What He Doesn't Know (What He Doesn't Know Duet, #1)

by Kandi Steiner

“I learned the people we love usually turned out to be one of three things: a home, a holiday, or hell.”

They say there are two sides to every story, and I suppose in most cases, that’s true. But the one I lived inside of? It had three. On the northeast side of Mount Lebanon, Pennsylvania, there was a house. But there was no longer a home.

Charlie Reid was married, she was Charlie Pierce now, and still, it didn’t matter. I loved her, anyway.

“Books aren’t meant to be in perfect shape,” she said when we reached her room. “They’re meant to be read, to be inhaled like oxygen.” Her fingers ran over the spine again, and she smiled. “This book has been breathed. It’s been loved.”

I was asking my husband on a date, but you would think I was telling him I was leaving him for the way I had to swallow past the knot in my throat.

Charlie had always been different. Special. She just never saw it herself.

I knew all too well what she was feeling — that terrible, sickening realization that home wasn’t really home anymore. That what once made it home was now missing.

Those marks on your stomach, while they are forever a part of you, they do not define you. They are not a sign of your weakness or of your failure.” I smiled then, rubbing the pad of my thumb along her cheek. “They are a reminder of your strength, of your love, and of the miracle of life.”

He’d kissed me, sure. We’d had sex, yes. But the passion had been absent — the want, the need, the look in his eyes that he finally had again, one that said he couldn’t live another second without his hands on me.

The want rolling off him in that moment was the most intoxicating drug, one I’d craved for so long.

They were in love, and even given the chance to fly in opposite directions, to put space between them, they always chose to stay together.

It wasn’t Charlie’s job to save me. Even if I wished she would.

I would make Charlie happy again. That was a promise I’d keep.

“I know how it feels,” she said. “That loss, that unfillable void left behind when someone you love is inexplicably ripped from the earth.”

“It never gets easier, no matter how many days or months or years pass. Some days are quieter than others, but on the loud days, on the days when everything you see and hear and do and feel reminds you of their absence…” She squeezed my hand once more before tucking her arms tight over her middle. “Those days are brutal.”

Charlie used to be the unbroken one. She used to be the positive voice of optimism to balance out my angsty teenage depression. So many nights she had brought me some kind of hope, even if I’d laughed at it in the moment she’d given it to me. But tonight, she didn’t attempt to fix the splitting of my soul. She only crawled into the fault line with me, giving me company in the hollow loneliness of it all.

“Not that I think there should be any comparison,” she said after a while. “Or that one loss is more than the other, or that we can measure a loss in the scars and memories left behind — but you have them, too. You have scars.” She pressed a cold, tiny hand over my heart, and I felt the beat of it through her palm. “They’re just not where you can see them. But you can feel them.” She shrugged. “You always will.”

“I wish I could say that hurt goes away, but I know you know as much as I do that it doesn’t. And I know it’s hard to hear, that it’s easier to just put the blame on yourself and wish it was you in their shoes, but there’s a reason you’re still living, Reese. And they would want you to live happily.”

Death changes us. It takes everything we thought we knew about our lives and fast pitches it out the window, shattering the glass in the process. Wind whips in, hard and cold, and throws everything we’d had neatly in place flying around the room. No one is the same once they lose someone they love. They just have to learn to exist in the new world, no matter how messy it is.

Charlie was desperate for Cameron to love her the way he used to, and he was oblivious. Just a man. A stupid, unassuming man.

She needed me like she needed air in her lungs, like she needed books in her hands, like she needed to feel whole again.

We both saw stars. Not the soft, sweet, majestic kind that sparkle in the distance on a dark night. No, we saw the black holes — we became them — two blazing suns burning up in each other’s atmosphere.

“If I am a river, you are the ocean. It all comes back to you in the end.”

But if I was a river, and he was the ocean, then Cameron was the storm that raged over the point where we met. And lightning was about to strike.

They say there are two sides to every story, and it was in that moment, in that dark, desperate snapshot of my life that I realized I hadn’t asked him for his.