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Charlotte would be a liar if she said she wasn’t surprised by the sound of the doorbell at two in the morning. Her being a university student, her sleeping schedule was a complete mess, but she didn’t think it very polite of someone to just presume that. She could have easily been asleep. Besides, there certainly was something creepy about having to open the front door in the middle of the night.
So she asked, “Who is it?” first. She didn’t think a serial killer would answer the question honestly, but that still seemed like a reasonable precaution.
“Hello, Charlotte, it’s Babington? With a very drunk Sidney on my shoulder.”
Charlotte opened the door, the light from the front parlour ebbing out into the darkness outside. “Bloody hell,” she said, wrapping herself in her thick cardigan, “it’s freezing!”
“Sorry,” Babington said, half leading, half dragging Sidney Parker into the house. “I think he lost the keys to his flat.”
Because he probably expected it from her, Charlotte rolled her eyes at that statement. She knew most people thought she still actively disliked Sidney Parker. She didn’t want to correct them. What difference would it make, anyway? No one really needed to know about her stupid infatuation with him. It wasn’t as if anything would ever come of it.
Charlotte locked the front door as Babington deposited his blackout drunk friend on the sofa in the living room.
“I thought Tom and Mary would be at home.”
“No, they’re up in London for the weekend, so I’m babysitting,” she explained.
“Ah. Hope I didn’t wake you?”
“No, no. Who’s asleep at two in the morning when they’re twenty-two?”
Babington smiled at that. “Good. Well, is it alright if I leave this drunk fool here to sleep it off? I would take him to mine, but Esther is definitely in bed by now, and I’m still making it up to her for the time I brought a very drunk Crowe home, and he threw up on our living room carpet.”
Charlotte chuckled at that. “Sure.”
“He is usually alright, if you just leave him sleep it off.”
“I know how to take care of babies, don’t you worry,” she joked.
“Alright. Thank you very much, Charlotte.”
Charlotte locked the front door after him, and turned the lights off, deciding to leave Sidney on the sofa. She was going to return to the spare bedroom she slept at whenever she babysat for the Parkers, but her conscience, doing its best to eat her alive, forced her to go into the kitchen and pour a big glass of water. She left it on the coffee table along with some paracetamol. He would probably have a hell of a headache the next morning, after getting as drunk as that.
She wondered what made him drink so much, as she returned to the bedroom. Despite the fact that her opinion of him had once been as poor as can be, she had thought well of him for a long time now, and she knew for sure he wasn’t one to go as heavy on alcohol as this. Something must have happened to make him want to drown his sorrows. Or maybe she was just overthinking it, and Sidney had actually been celebrating something? Or, perhaps, he had just decided to get drunk on that particular night, no reason behind it.
The baby monitor went off, and she had to go upstairs to check on little James, who was teething and could be stroppy from time to time. As she was coming downstairs to the spare bedroom, she was almost scared out of her mind by the tall, dark figure in the corridor.
“Sidney!” she whisper-shouted, her hand on her heart. “You scared life out of me!”
“Sorry,” he slurred. “I thought I was at Babington’s place, and was trying to find the toilet.”
He sounded incredibly drunk. She sighed.
“You’re at your brother’s. I’ll take you to the bathroom.”
“Much obliged.”
Now Charlotte really rolled her eyes. Even when rat-arsed, he somehow remained sharp-tongued. Unbelievable.
He took her hand, happy to be led, surprising her, and making her very much annoyed with how good it felt to just have her hand in his. It was ridiculous, so she did her best to ignore the feeling and led him to the bathroom, which was just down the corridor, but she didn’t trust him not to knock anything over and wake the kids.
“There,” she said, turning the lights on for him, “I’ll wait outside.”
It turned out, however, that he didn’t need the toilet for its primary purpose. Instead, he kneeled in front of it just in time to start throwing up. In his defence, he didn’t make a lot of loud retching noises that Charlotte’s friends would usually make when throwing up drunk. It seemed Sidney was capable of being considerate of the Parker family even when drunk out of his wits. Incredible.
“Well,” she said, sitting down on the floor next to him, “at least you didn’t do it on the living room carpet.”
The process continued for a few minutes, but then, the first round of nausea must have passed, for he stopped expelling the contents of his stomach, and sighed heavily. “I’m sorry. This is disgusting, you should look away.”
