Archive of Our Own

Once upon a time, Charlie was kind of a fuck-up.

Not in any obvious, tangible, measurable ways—he went to college, he lived on his own, he had a mortgage and a 401k and a decent-paying, mostly not-terrible job—but in ways that were, even to him, difficult to fully articulate.

He felt trapped, caged in, claustrophobic in his own skin; he went to Sunday brunch at his parents' house, helped his dad set up the grill, and had to physically fight the urge to hop the ancient chicken wire fence in the backyard. To flee. To escape. His brothers started getting married, popping out nieces and nephews and promotions and good news like brainwashed fucking vending machines, and he realized he hadn't had a steady girlfriend since he was eighteen. He listened to his baby sister rant about petty high school bullshit, about evil, life-ruining cheerleaders and dress code violations and teachers who fell asleep during final exams.

He painted an accent wall in his living room.

He went on a backpacking trip through the Canadian Rockies.

He slept around a lot, and he renewed his passport, and he switched cereal brands. He bought a new jacket. Buzzed his hair short. Got a grinning, black-and-blue orca tattooed on his arm, the graceful bend of its tail wrapped snugly around his bicep.

He showed up to work, and he checked on Norbert, and he stared out at the ocean, at the white-capped waves and the bright orange buoys and the research boats, the conservation pools, the craggy rocks and the barking seals and the slope of the horizon, cresting pink and orange with the sunrise and impenetrably, fascinatingly endless.

He put in his two weeks notice.

He rented out his condo.

He dusted off his resume, and he packed a single canvas duffel bag, and he got on a plane.

Five years, though.

Five years is a long fucking time.

"Yeah, no, I know, and I said I'd be there," Charlie snaps, yanking his sunglasses off, patting down his wallet, and kicking his car door shut. "Jesus Christ."

His mother sighs, long-suffering, and he can tell she's angry by how her breath crackles through the speaker of his phone. "Charlie. Ginny is just—she's so excited to see you, finally, god, it's been how many—"

"We all know how many years it's been," he interrupts, squinting at the idiotically ostentatious little cobblestone alley winding around the exterior of the outdoor mall. It's new construction—uncomfortably upscale, anchored by a wine bar at one end and a dimly-lit, French-sounding cooking school at the other. "You don't need to bring it up every five fucking—every five minutes. Sorry."

There's a beat of noticeably tense silence. "I'm just saying, Charlie, that I would appreciate it if you didn't disappoint her today. That's all."

Charlie stops walking, a ball of something hard and sour and guilty forming in the pit of his stomach, and scrubs at the nape of his neck. His palms are callused, the scent of South Pacific sea salt and stale airplane peanuts lingering in his nostrils. He takes a deep breath, trying to center himself, trying to remember why the fuck he'd ever been delusional enough to actually think he was homesick.

"And I'm just saying, Mom, that I'll be there," he says, careful to keep his tone even. "Save me a spot, okay, I'll text Ron to find out where you're sitting."

His mother makes a faintly disparaging clucking noise, like she's planning to argue with him some more. "Charlie—"

"Listen," he continues, talking over her, "I've gotta go. I'll see you later. Bye."

He hangs up before she can seize the opportunity to outline in exhaustive detail all the reasons he's a shitty son and a shitty big brother and a shitty—whatever the fuck else he's failing at—and then stuffs his phone into his back pocket, raking both of his hands through his freshly buzzed hair. Cutting it all off again had been a dumb impulse, maybe, but it isn't like the tattoo behind his ear or the waxy pink scar on his scalp are going to shock anyone in his family. He's thirty-one years old. He's a fucking adult. He doesn't need their validation or their scorn or their judgement for any of his choices.

Still.

Still, he heaves another not-quite calming breath, wipes his palms down on his jeans, and tugs open the door to the bakery.

It's small inside, narrow, punishingly clean—the floors are checkered with pink-and-white tile, and the walls are papered in a floaty shade of spangled lavender, lined with rolling brass shelves filled with elaborate arrangements of cake pops and European chocolate bars, sugar cookies and caramel squares, scattered collections of lacy white doilies and dried rose petals and porcelain teacups. It's all almost ludicrously feminine, from the glitter-dusted unicorn cake on the counter that looks like it's been lifted straight out of an antique carousel, to the tiny handwritten chalkboard signs in the sparkling glass display case next to the register.

Charlie feels alarmingly off-balance.

Clumsy and rough, the proverbial bull in the china shop, like he's about to trip over his own feet and accidentally fucking decimate something.

He steps farther inside, coming to a tentative halt in front of the counter. A girl is bent over behind the display case, gently maneuvering a sterling silver tray of chocolate-frosted cupcakes—he can see an immaculately manicured hand, short, glossy, pearl pink nails, a slender wrist and a tinkling charm bracelet, the barest hint of sleek, dark brown hair tumbling forward.

He clears his throat.

The girl jumps, slightly, unfolding herself from her crouch, standing up straight and throwing her shoulders back and—

Oh, no, Charlie thinks inanely.

He knows her. He can't place how or where or when or why, because she's at least five years too young and entirely too well-groomed for the kind of bars he used to typically pick up at; but he definitely fucking knows her, and, judging by the expression on her face—surprise and unease and dismay written crystal-clear across her slightly too angular features—she definitely fucking knows him.

"Oh, fuck off," she blurts out, and then freezes. Swallows. Works her jaw. Her cheeks are flushed a rosy pink, and she's wearing a low-cut, loose-fitting silk blouse, and her tits are—objectively nice. Big. Memorable. "Right. So. I'm going to pretend I didn't say that, and so are you."

Charlie snorts, amused despite his initial and unrelenting certainty that he's going to deeply regret coming here. Meeting her. "Am I?"

She forces a smile that's more of a grimace than anything else and folds her hands over the counter. "What can I get for you?"

Charlie puffs his cheeks out. "I'm sorry if this is...weird, but—do I know you? Like, have we met?"

She actually looks at him, then, head-on, and her eyes are a startlingly dark, mercurial blue. Shuttered. Wary. Hard to read. "You...don't know who I am?"

He winces. "Fuck, did we sleep together?"

She chokes on her next breath, coughing into her forearm. "Oh, my god," she bleats, sounding so fucking appalled by the idea that it's honestly a little offensive. "No, we did not sleep together, what the fuck."

"You just said fuck again."

"So did you."

"I'm allowed to, though," Charlie says cheerfully. "I'm the customer."

"Not if you don't tell me what you want," she retorts, another tight, viciously insincere smile tugging at the corners of her mouth.

He glances at the display case. Everything inside is delicate and decadent and very, very small. "So, we didn't hook up," he goes on, prodding at his teeth with the tip of his tongue. "But you know who I am?"

"I know of you, yes."

"How?"

"I was in the same grade as your brother," she says. "In high school."

