[i]Luke was back home for a few months, and Sam had convinced him to book a flight to Nashville to meet his girlfriend. “I’m going to convince her to move up here. I know it. You have to see who I’m talking about. You’ll love her.” And talk about her he certainly did, almost endlessly, even when Luke was deployed and he had few precious moments to video chat him. Charlie and the farm. The farm and Charlie. That’s it. Admittedly, Luke did want to meet her, to see what in the hell got Sam like this. He’d had girlfriends in the past, but none of them had made him overturn his hard-nosed, work-centric attitude like Charlie.

Of course, Sam picked the worst place on Earth to meet a new person. The downtown honky tonk bar was loud, sticky, and horribly crowded. Live music and bachelorette parties in matching t-shirts filled every corner. He couldn’t turn around with hitting someone’s shoulder or accidentally pressing against a stranger’s sweaty arm. His phone dinged with a text from Sam. ‘Grab me a beer and meet me at one of the window seats. I’m going to find Charlie. She’s here somewhere.’ Easier said than done. Luke didn’t have tits, so getting his hands on two Miller Lites was like a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that wasn’t there.

“Fifteen dollars,” the bartender said.

“Are you fucking serious?”

“Seven-fifty each. Price goes up the more I dislike you.”

Luke gave him a twenty, grabbed the beers, and was too busy being pissed to watch where he was going. He absolutely shoulder-checked the girl behind him and drove two fistfuls of bottles into her chest. Foam went everywhere, and he drenched both himself and his unwitting subject. “Jesus Christ – ” he cussed at the same exact time she gasped, “Fucking God!”

He shoved the bottles onto the bar and grabbed her shoulders. “Holy shit, I’m so sorry, are you okay – ”

She wrenched away from him. “Get your fucking hands off me!”

“I’m sorry! Relax! You were up my ass! How was I supposed to see you?”

“Well you took twenty years to order,” she snapped. “I didn’t think you’d move so fast all of a sudden.”

Luke glared at her, and the greenest eyes he’d ever seen glared at him right back. She was gorgeous. And a bitch, apparently. “Listen. I’m sorry. Really, truly sorry, okay? I’ll buy your drinks. I’m meeting my brother, and I didn’t know this place was a money laundering racket.”

Surprising him, she laughed. “Yeah, I hate it here too. I’m meeting someone also – my boyfriend’s brother – and I’m not exactly calm about it.”

Luke looked at her again. Hard. Those eyes, her dark hair, her bright smile. The pictures Sam had shown him. Meeting someone in person was different, especially when she was wearing a beer and yelling at him. “Charlie,” he said softly, finally putting it all together. “You’re Charlie.”[/i]

It had always been this push and pull. They’d vibrate, like two similar ends of a magnet forced together, until one of them turned and they snapped into place. 

“You never said or did anything. That’s not betrayal, Charlie. At least, I don’t think it is.”

[i]Doing it[/i] would be the awful part. It was a dark forest path they both separately agreed to never acknowledge. No good would come from it. A selfish piece of him yearned to know what her version of this betrayal was. Every thought and fantasy. However, her head gently resting at his shoulder told him that it didn’t matter. Right now mattered. That was most important.

Luke leaned against the railing, smoking until Charlie took the cigarette from his fingers. He watched her carefully, knowing she was either going to tell him to kick shit or ask him to stay. She couldn’t keep riding the line like this – she needed to pick one.

And for him – for right now – she picked the exact thing he wanted to hear.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Luke said, voice barely audible as the words lingered in his throat. “I’m staying.”

He wrapped his arm around her shoulder, took back the cigarette with his free hand, and snuffed it out on the wooden railing. Sam always went batshit when he did that. The rain would take care of it. 

“You remember when we first met? When I decked you at the bar and got beer everywhere?” He left out the part about wanting to put her over his shoulder and walk her out the front door. “Sam made you seem larger than life. Sweet, kind, compassionate. He sung your praises to hell and back. And when I actually met you and you were pissed at me, I couldn’t put those two people together at first. We all have multiple sides. Different versions, you know?”

Luke wasn’t sure where he was going with all this as he watched Jake weave back up the barn bath. The shepherd sniffed out his tennis ball, brought it up the steps, and put it at Charlie’s feet before nudging at her knee with his nose.

“We bring out different sides in each other. Good ones. And we can use them to make this place everything that it can be.”

As the sun set over the edge of the barn’s roof, a horrible aching feeling at the back of his throat radiated in his chest. His little brother, the one who’d always worked so hard to knock his moral compass into place, was gone. A cold headstone was all that was left of him, just down the hill. And yet somehow, he was still all around them.

“I fucking miss him, Charlie,” Luke whispered, hoping to hell she couldn’t hear the cracks in his voice. “I miss him so much.”