Charlotte passed him some toilet roll, which he used to wipe his mouth. “I’m a uni student, Sidney. Do you actually think I haven’t seen vomit before?”
He actually found the strength to smile.
“My first year, we had a chunder chart in the kitchen of our flat. It was like a stupid competition. I was the only one who never got on it,” she shared.
“Why not?” he asked, and Charlotte noticed that he lisped slightly when drunk. She somehow found that endearing.
“Alcohol tastes really bad to me, even in stuff like ciders or beers. I rarely drink.”
He nodded, tired. His eyes were sliding shut.
“Do you think you can sleep now?” she asked him, embarrassed about how gentle her voice sounded, and unable to do anything about it. She really did love him so much. Even when he was drunk and gross. “Yeah?” she looked him in the eyes.
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Let’s get up,” Charlotte helped him to his feet and, having flushed the toilet, led Sidney to the sink. “If you just rinse your mouth,” she cupped her hand to bring water from the tap to his face. “That’s it, well done. Now the towel, yeah.”
He dried his mouth with the towel, and she led him to the spare bedroom, thinking he deserved to sleep at least somewhat comfortably. She could sleep in Alicia’s room, it wasn’t a big deal.
“There you go,” she said, letting him fall face first onto the bed. He turned over clumsily, and she took his shoes off and got a blanket from the window seat where she’d been reading before, not wanting to even attempt moving him off the covers and under them.
She brought the big glass of water she had left for him earlier in the living room, and sat down at the edge of the bed to force him to drink at least some of it. “It’ll help you feel better tomorrow morning,” she promised because he kept frowning, displeased with having to drink it. “Well done,” she said, once he laid back onto the pillow.
Charlotte set the glass on the night table and felt him take her hand in his. “You okay?” she asked, looking down at him, his eyes peering into her. She had this weird wish to caress his face; he looked so tired and sick, she wanted to comfort him somehow.
“I’ll live,” he murmured, toying with a ring on her hand pensively. “You’re so beautiful.”
Charlotte’s heart almost stopped in her chest. He didn’t mean that, surely. Or, if he did, it was just drunk talk.
Deciding to ignore it out of respect for his vulnerable state, she turned off the lights. “Sleep it off,” she told him, and was about to leave, but he wouldn’t let go of her hand.
“Don’t go,” he winged, without even opening his eyes anymore. “Stay.”
Charlotte shook her head. That would be very wrong. “No. I’m sorry, Sidney, I can’t.”
He probably just felt lonely and sad, and didn’t actually want her next to him. He probably wanted Eliza instead. Charlotte knew better than to read into this or take advantage of the situation.
Sidney sighed grumpily, and shifted to adjust his pillow slightly. “I know, I know. You don’t love me. I need to get over you,” his murmurings were somewhat slurred, but clear enough for her to understand. “Just wish you wouldn’t post stuff like that.”
Charlotte frowned, and was confused. “Post what?”
He didn’t respond.
“Post what, Sidney?”
But he was already asleep, snoring softly, his face almost drowning in the pillow.
She stood there, for a few moments, dumbfounded, not knowing what to do or how to live with she just heard. Her heart beat in her chest so strongly, like it was threatening to break out of her ribcage.
He couldn’t have meant that, right? She thought. He was blackout drunk, he probably would’ve gotten his name wrong, if asked.
Charlotte left him in the bedroom, and the first thing she did, on her way upstairs to Alicia’s bedroom, was google, do drunk people tell the truth. She remembered her mother say from time to time, that drunken words were sober thoughts, so maybe. Just maybe?
The first link was to an article about Mel Gibson being pulled over when drunk and making anti-Semitic comments, but was too agitated to read it in detail, so she scrolled through it quickly. The only thing she got out of it was that alcohol couldn’t make you feel things you didn’t feel. So if you said something, it must be true.
She lay in bed next to Alicia, listening to her soft breathing, and mentally debating what to think or believe. The rational part of her told her that taking that as some kind of sign would be wishful thinking, but her heart hoped for his words to be true so badly that she would have believed anything. She was anxious, her heart beating fast, her palms sweating. She wanted to start biting her nails again – something she hadn’t done since she was about twelve.