"I've got a lot of those."

"Brothers?"

"Yeah."

"Ron," she grits out. "Ronald. Not that it matters. Are you here for something in particular?"

Charlie frowns. "You were friends with Ron?"

Her shiny red lips twitch up and then down and then up again, pursed, pressed together, like she's biting back another one of those awful fake smiles. "No," she says flatly, "we weren't friends. Is this a special occasion? Did you need a custom order form?"

Charlie studies her for a while, and he couldn't explain it to anyone—can't even explain it to himself, not really, not when she's much too young and much too expensively put-together for...lots of things; most things—but he's interested. He's curious.

"What'd you say your name was?" he asks.

"I didn't."

He waits.

Her nostrils flare.

He raises his eyebrows.

"Pansy Parkinson," she admits, visibly reluctant, which—

Oh. 

Oh.

"Oh," Charlie says, probably not as tactfully as he should. Her gaze hardens. "Pansy Parkinson."

She sneers. "What?"

"What?"

"Why did you say my name like that?" she demands, crossing and uncrossing her arms over her chest, inadvertently dragging the already too-low scoop-neck front of her blouse even farther down.

And Charlie—well, he stares, unblinking, somewhat pathetically awestruck, all while wondering if she has on a gravity-defying push-up bra or is just truly, tremendously genetically blessed—before firmly reminding himself that he does not care.

He cannot care.

He is not allowed to care.

She's an evil, life-ruining cheerleader. Ex-cheerleader. Whatever.

"Oh, nothing," Charlie eventually manages to respond, shrugging one shoulder as he leans forward to peer inside the display case. "I was just thinking, like, yeah, non shit you weren't friends with Ron."

Pansy Parkinson goes quiet for a second, but the he hears her let out a soft, admittedly begrudging huff of almost-laughter.

He has to duck his chin to hide his grin.

She recommends six different flavors of outrageously overpriced cupcakes—chocolate peanut butter and vanilla caramel and something moist and spicy with a blackberry compote center—and swipes his credit card, offering him his receipt with a slightly too professional flick of her wrist.

He can't help himself.

He winks at her on his way out, giving her a slow, deliberately thorough once-over, and pushes the door open with his hip, sauntering into the sunlight with her eyes on his back and his bloody positively thrumming through his veins.

He can't help himself.

Pansy Parkinson.

Oh, fuck off, was, to be fair, almost certainly the correct response.

Charlie tells himself that he isn't going back, but he's a bullshit fucking liar and he knows it.

Four days later, he's parking his truck in the same freshly paved spot and scuffing his boots along the same ugly tri-colored river rock. He'd changed his shirt before leaving work, but he hadn't shaved. Walking into the bakery—taking in all the glittery pinks and purples, the floral motifs and the tea party accessories, the overwhelming air of delicacy permeating every square inch—it kind of makes him wish that he had.

Pansy Parkinson isn't behind the counter.

Instead, she's standing next to one of the rolling brass shelves, on the very tips of her toes, reaching for a cut-crystal vase of tulips, just barely managing to nudge it with her fingers; her sandals are white, and her dress is ankle-length, strappy and silky and green, vibrantly romantic against the sun-kissed peach-pink of her skin, and her hair is twisted into a complicated, artfully messy braid, winding down her back, between the wings of her shoulder blades.

Oh, no, Charlie thinks again, before pointedly ignoring his own conscience.

"Need a hand?" he asks, slipping in behind her, lifting his arm and grabbing the vase, careful to hold himself still; careful not to crowd her. She smells expensive, like Tahitian vanilla and the perfume counter at Saks, nutmeg and espresso and his mom's kitchen around the holidays, when there's a seemingly never-ending supply of sugar cookies and gingerbread and mugs of chocolate overflowing with miniature marshmallows and cinnamon sticks.

Instinctively, like he's been burned, Charlie takes a giant step back, still clutching the vase. 

Pansy spins around, appearing more frustrated than genuinely startled, and gives him a cursory, vaguely impatient half-smile. "Thanks," she says, idly adjusting the enormous diamond studs in her ears. She doesn't take the vase from him. "Wow. You're back."

"Yeah, wow," he agrees, tucking the vase into the crook of his elbow. It's cool to the touch. Heavy. "I, uh, I promised I'd bring dessert to a family thing—" Specifically, he'd volunteered to bring dessert to a family thing, but there's really no point in dwelling on the lunacy of that. "—and my sister liked the cupcakes the other day, so."

Pansy's half-smile turns gratuitously smug—gratuitously proud, maybe—before disappearing altogether. She scans his face, intent and a little wary, like she's searching for the dreaded punchline to a joke he's pretty fucking sure he never told; but then she's smoothing her bangs off her forehead and snatching the vase out of his arms and gesturing casually to the display case, her dress swishing around her legs as she maneuvers around him, and Charlie thinks he must've imagined it.

"Right," she says briskly, "so—more red velvet? Or are you feeling...adventurous?"

The next time, Charlie only tries to talk himself out of it for thirty seconds, tops, before he's locking his truck and jogging down the ridiculous cobblestone path to the bakery. There's a tiny beribboned bell above the door now, a blur of pink and ivory and silver, and it jingles merrily as he shoves his way inside.

He then promptly forgets how to fucking breathe, which is—bad

Maybe.

Definitely. 

Pansy Parkinson is perched on the counter, a big blue vinyl binder in her lap and a haphazard collection of Polaroids spread out around her—they're all of cakes and tarts and cookies and truffles, the fancy five-star restaurant kind, flakes of edible gold leaf and drizzles of sugar syrup—and she's wearing sheer black stockings and a short polka-dotted dress, sweetheart neckline framing the curve of her cleavage, a spotless white apron tied tight and folded down around her waist, her lips that same slick, sticky shade of deep, dark, pouty red, and she looks like some kind of scandalous 40's pin-up ad for flour or oven mitts or sex, Christ, like she should be painted on the side of an airplane, posing for a calendar, smirking and mysterious and maybe even bent over, just a little, just to tease.

Fuck.

Charlie hadn't even known he was into any of this.

"Another family brunch?" Pansy suddenly asks, lifting her chin and curling her fingers around the edge of the binder. "Maybe a birthday?"

Charlie exhales on a slightly stilted laugh, crossing his arms over his lower abdomen. "Picnic," he grunts, making a mental note to invite a few of his brothers to the beach later. He's planning ahead. That's perfectly fucking normal. "You have anything...summery?"

Pansy flaps her wrist, motioning towards a glazed porcelain tray next to the register that's piled high with small paper sample cups and a shallow, heart-shaped bowl of plastic forks. "Lemon ricotta cheesecake. It's new. Might not keep it on the menu—haven't decided yet."

Charlie eyes her curiously as he plucks a cup off the tray. "Wait, is this—this place is yours? You make all of this?"

