally, he lifted his eyes to her and he gave her a tight nod. “Thank you. I appreciate that.”
She smiled and moved gracefully away from the table. “This time it’s really goodbye.”
“Fallon,” he murmured softly, making her faux smile wilt a little, “you should know something too.” Charlie swallowed, trying to get the words right, knowing how important they would be to her. “I’m not that Charlie, but part of me is, right? I’m still him—it’s just life experience has carved us in different ways. So if I’m him, then I can tell you how I would have felt if I was feeling that lost, and my best friend didn’t recognize me anymore and didn’t understand me, and I was feeling all alone, and then this girl comes along who sees me, who gets it … that would mean everything to me, and I’m guessing it meant everything to that Charlie too. You matter, Fallon. You mattered to him. I somehow know that without knowing it.”