Sidney had spoken about her posting something. She wracked her brain, thinking of what he could’ve meant. The only social media he could have had in mind was Instagram, since that was the only place where she posted anything at all. She hadn’t used Facebook for anything other than the messenger in years, and Snapchat had been long forgotten by everyone, so that left Instagram. She looked at her profile, even though she knew she hadn’t posted anything in at least a week, and the last thing had been a picture of her and Alison, her younger sister.
But then, she remembered her story. She had gone out for coffee this morning, with James Stringer, a guy in her Architectural Humanities module, and Alison had tagged along. On the way there, Ali had taken a picture of her and James, walking ahead, talking about something. They had been looking at each other, enthusiastic about the topic of discussion (she could not remember now what it had been), and it would not have appeared romantic in any way, had Ali not drawn a huge love heart over them. Charlotte had liked the picture, had thought it was sweet, and had reposted it to her own story.
That could have been what Sidney had meant, but that would have implied he had been… jealous? And that would have been the reason he had gotten so drunk in the first place? No, that couldn’t be true. Why would Sidney Parker be jealous? Someone like him would never be interested in someone like her. That couldn’t be true, she was reading into the whole thing too much. No one took the ramblings of someone as drunk as that seriously.
She did her best to fall asleep, but, in her agitated state of mind, only managed to drift off around four in the morning. The Parker kids didn’t let her sleep in, naturally, and were bright-eyed and bushy-tailed by half past seven. Charlotte felt miserable and hated herself for never going to bed early.
Sidney emerged past ten, looking awful. Charlotte, at that time, was at the kitchen counter, with a book and a cup of strong coffee. She was trying to read, rather than reading, her exhaustion and distracted state of mind preventing her from paying full attention to Howards End, a book that she had actually enjoyed up until now. Now, however, she kept re-reading the same page, trying to comprehend whose funeral the characters were attending, and failing miserably at it.
He acknowledged her with a look of confusion and a hello, as he walked past her and upstairs, and she gave him a tense smile. For the next five minutes or so, she listened to him shower and rummage through things, probably looking for clean clothes and a spare toothbrush. All the while, Charlotte wondered at the thinness of the walls in the house, just to stop herself from stressing about what she was going to say to Sidney. She couldn’t go on like this, she had to ask him about it.
He came back, looking a lot less hungover, but much more tense, and cautious, as if scared of meeting her eyes. “Where are the kids?” he asked, in the process of making himself a cup of coffee and a sandwich. He avoided looking at her. But again, maybe she was overthinking things, as always.
“Arthur and Diana took them out for the morning. Babington called them and said you were here, and they thought I didn’t get much sleep and would appreciate some help.”
He winced, and finally turned to look at her, taking a sip of his coffee. “Yeah, I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s fine,” she waved him off. “I never go to bed before two in the morning, anyway. I would’ve been tired anyway, with the kids getting up at the crack of dawn.”
She didn’t want to mention how it didn’t help that she had been too busy to sleep because of all the mental gymnastics: trying to determine whether there could be any chance he felt for her what she felt for him.
“How are you feeling?” Charlotte asked.
“Like I got hit by a car,” he shrugged.
“How much do you remember?” she decided to ask next, and his gaze snapped up to look her in the eyes.
“Not much before I got here. Or,” he smiled softly, embarrassed, and looked down in that way of his, “before Babington got me here.”
Charlotte smiled in response. “Yeah. You couldn’t exactly walk on your own.”
“No, not at all.”
They were silent for a few moments, the situation awkward in every possible way.
“I also remember that you took care of me,” Sidney said, looking at her, unusually soft and pensive. “Thank you for that.”
“Any time,” her heart did that thing again, where it beat in her chest so hard that she thought she could hear it. She scrunched up her nose, in a half-hearted attempt to relieve tension, “You’re strangely sweet when you’re drunk. It was adorable.”
He snorted at that, and finally took a seat adjacent to her. She thought about how his left hand was inches away from her right. Even that was enough to unsettle her. She was ridiculous.
“Wouldn’t have thought throwing up at two in the morning could be considered adorable, but I’ll take it,” he said, the look in his eyes intense, closely focused on her.