She stiffens. "Yes. Is that a problem?"

"No, no," he says quickly, prodding at the neatly sliced square of cheesecake. It's moist and light and a milky, sunny yellow. "That's just—you're so—that's...impressive. This is impressive, I mean."

She flashes him a chillingly sweet smile. "It's an investment."

"What?"

"An investment," she repeats, swinging her legs from her spot on the counter. "In my future. From my father."

"Oh."

"I went to pastry school, right, but I think he assumed I'd..." Pansy trails off. Starts over. "Like, I was engaged for a really long time, even if it wasn't..." She trails off again, her voice wavering. "The short version is—I went to pastry school and didn't end up eloping with my closet case of an ex, who I'm still friends with, by the way, because I am a fucking saint, and so my father freaked out and threw a bunch of money at me and co-signed on, like, a ten-year lease so I would never have to, I don't know, suffer the indignity of working for someone else, and—" She stops. Corrects her posture. Straightens the dainty silver chain of her necklace, tapping her fingernail against the seed pearl pendant, unfairly drawing Charlie's attention right back to her tits. Fuck. "Sorry. I'm having a bad day. Week. Year. It's fine."

Charlie very methodically chews a bite of cheesecake, his tongue darting out to chase a stray crumb. He isn't panicking, not exactly, but he thinks he might prefer an hour in the underwater cage with Norbert to having to come up with a suitable response to whatever the fuck that just was.

"Okay, so, first," he says, stalling, "that's fucking delicious."

Her gaze drops to his mouth. Lingers. She's blushing, just like she was that first day, and it's mesmerizing, watching the color slowly seep into her cheeks. "Yeah?"

"Yeah. And I think—" He pauses, weighing his words. "And I think you should absolutely keep it on the menu."

She stares at him for a second, and the only sounds in the shop are the whirring of the air conditioner and the tinkling harp music coming from the built-in speakers and his heartbeat, riotously, traitorously loud in his ears.

"Well, that's insightful," she says, drumming her fingers against the top of her thigh. Her lips quirk, wry and self-deprecating and just the tiniest bit awkward. "But—thank you. For the compliment. I guess. I actually—I prefer savory desserts, but most people like theirs sweet, so."

Charlie absently blots at a speck of powdered sugar on the back of his hand. He kind of wants to lick it off, but he also kind of suspects that might be the textbook definition of coming on too strong, which—is still not a thing he's totally sold on doing. Mostly.

"Dessert doesn't have to be sweet," he says. "That's not the point of it. And, like—people love chocolate, right? Dark chocolate? Bitter chocolate? Fucking—red hot chili pepper chocolate, I don't know, you probably...you probably make tons of that stuff. Right?"

Her expression flickers with something oddly, transparently wistful before shutting down. Flat-lining. "Yeah. Yeah, people fucking love chocolate. Not for picnics, though." She sniffs and tosses her hair. "The lemon ricotta, then?"

He buys the cheesecake.

He also spends the rest of the afternoon lounging on a beach towel, resolutely not wondering what Pansy Parkinson might look like in a flimsy wet bikini, and struggling to ignore Bill's increasingly aggressive attempts to discover the real reason Charlie keeps showing up to family gatherings with sparkly gold bakery boxes. 

Charlie doesn't fucking know. 

Charlie doesn't fucking know anything anymore.

The fourth time isn't even technically Charlie's fault.

It's raining—one of those angry, almost eerily otherworldly summer storms that floods the roads and cracks through the humidity and sends jagged veins of lightning hurtling across the bruised gray skies—and he's on his way home, reeking of dead fish and the medicinal vitamin drops he has to feed to Norbert twice a week. He's soaked through his t-shirt with sweat and rain from running to his truck, and he's tired from the early morning emergency calls, and fuck it, fuck it, he wants a fucking hug.

And some chocolate.

And a blowjob.

And, well, if he's being honest with himself he wants significantly more than that, too, but being honest with himself would mean accepting that he still hasn't quite figured out why, still hasn't quite forced himself to examine any of this too closely, and he isn't actually a masochist.

The chocolate, though.

He can have the chocolate.

He stumbles into the bakery with his jacket pulled over his head, dripping water all over the pink-and-white tiled floor, and Pansy just lifts an intimidatingly perfect eyebrow from where she's standing in front of the counter, holding a roll of paper towels and an industrial-sized bottle of Windex.

She opens her mouth—probably to ask him something snide and horrible—but almost immediately wrinkles her nose. "Oh, my god, why do you smell like fish?" she bleats, blindly reaching behind her to extract a can of Febreze from a plastic purple caddy; she sprays it at him, violently, sniffing in disgust. "That should be illegal. You should be illegal."

Charlie chuckles, shoulders relaxing. "I work with animals who eat a fuck ton of fish, that's why," he says, scrubbing at the stubble on his jaw. He abruptly feels out of place, off-balance, just like he had that first day—too big, too rough, too crusted in blood and guts and salt and Norbert's seaweed-slimy tank water. "I, uh—I rehabilitate sharks. Injured sharks. It's—you know. Messy."

Pansy looks at him for a while, considering, assessing, her gaze raking over his t-shirt—wet, tight, clinging to his chest, his arms, the flat of his abdomen; and his jeans—wet, tight, pooling in a soggy, bedraggled puddle around his loosely laced boots; and then she sighs.

"Let me grab you a towel," she says, stepping around him and sauntering towards the back room. She has on a pair of slim black leggings and an oversized crew-neck sweatshirt, striped yellow and gold, that hits her mid-thigh and reminds him of the sunshine-dappled sand in Borneo. "Are you cold?"

Charlie startles. "What?"

"Are you cold?" Pansy repeats, enunciating slowly. Sarcastically.

His lips twitch. "It's eighty degrees out," he says, shifting from one foot to the other. It occurs to him, belatedly, that he could've just driven to his parents' house and bullied his mom into baking him cookies, had a shower in his old bathroom with the mildewed little privacy window and the comfortingly shitty water pressure. "Hey, do you have anything with—chocolate, maybe?"

Pansy snorts, loudly, and then reappears with a stack of impossibly fluffy white towels and a sheet pan of brownies. "Here," she says haughtily. "Mexican chocolate. They're spicy."

He takes the towels from her, rubbing his hair down, draping one around his neck and dropping the other to the floor. "Nothing sweet, huh?" he teases.

"No," she says, leaning backwards into the counter. "Too easy."

Charlie takes a massive bite of a brownie and groans around a mouthful of rich, buttery chocolate. There's heat, too, silky and sharp, saturating the back of his tongue in a wave of different layers, different flavors, and it's all so good he doesn't even care that he's rapidly cycling through his entire fucking repertoire of sex noises. 

"That's incredible," he says, breathless. "Holy shit."

