Page 4 of Say You Want Me
Like she was twenty-five herself. Like she hadn’t spent the last two decades learning better.
The waves hissed against the shore, each retreat leaving dark wet sand behind. She focused on the sound, the rhythm that should have soothed but only reminded her of how her pulse had felt when Taylor had been close enough to kiss.
“You’re quiet,” Taylor said.
She swallowed. She couldn’t explain that she was cataloging her mistakes, adding up the years between them like evidence in a case against herself. She couldn’t admit that part of her—the part that had been dormant since Diane left—kept whispering that it wanted to forget the math entirely.
“Just thinking.”
She was a psychology professor, for God’s sake. She knew better. She’d watched colleagues crash and burn in exactly this scenario—distinguished faculty members seen with women young enough to be their daughters, their reputations dissolving like sugar in rain. The same sick twist now lived under her own ribs.
Except this didn’t feel like the same thing. The way Taylor had listened when she mentioned her divorce, the careful way she’d offered comfort without judgment—that landed somewhere deeper than Charlotte’s usual defenses, and the unfamiliar warmth made her stomach tighten even more.
But it didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter.
If she had turned down the woman at the bar because she was too young, why was she even entertaining the idea of kissing Taylor? The woman at the bar hadn’t been subtle, all glossy lips and eager confidence, and she had felt nothing except a tired wish to be left alone.
Taylor had only looked at her.
That had been enough.
“What are you thinking about?” Taylor asked, cutting through the noise in her head.
She exhaled through her nose. She tightened her grip on her heels and watched the tide pull a silver seam across the sand.
“I told you I turned down that woman at the bar because she was too young?”
Taylor glanced over. “You mentioned it.”
“Well, it’s bothering me that I nearly kissed you.”
Taylor stopped walking.
Charlotte took another step before she noticed. Sand dragged beneath her foot. She turned back and found Taylor staring at her, her face open with such startled disbelief that her own stomach clenched.
“Why would it bother you?” Taylor asked.
“How could it not? I’m probably twice your age.”
Taylor’s mouth curved with rueful patience. “I really doubt that.”
Charlotte lifted her eyebrows and waited.
“I’m twenty-seven.”
The number landed in her body before her mind could organize it. Twenty-seven. She hated that she felt relieved. Twenty-seven put Taylor closer to thirty than twenty, which was a ridiculous distinction and not one she could defend in any room with decent lighting. Taylor was still young. Young enough to have been born after she had finished graduate school.
Charlotte didn’t know why she was still thinking about this. The moment had passed. They weren’t going to kiss. She had ruined it for the second time that night, first by pulling away and now by turning a walk on the beach into an ethics seminar no one had requested.
Taylor stepped into her space. The slow certainty of it made her stomach drop the way it used to when the elevator in her old building plunged too fast. The heels in her hand suddenly weighed ten pounds each, useless anchors dragging at her fingers. Taylor reached up, warm fingertips brushing a wind-tangled strand of hair behind her ear. The touch lit a live wire straight down her spine.
Her breath caught somewhere high in her throat.
“Why are you so worried about being with someone younger than you?” Taylor asked. Her voice had gone low, rough at the edges.
The question lodged in her chest. She should move. She should list every ethical reason, every statistical improbability, every lecture she’d ever given on power and projection. But Taylor’s hazel eyes held hers, steady and patient, and every scrap of theory in her head dissolved.
“Because I’m not far off fifty,” she heard herself say. The words scraped out. “And I don’t want to be a cliché.”