“Do you—” she tried to say it, fear twisting in her stomach. “Do you remember what you said before you fell asleep?”
Sidney pursed his lips, watching her face tensely. “I remember the gist of it. Wouldn’t be able to quote myself, or anything, but.”
Charlotte opened her mouth to say something, but then closed it, not knowing what exactly to respond to that. He sighed heavily, his gaze dropping to the coffee in his cup. “I’m sorry. I know you don’t feel about me that way. What I said last night doesn’t have to change anything.”
She couldn’t believe it.
“I thought you were going to get back with Eliza,” she said, confused.
To say their relationship had gotten off to a rocky start would be an understatement. They both had not been able to stand each other for a long time, even as they’d had to interact anyway, since Charlotte’s parents were close friends with Tom and Mary. Charlotte had done her best to think badly of him, but he had proved her wrong in every way. And, when she had thought that maybe he had started to like her as she liked him, his ex-girlfriend had showed up. The love of Sidney’s life, according to Tom. It had seemed to everyone like the two would get back together, and so Charlotte had taken a step back, not wishing to get entangled in a love triangle.
Sidney frowned, as if he didn’t know why she would even think that. “Eliza and I were over ten years ago, and are still over now. I don’t know why Tom thought I was even considering getting back with her,” he said a little ruefully, still not looking at her.
Charlotte’s heart may as well have stopped. She couldn’t believe what that may have meant. “How—” she cleared her voice, which suddenly sounded husky, because of how worried she was. “How do you know how I feel about you?”
His gaze snapped back to her face, the frown deepening. “What do you mean?”
She smiled at him, taking his hand and toying with it like he had done with hers last night, as she gathered the courage to tell him how she felt.
“For someone so brilliant in many things, you can be incredibly dense sometimes,” she paused. “Did you get blackout drunk last night because of me?”
Sidney was quiet for a few moments, and Charlotte started to think that maybe she’d made a mistake. A huge, monumental mistake that she wouldn’t be able to fix, not ever. But then, he sighed once again (he really did that a lot, she noticed), and said, “Yes.”
“Because of my Instagram story?”
He nodded. “I know that’s stupid, but.”
“You know, Stringer and I are just friends. I’ve known him for four years now, and never liked him. Romantically, anyway.”
“Oh,” was all Sidney said in response to that, as if not knowing how to react or what to do.
Suddenly, Charlotte felt excited. She couldn’t wait for him to know about her feelings for him. It was much easier to be enthusiastic about it now that she knew her love was requited. She wanted him to be in the same position.
“Last night, you said, I quote, ‘I know you don’t love me, and I need to get over it.’ Please, don’t get over it? Because I do love you. I have for a long time now.”
The frown on his forehead smoothed out, and his gaze roamed all over her face, like he didn’t know where to look in his disbelief, and probably trying his best to understand whether he was misinterpreting what was happening in any way.
“So have I.”
They looked at each other for a few long moments, as if soaking up each other’s presence. Then, Charlotte smiled, “Are you going to kiss me?”
He blinked. “Can I?”
“Yes, please,” she said, and they both laughed at that quietly, feeling foolish and very much engrossed in each other.
The kiss was soft and unsure at first, but then it got more intense and passionate, as their excitement grew. He tasted of coffee and toothpaste and of Sidney, and it was everything she’d ever wanted from a kiss. It was very inconvenient, however, to kiss with the kitchen counter in the way, and eventually she got frustrated enough to get up, huffing in irritation, and pull Sidney to his feet. Then they were kissing again, and, impossibly enough, it was even better than before.
She didn’t know when they started to undress each other, or move towards the living room, connected to the kitchen; it only registered in her mind when Sidney pulled away and said, “Wait, wait. Wait.” They breathed heavily, their foreheads touching. Her cardigan was gone by then, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down. “Tom and Mary will never forgive me if we have sex on their sofa.”
“You’re right,” she said, unable to stop herself, however, from pressing light kisses to the corners of his mouth, talking in between them, “we should stop.” Then, she got an idea. “There’s the guest bedroom?”
Sidney looked at her lips, then down her cleavage. “What time are the kids getting back?”
“After lunch.”
“Sounds like a plan.”
And, giggling like teenagers, they disappeared in the bedroom, shutting the door behind them.