Pansy watches him chew, her bottom lip tucked between her teeth, and there's a hesitancy to her demeanor that he guesses isn't normal for her. He isn't sure, though. Obviously. It isn't like he knows her.

"So, like, what excuse do you have to be here today?" she asks, just as he's taking a third bite of his brownie, and he chokes, sputtering into his fist, gooey chocolate crumbs flying. Her expression remains placid, its customary blend of impassive and unimpressed, but the slant of her mouth is smug and the sparkle in her eyes is playful and he—

He likes her, he realizes.

Genuinely.

He genuinely likes her.

Oh, no, he thinks, gut twisting with a vague, rumbling kind of horror.

"What?"

"You keep coming here," she says, more blankly, less patiently. "Why?"

He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "The customer service."

She doesn't smile. "Funny."

"Do you, uh—do you interrogate all your customers about why they're here? Or am I just lucky?"

"Lucky," she repeats. "That's an interesting choice of words."

Charlie peers down at her. She's wearing flat shoes, color-blocked beige leather with stark black stitching and excessively pointy toes, and she seems shorter than usual. He isn't tall, not really, not like his brothers, but the distance between him and her—the top of her head wouldn't even graze his chin, if he moved closer—it's jarring, suddenly. Striking.

"I like it here," he says. It's a shitty deflection. "And I like—I don't know."

"You don't know what you like," Pansy drawls, inscrutable. "Really."

"No, I know what I like. I just—"

"Can't describe it?"

There's a taunting, brittle quality to the question that's making Charlie uneasy, nervous, like he's being put on the spot—and he doesn't enjoy introspection, as a general rule, doesn't like to think about why he'd been so miserable before leaving for Fiji, before wasting five years in a meaningless, dead-end tourist trap training fucking dolphins—but he can sense how unsatisfactory his answer was, can see it in her clenched jaw and fluttering pulse, because he remembers who she is, remembers her name from Ginny's rants about her petty high school bullshit; the evil, life-ruining cheerleader with the snow-white Beemer and the limited-edition Louis Vuitton bags and the vicious, unprecedented knack for starting rumors and stealing boyfriends and getting her self-proclaimed enemies expelled.

She acts like she's Regina George, Ginny had always sneered as she snuck beers with Ron out of the grass-stained cooler in the backyard. She acts like we should be jealous of her.

Pansy's blatant mistrust of Charlie—of his intentions—it's understandable. Reasonable. And his continuing presence here—his continuing invasion of her space, her life—he wonders if it doesn't look, to her, like he's mocking her. Stringing her along.

"Maybe I just like seeing you," he eventually says, and he tries to project sincerity and earnestness and courage and whatever the fuck else people feel when they want to date someone, not just fuck them for a few weeks before vanishing into the depths of a read-receipt riddled text thread.

Pansy's jaw clicks, and then she takes a shallow breath, glancing away, balling her hands into small, white-knuckled fists, like she's steeling herself for something. A let-down. A disappointment.

"I have cinnamon-cayenne icing for those," she says, too brightly, nodding towards the brownies. "Just—give me a second, okay?"

The fifth time is practically a chore.

"It's an employee softball game," Charlie explains, propping his elbows up on Pansy's counter, eyes skimming over what's left in the display case; there's a whitewashed wicker basket half-full of pastel-colored macarons and a gilt-rimmed platter of elegantly frosted eclairs, the chocolate roses a dark, glossy brown in the overhead spotlights. "For charity. I'm a team captain. I have to bring snacks."

Pansy blinks at him, face spasming with incredulity, before she snorts and looks back over her shoulder, towards where the kitchen is. "Snacks," she says dryly. "Really."

"For nutritious and long-lasting energy, yeah."

"I buy butter by the crate."

"Can't put a price on morale in the dugout, though, can you?"

"No, but you can put a price on Capri Suns and orange slices."

"Hey, I took a very sophisticated team vote."

"In your minivan?"

Charlie grins. "You're fun."

"No, I'm not," Pansy says, rolling her eyes, but she's blushing, her lips tilting up in a begrudging almost-smile that feels like a fucking victory to him, and then she's curling her tongue over her teeth and fiddling nervously with the straps of her tank top. It's flowy, electric-pink satin with a jet-beated band right beneath her breasts, like some kind of erotic, utterly unnecessary shelf. "Anyway, I'm about to close, but I just took out some shortbread. It has dates in it, which is—I mean, that's a fruit, right?"

"Uh. Those grow on trees, I think, so—yeah?"

"Right, so it's basically a health food," she says sagely. "You can have all of it for your baseball match."

"Softball," Charlie corrects, bemused. "Baseball wouldn't be fair to the octopus guys. Big nerds. Huge nerds."

"Octopus guys?" Pansy meanders into the kitchen, raising her voice to call out, "What does that mean?"

Charlie yawns and rocks back on his heels. "They study the octopus habitat—give them, like, puzzles and Rubik's cubes and those little pool toys for babies? Foam lobsters? Plastic rings? That kind of stuff. Complex problem-solving."

Pansy reappears with a giant, sparkly gold bakery box, neatly taped shut and emblazoned with her own initials. "They just...observe octopuses all day?"

"Yeah."

"That's boring."

"Yeah. Zero danger."

Pansy cocks her head to the side. "You know, I always order the octopus at Nobu."

"What?"

"Mm. It's super tender."

"That's...uh. Nice."

"Yeah," she says, slightly too thoughtfully. "Probably from all the complex problem-solving."

Charlie pauses. "Holy shit, did you just make a joke?"

"Oh, my god."

"No," he says, delighted, "you totally did, that's amazing, it's like—"

"Shut up."

"—watching a caterpillar transform into a—"

"I said," she interrupts, shoulders shaking with barely restrained laughter, "shut up."

Charlie doesn't leave.

He should, honestly—it's late, and he has his snacks for the game, and Pansy's sort of lazily running through a checklist of tedious retail operation bullshit, a ritual that seems to involve printing off a mile-long daily sales report and brushing all the crumbs out of the display case and scowling murderously at the contents of her walk-in pantry. 

But he doesn't.

He doesn't leave, and she doesn't tell him to leave, and the spindly silver hands on the mint green cuckoo clock in the corner just keep ticking, moving, winding down to closing-time. 

"You're aware you can, like, go, right?" she eventually asks, stuffing a stack of rubber-banded twenty-dollar bills into a blue leather envelope. Her nails are painted turquoise now, still glossy, still pristine, and the color reminds him of the water in Samoa. "Whenever you want?"

"You mean you aren't holding me hostage?" Charlie deadpans, sliding his thumbnail under the torn, jagged edge of a piece of tape on the side of his box of shortbread. "Huh. Something must've gotten lost in translation, then. My bad."

Pansy huffs, looking less annoyed than he expects her to. "You aren't funny."

"Nope."

"Or charming."

"Yeah, no, definitely not."

"In fact," she goes on, rummaging around her mostly-empty register drawer before extracting a plain purple elastic for her hair, twisting it into an uncharacteristically messy knot on top of her head, "if you keep spending so much time here and eating literally all of my experimental merchandise, you're going to get fat, and then you're not even going to have that—that rugged, manly, adrenaline junkie shark tamer thing going for you."

"Rugged, manly, adrenaline junkie shark tamer thing," Charlie echoes, a ludicrously fucking fond thread of warmth beginning to unfurl in his chest. "Is that—like, is that a type that you have, or—"

"Maybe," she says archly, scooping up a luxuriously soft brown leather bag, unearthing an enormous key ring, and switching off the lights in the kitchen. "Like, you know those guys on that deep-sea fishing show? Dirty flannels? Missing teeth? Misspelled tattoos? My type. For sure."

Charlie grabs his box of shortbread and follows her outside, into the humid night air, and he tries—he tries so hard—not to look when she bends down to lock the door, but her designer-distressed jeans are tight and her ass is right there and, really, he'd fucking given up on rationalizing his attraction to her weeks ago.

"So," Pansy says, glancing up at him from under her lashes and then biting her lip, like she's second-guessing whatever she's about to ask him. "How, um—how old are you? Exactly?"

He sputters, rubbing at the back of his neck as they walk, slowly, down the cobblestone path to the parking lot. Most of the other shops are already closed, locked up, lights off, and the sky is clear, cloudless, showcasing a crescent moon and a swathe of twinkling, white-bright stars.

"Uh," he says, "why?"

A now-familiar flush floods her cheeks, and his heartrate speeds up. Shifts gears. "I'm just...curious. I don't really remember very much about your—um, your family."

Charlie hums, grip tightening on his box of shortbread. "I'm, uh, I'm thirty-one."

Pansy furrows her brow. "Oh."

"What?"

She doesn't reply for a second, just quirks her mouth from side to side, considering. "My dad...he's, like, constantly setting me up. With any guy he can find who has a pulse and a decent pedigree. Because he thinks twenty-three is too old to not at least b—" She lowers her voice several octaves, adopting a syrupy Southern drawl. "—attached to someone, Pansy, here, this is Vincent, he speaks Mandarin and works for Nike and wants five children, preferably all boys, before his thirtieth birthday."

Charlie barks out a laugh, helpless with it, and scuffs the toe of his boot along the ground, flashing her a rueful smile when they reach the parking lot. His truck is in its usual spot, but there are only a couple of other cars around. 

"To be fair, my mom—well, my whole family, I guess—they've been on my case about that for a long time."

"Yeah?"

"Anyone special you want to bring around for dinner, Charlie? You're not getting any younger." He mimics his mother's shrill New England accent, voice cracking with the strain of it, and Pansy fucking giggles, a whiny, high-pitched little trill that would probably be profoundly irritating under any other circumstance, coming from any other girl, but—but it's the most expressively sincere reaction he's ever gotten from her, and he kind of wants to fucking savor it. "And have you thought you might be bisexual, Charlie? Dipped your toe in the other pond, so to speak?"

"Oh, my god," Pansy gasps, still giggling.

He chuckles, nudging her with his elbow. "Yeah, my parents—my dad, especially—they're really progressive, you know, really—really supportive. But. Fuck. Come on, you know?"

Pansy's giggling gets louder, more intense, until she's stopped walking altogether, bending over slightly, her bag swinging from her arm, her face scrunched up and her teeth shining straight and white and sharp; and Charlie's next few breaths rattle around his ribcage, something sweet and solid and good taking root in his lungs as he looks at her, watches her, something that tastes like satisfaction, almost, but better. Deeper.

Eventually, the giggles taper off, and she's standing upright again, toying with the charms on her bracelet. "Well," she says innocently, "did you?"

"What?"

She smirks. "Dip your toe in the other pond, so to speak."

"Nah," he admits. "I mean...the Kinsey scale, right? That's real. That's a thing. I just don't think I'm on it."

"Mm."

"What?"

"Oh, nothing, I just—" She breaks off, cheeks still dimpled in a smile. "I'm trying to imagine how thrilled my dad would be if he had a whole second gender to try and set me up with, and I'm just—" She collapses into another fit of giggles, listing into Charlie's side, and Charlie—

Charlie has to swallow around a jumbled assortment of words.

Questions.

Pleas.

Declarations.

Oh, no, he thinks, semi-hysterically.

"So, uh, your dad—he sets you up a lot, then? Like, on blind dates?" Charlie asks, anxious and a little clumsy. "Or is that—you said you were engaged before, right?"

Pansy opens and closes her mouth, stretching the muscles out, like she isn't used to smiling or laughing that much. That often. "He's just really...traditional," she says carefully. "He was already a lot older when I was born, and then my mom died, and I think he's just—afraid? That there won't be anyone around to take care of me?"

Charlie blinks. "Fuck."

"Yeah."

"But you're an adult," he says awkwardly. "You're...twenty-three? Right?"

"Yeah."

"So."

Pansy shrugs, not quite nonchalant. "He's always given me everything I've ever asked for." She jerks her chin back towards the bakery. "Everything I've ever wanted."

Charlie studies her intently. "Everything you've ever wanted. Really."

She stays quiet.

They're standing directly beneath one of the gas-lamp style streetlights, his truck in their periphery, and there's a hush blanketing the atmosphere, like the world knows something important is about to happen.

"I used to think it didn't matter how you got what you wanted if you wanted it badly enough," Pansy finally murmurs, smoothing the hem of her tank top between her thumb and forefinger. "I don't think that's true anymore."

"Pansy—"

"And my dad, you know, he just—he thinks I'm lonely," she blurts out, glancing away, towards a sleek black Range Rover parked on the far side of the lot. "And that's why—like, he wants me to be taken care of, yeah, but he mostly—he wants me to be happy. Happier. Than I am."

Charlie frowns. "It isn't—hey. Pansy." She meets his eyes, and it hits him like a sucker punch to the gut. "There's nothing wrong with getting what you want, with doing what you want to be doing, and still being—dissatisfied. There's no..." An uncomfortable kind of clarity lodges itself in the back of his throat, then, because shit, shit, does he know a lot about that. "If you aren't happy, you can fix it. That's—I mean, you're talking to the guy who, like, quit his entire life and moved to Fiji for five years."

Pansy stares at him, her expression terrifyingly open, honest, contemplative, like she's looking right through him, reading between all the lines, and—

God, he wants to kiss her.

It steals his breath a little, how desperately—how fiercely—he wants to kiss her.

He doesn't kiss her.

He's paralyzed with an emotion that feels a lot like fear and it's scraping at his skull, his spine, spreading out from his hindbrain like one of those bizarre sub-tropical rashes he'd made the grave mistake of Googling once at an internet cafe in Bangkok; and she's still staring at him, streetlight glinting off the rings on her fingers and the diamonds in her ears and the expectation, the anticipation, weighing heavy in her eyes.

And it's that.

It's that.

She's expecting it.

She's expecting him to kiss her, right now, in this moment, and she's expecting him to fucking mean it, probably, and to want to do it again and again and again, and he can't be sure—he doesn't know, does he, if he fucking will. Mean it. Want to do it again.

Oh, no, he thinks, a frantic, strangely painful lurch of indecision hiccupping through his chest.

Fight or flight.

Fight or flight.

Fight or—

"Hey, so," he croaks, raspy enough that he has to clear his throat. Start over. "Hey, so, it's pretty late, uh, I should—I should get going."

Flight.

He doesn't go to the bakery for a while.

He halfheartedly makes excuses to himself, for himself—he's busy, of course he's busy, busy catching up with his parents and his siblings and his co-workers and even grumpy, snaggle-toothed Norbert—but he's a bullshit fucking liar and he knows it.

Charlie helps his dad build an entire garage's worth of IKEA furniture, cabinets and storage shelves and a drafting table that somehow, despite their best efforts and near-religious adherence to the instructions, still ends up with one leg a quarter-inch shorter than all the rest; and he lets his mom come over while he's at work, lets her re-stock his freezer with chicken soup and homemade vanilla ice cream and Ziploc bags full of dumplings and garlic bread and meatballs, lets her sort his laundry and dust his coffee table and probably sigh in despair at the state of his bathroom; and he takes Ginny out to dinner, marvels at how grown-up she is as she excitedly lists all the ways she's going to manhandle the sports section of the local newspaper into the twenty-first century, valiantly not commenting when she asks him to drop her off at a frat house, after; and he hangs out with his brothers, with their wives and their children and their endless stream of invitations to backyard barbecues and birthday parties and soccer games and Sunday matinee Pixar movies; and he comes home to his empty condo, to the ugly brick-red accent wall he'd painted what feels like a fucking lifetime ago, to the unpacked boxes in the dining room and the ratty brown rug in front of the fireplace, and he thinks—well, he thinks about Pansy Parkinson.

He gets through a six-pack of Corona, two bowls of his mom's award-winning chili, and twenty-eight percent of an eHarmony profile before it occurs to him that he really is just a giant fucking hypocrite.

If you aren't happy, he'd said, like he was some kind of fucking authority on the subject, like he wasn't scared shitless of himself, of her, you can fix it.

And he thinks about that.

And then he thinks about running away.

And then he thinks about coming back.

And then he thinks, again, about Pansy Parkinson.

He's getting ready to dump a bucket of bloody, half-frozen fish into Norbert's outdoor tank when he hears it.

Pansy's voice.

Pansy's nasally, high-pitched, annoying little giggle, piercing the sultry summer air, floating around the slimy concrete deck like one of those squalling, shrieking carrion birds. 

Charlie raises his head, flexing his fingers inside his yellow rubber gloves, glancing left and right and back over his shoulder, towards where a stainless steel spiral staircase is partially obscured by a jumbled assortment of hoses and towels and diving equipment and specimen containers. The salty-sour stench of decaying seaweed is prominent, but he doesn't see anything. Anyone.

Is he hallucinating?

Has he finally fucking lost it?

Twitching with alarm, he thoughtlessly rakes his fingers through his grown-out hair, smearing god only knows what across his forehead in the process—and he swears, loudly, grimacing as he lifts up his t-shirt to wipe his face, and that's how they find him, the lower half of his abdomen exposed, his grimy work jeans lying low on his hips, a bloody streak of congealing squid guts and rapidly drying fish scales clinging to his skin.

"—won't set up here, of course, the observation deck is just around the corner, but this is where we keep the animals who aren't likely to be re-released soon." Padma, the prodigal intern with the upper-crust British accent and near-limitless disdain for male Weasleys, is leading two people up the spiral staircase, gesturing to Charlie as she talks. "That's Charlie, he works with—oh, bollocks, is it feeding time? I didn't even think to check, I'm—"

Pansy appears, then, like a ghost, or a fucking mirage, her eyes wide and her lips red and her lacy white skirt swishing serenely around her thighs—and she isn't alone.

There's a tall, scrawny, blond guy with her who looks like he just walked straight off the cover of a fucking Martha's Vineyard lifestyle magazine; salmon pink shorts and a blue-and-white striped button-down, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, an expensive watch on his wrist and a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses tucked into his shirt collar and no fucking socks with his fucking boat shoes. He's in his mid-twenties, probably, younger than Charlie, certainly, and he's clean-shaven, his hair slicked back, a leisurely kind of elegance to how he slouches forward, peering into Norbert's tank with evident, likely purposeful boredom.

Padma is still talking.

Pansy is still staring.

And the guy Pansy is with—he notices, after a minute, that Pansy isn't paying attention to him, and he tracks her gaze, his eyebrows shooting up, before he slowly starts to smirk, as if he's reluctantly, knowingly amused by the way Pansy's cheeks are flushing darker and hotter and pinker the longer she stares at Charlie.

"Ch-Charlie," Pansy stammers, tripping over the two syllables in his name. "I didn't expect—hi. Wow. Um. Hey. This is a—surprise."

Charlie squints down at Norbert, who's milling around the side of his tank, attempting to locate his lunch, the hollowed, beady, scarred-over sockets of his eyes gleaming like patchwork leather under the scorching glare of the sun. 

He can't fucking believe this.

He can't fucking believe he'd thought she wanted him to—

He can't fucking believe he'd been avoiding her, avoiding the necessity of having to confront his own indecision, and all the while she was—

He can't fucking believe this.

The guy she's very clearly on a date with looks between Charlie and Pansy, that god-awful fucking smirk dimming, slightly, twisting in on itself with confusion. His face is pointy. Narrow. Pretty. Charlie guesses he's another one of those sixth-generation yacht club assholes Pansy's father likes to set her up with—but she'd been laughing. Happily. Sincerely.

Charlie had heard her.

"Pansy, wow, hey," he says mechanically. He sniffs, realizing he still has dead fish slime on his forehead, and ducks down to snag a towel out of a nearby cooler, scrubbing at his skin hard enough to leave it stinging and aching and red and raw and tender. "This is—yeah. A surprise. Wow."

"Wow," the bleach-blond douche drawls, looking askance at Pansy. "This is the shark guy?"

Charlie rips both of his gloves off and crouches down next to Norbert's tank. He's clenching his jaw, bone creaking ominously under the pressure, and shit, shit, he's fucking abysmal at this. Masking his feelings. Pretending he's fine. It's why he's such a shitty liar.

"Shark guy?" he grits out.

Pansy chokes, hastily stepping forward, unlatching herself from the blond guy's arm so she can move closer to Charlie. "I may have...mentioned you," she says, pursing her lips and glancing at Norbert, doing an almost comical double-take. "Oh, my god, he's huge."

The blond guy snorts. "That's what she said."

Charlie rolls his eyes—a little too viciously, judging by the sharp, puzzled frown levels him with—and sticks his hand into Norbert's tank. "Yeah, tigers can grow up to twenty feet. Norbert's a big boy."

"Is he—"

"Blind, yeah." Norbert bumps his snout against the inside of Charlie's wrist. "We found him when he was a baby, but—hey careful, he's not—"

Pansy dips her fingers in the water, drawing Norbert's attention; he swishes his tail, rubbing the top of his head against her knuckles, and her expression softens, mouth curling up in a small, decidedly awestruck smile.

"He's so friendly," she coos, seemingly unbothered—or just oblivious to—how rough Norbert's skin is. "He's so cute. Yes, you are, you are so cute."

"He's...not, actually," Charlie says, dumbfounded, watching her—Christ—gently pet Norbert's nose. "Friendly, I mean. He is—the opposite of friendly."

"Really?"

"Yeah. He's normally—well. He's normally kind of an asshole."

Pansy giggles at that, lifting her hand, shaking off the water. "I think he likes me."

"What?"

"Norbert," she teases, strolling back over to the blond guy, who's blatantly yawning into his fist, phone held up to his ear. Padma is nowhere to be found. "I think he likes me."

"Oh," Charlie says shortly. "Right."

Pansy hesitates, hovering between Charlie and the blond guy, like she isn't quite sure what she's supposed to do now—and Charlie feels just as cumbersome and awkward as he did the first time he'd stepped into her bakery, just as painfully, fundamentally aware of the holes in his jeans and the calluses on his palms and the salty, rust-brown stains on his t-shirt, all of it, all of him, standing in starkly inadequate contrast to the guy she's actually on a date with.

Charlie wonders if he hasn't been lying to himself, a little—if he hasn't been assuming more than he's been listening. Had she ever even acted, for more than a millisecond, like he was anything other than just another customer to her? 

Just another fucking Weasley?

Charlie blinks, rapidly, licking his wind-chapped lips, crossing and uncrossing his arms over his chest, and Pansy decisively opens her mouth, her eyes trained on his face—

The blond guy nudges her with his elbow. "Hey, what's-her-name, that girl—Padma—she said to meet her over at the observation deck before we go, and also my mom called, she left a message, she wants to have dinner with us later. To thank you."

Pansy flinches backwards, startled. "Um," she says, and then nods briskly, almost as if to reassure herself of something, turning back to the blond guy and reflexively tossing her hair. "Yeah. Okay. Let me just..." She sneaks another glance at Charlie, offering him a weak smile. He doesn't smile back. She visibly falters. "Oh. Um."

Charlie's stomach lurches, churns, tightens around an unforgiving stab of what he refuses to acknowledge is jealousy—because he isn't fucking jealous of some spoiled little frat boy shit, no matter how easily he can make Pansy laugh, no matter how fucking smug he looks as he places a pale, long-fingered hand on the small of her back, guiding her towards the stairs on the far side of the deck.

Charlie squeezes his eyes shut.

He then spins around, furiously snapping his gloves back on, somehow managing to knock over an empty metal bucket as he hunts for Norbert's fish.

"Bye, Charlie," Pansy calls out, too carefully. "I'll...see you."

Charlie grunts, not bothering to respond, and it's ridiculous and it's rude and it's mean, it's exactly the kind of petty high school bullshit Ginny used to tell him stories about, the kind of petty high school bullshit that a much younger version of him might've pulled if he'd ever cared enough about anyone to feel like this, out of control and out of ideas and out of character.

Except—

It isn't, not really.

This is who he is.

This is what he does.

He wants and he denies and he evades and he wants and he breaks, he takes, he uses, he inevitably loses interest, he drifts and he drifts and he drifts and—he leaves. 

He forgets.

Footsteps sound from the rickety spiral staircase, steadily moving away from him, and there's muffled voices and fragile laughter and a sweltering mid-afternoon breeze and Charlie is violently, overwhelmingly sick, all of a sudden. Nauseous. Regretful.

Shit.

Shit.

Fuck.

He goes home in a daze.

He kicks off his boots, takes a scalding hot shower, and stands motionless in front of his wide-open refrigerator door, eyes darting from the vegetable crisper to a carton of eggs to a thawing package of chicken breasts to a leftover, grease-splotchy Domino's box. He tentatively reaches for the eggs, and then puts them back, reaching instead for the chicken breasts, before putting those back, too, and then he grits his teeth and squares his shoulders and snatches the pizza box off the middle shelf, petulantly pushing aside an expired bottle of deli mustard and a half-full jar of pickles.

He reheats three slices of pizza in the microwave.

He methodically picks off the olives.

He stares at a string of melted cheese crisscrossing his plate, unplugs his phone from the charger on the kitchen island, and pops an olive into his mouth.

Bill answers after four rings and far too many seconds of silence. "What?"

"Hey," Charlie says, drumming his fingers along the grout between the counter tiles, "can I ask you a question?"

"What? Seriously?"

Charlie chews another olive. Forces himself to swallow. "What would everyone think if I brought a girl home?"

Bill chuckles, sounding relieved. "Everyone would be really happy for you, I think. Why? Have you finally met—"

"What would everyone think if I brought a girl home who was Ron's age?" Charlie interrupts, sorting through his pile of discarded olive slivers.

"I still...I still think everyone would be really happy for you," Bill says, more slowly. "Especially if she—if you were happy. Are you?"

Charlie puffs his cheeks out. "Okay, but what would everyone think if I brought a girl home who was Ron's age and who I knew, like, for a fact, none of you would like?"

There's a long, audibly tense eruption of static as Bill inhales, exhales, like he's preparing to launch into one of his patently patronizing big-brother lectures about family and responsibility and being a good fucking role model—but then he pauses.

"Fuck. Charlie."

"What?"

"Okay." Bill sighs. "Okay, so, in this...extremely hypothetical scenario—this girl. Do you like her because you like her? Or because you think none of us would?"

Charlie presses his lips together, focusing on the ugly geometric patterned squares and ovals and rectangles peppering the outer edge of his plate, the little brown-black blisters of burnt, bubbly cheese littering his pizza crust; he remembers scraping them off with his thumbnail as a kid. Hating the texture. He must've stopped doing that at some point.

Unbidden, he thinks about Pansy.

How guarded she was when they first met, and how gradually that had changed—because he hadn't even fucking noticed, had he? But she'd fed him weird spicy brownies and she'd teased him about that stupid softball game and she'd laughed with him, laughed at him, and she'd gone from "Oh, fuck off" to "You should be illegal" to "Dip your toe in the other pond, so to speak", and yeah, yeah, he'd been taken aback by how much he wanted her, by how much he liked her, but—

It's easy, now, to admit that.

To himself.

To her.

"Hey, thanks, man," Charlie says, belatedly. "I've, uh, I've gotta go."

He hangs up before Bill can reply.

He shoves his plate of pizza away.

He hesitates—

He grabs his car keys.

The white-and-gold fairytale-inspired CLOSED sign is hanging in the display window. It's dark out, the last straining notes of navy and violet seeping from the cushion of clouds in the sky, but there's a bright, white-yellow light emanating from the back of the bakery, where the kitchen is. 

Charlie knocks on the door.

A minute goes by.

He knocks again, running his tongue over his front teeth, tasting the tinny remnants of olives and garlic and canned tomato sauce; he's nervous, restless, toes curling and muscles twitching and heart jumping—jack-hammering, really—when Pansy appears in the kitchen doorway. He can pinpoint, even through a thick layer of glass, the precise moment she notices him.

She freezes, clenches her jaw, and then stomps over to the door, untwisting the lock and heaving it open with a loud, jangling clatter, her expression impatient and indignant and confused and just the tiniest bit hopeful.

"Charlie," she greets him warily. "What are you doing here?"

She has on heather gray yoga pants and a ribbed cotton tank top, a pastel pink apron loose around her neck, her hair tied up in another lopsided knot on top of her head. Her bare arms are covered in glitter and flour and cocoa powder, green and blue icing smeared across her cheeks, and he's never seen her like this before, messy and careless and so imperfectly put together—so imperfectly staged, he realizes, with a staggering little thrill of comprehension.

"Were you on a date today?" Charlie blurts out. "With that guy?"

"What?"

"Were you on a date," Charlie repeats. "Today. With that guy."

"With Draco? Oh, my god, no, of course not, he's my—" Pansy breaks off, blinking. "Wait, is that why you were being so weird? You thought I was on a date?"

"I was jealous," Charlie says honestly, shrugging. "Sorry about that."

Pansy continues to blink, her gaze pinned to a seemingly random spot just above his left shoulder—but then she spins around and wordlessly marches back to the kitchen, leaving the door open behind her, which he kind of optimistically chooses to interpret as an invitation.

He follows her.

The kitchen is big, with high ceilings and white brick walls and a complex arrangement of copper-shaded spotlights spaced out between the rafters, shining down on the stainless-steel appliances, the army of stand mixers and rolling racks and snowy marble counters, and the air is pleasantly warm, swirling with the scent of sugar and spice and fresh pastry dough, nutty brown butter and cooling chocolate cake.

Pansy is at one of the massive worktables, rolling out a sheet of vivid orange fondant, a vast array of spindly little tools he doesn't know the names of sitting next to a candy-red silicon mat, a row of neatly-cut fondant pieces already filling up the bottom.

"Your baseball game," she starts, smoothing her fingertips around the edges of a ball of fondant; she's molding it, shaping it, turning it into a—fish? "It was for charity, right?"

"Softball," Charlie corrects automatically, before pausing. "And—yeah. It was for charity. Why?"

Pansy holds up the fondant fish. "So is this."

"What?"

"That's why I was there today," she clarifies, snatching up a second ball of fondant, this time in white, and using what might be a miniature pizza-cutter to slice it into short, skinny strips. "Padma, your intern—her twin sister is in Junior League with Draco's mother, and they're organizing a luncheon together to raise money for—I don't fucking know, clown fish, or something, I have a picture I'm supposed to model these after."

Charlie stares at Pansy—at her nimble fingers and her peach-pink lips and the scarily lifelike fish she's currently sculpting, at the tiny jars of edible paint sitting next to her elbow, at the pinched furrow in her brow and the blue-black cloud of mascara around her eyes—and he doesn't feel nearly as fucking stupid as he probably should. She'd made a cursory effort at wiping her makeup off, it looks like, and she has an incredibly faint smattering of freckles on her nose. Sunspots. 

"So," he says, "you're just—"

"Making five hundred cupcakes in two days as a favor for my ex-boyfriend, yeah, like I said, I'm a fucking saint," Pansy snaps, exasperated, dipping a toothpick-sized paintbrush into a cup of water. "Who even still—cupcakes were cool, like, ten years ago, this is fucking dumb."

Charlie hums, his blood beginning to simmer, almost, with a halting little burst of adrenaline. "Closet case?"

"What?"

"Your ex," Charlie says, stepping forward, leaning sideways into her worktable, and crossing his arms over his chest. "You said he was a closet case."

Pansy snorts, and then sighs, and then closes her eyes, tossing her paintbrush aside and tilting her head all the way back. "He was, yeah. A long time ago. Why are you here, Charlie?"

Charlie swallows.

Oh, fuck off, she'd said to him—before anything else had even happened; before anything else could even happen—and he'd reacted to that, to her, like he was seventeen and getting his first tattoo again, like he was trying too hard to irritate his mother and test his own limits and rewrite the definition of the word permanent, all at the same time and all while wearing a too-tight fucking blindfold.

He swallows again.

"I like you, Pansy," he says quietly. "I like you a lot."

Pansy's lower lip quivers, just for a second, and then she clears her throat. "Okay. And?"

"And," Charlie goes on, "I'd really like to have a conversation with you somewhere that doesn't smell like chocolate. Or fish. It's conditioning me, you know?"

She huffs out a suspiciously wet sounding giggle and ducks her chin, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear. "Everyone likes chocolate, though," she says, lashes fluttering as she glances up at him. "Dark chocolate. Bitter chocolate. Right?"

Their eyes catch, then, and he remembers, with a stuttering, impossibly sweet pang, how she'd smiled, small and decidedly awestruck, when Norbert had rubbed his head against her fingers. 

I think he likes me.

Charlie makes up his mind.

He moves slowly—uncrosses his arms, straightens his shoulders, reaches for Pansy's wrist, thumb hovering above her pulse point, tugging her towards him; and he's never touched her before, not like this, not deliberately, not with any kind of intent, but now, now he's bringing his other arm up, placing both of his hands on her waist, tracing the sinuous curve down to her hips, squeezing, memorizing, drawing her closer and relishing the faint, full-body shiver she can't quite manage to suppress.

"Don't forget the—what was it—the fucking red hot chili pepper chocolate," he murmurs, just so he can hear her breath hitch on a tremulous little laugh, just so he can taste what that means when he finally leans down, leans in—

Once upon a time, Charlie was kind of a fuck-up.

Not in any obvious, tangible, measurable ways—he didn't have a dozen different daddy issues or a mile-long vindictive streak or a talent for making wildly unconventional desserts—but in ways that were, even to him, difficult to fully articulate.

He was happy, though.

He was sure.