Free Belle of the Brawl by Lisi Harrison Page B

recent years on love potions that actually worked. She’d ask her fellow IM’s. Someone had to be making progress with pheromones in a lab somewhere.
    Darwin executed a hard left in the PAP, sending Charlie’s puff-sleeved shoulder into contact with his blazer-covered one. An electric surge of longing rippled through Charlie’s arm and shot through her body, down to her toes. She snucka peek at Darwin and saw a dimple sinking deeper into his cheek as a lopsided smile emerged on his mouth—a sure sign that he felt it, too.
    “Remember when we built that house in the favelas?” He sighed wistfully.
    Charlie nodded, her mind traveling back to the slums outside of Rio where shacks made of nothing more than cardboard and corrugated metal dotted the mountains. She and Darwin had spent a week working with other volunteers to construct a house for a family with six kids. They’d hammered nails and drilled screws in hundred-degree heat, and Darwin had even injured himself when a cinder block fell on his foot, but it was all worth it when the family saw the simple house once it was built. The mom and the two oldest kids burst into tears, hugging Charlie, Darwin, and the rest of the crew over and over.
    “Of course I remember. That was amazing,” Charlie said quietly. “I hope we can do something like that again this summer.”
    “I was just thinking about the foundation of that house. How we had to flatten it and measure it a thousand times before pouring the concrete. And then, the rest was easy.”
    “Yeah… ,” Charlie murmured, not quite sure where Darwin was going. It hadn’t been that easy to build the rest of the house. And more experienced people did a lot of the hard stuff, but she guessed she saw his point. In some ways,Charlie thought, they were so different. He could be so enigmatic and abstract, where she was all about practicality. He was drawn to music and philosophy, and she liked taking stuff apart and rebuilding it, working with her hands to get tangible results.
    “That’s what I want. With you. I want us to build our foundation again, to make it rock solid.” His hazel eyes met hers, and Charlie was surprised to see they shone with emotion. “Once our foundation is strong, we can do anything. We can build our dreams.”
    Charlie swallowed hard, pushing a pining ache for him back down her throat. “I want that, too.”
    Darwin leaned toward her, his knee touching hers. She shifted it away, pretending not to notice what was happening. His eyes searched hers out, but she looked down at the clear floor of the PAP, her eyes focusing on a group of three Alpha girls chasing Dingo on the beach.
    “Charlie?”
    “What?” She looked up, plastering a look of innocence across her features.
    “Then why are you being so distant?!” Darwin furrowed his brow.
    “I thought you understood. I thought we had an agreement.” Her voice was flat and emotionless, but inside her heart was whirling faster than a weathervane during a lightning storm. Why couldn’t Darwin wait a tiny bit longer?
    He rolled his eyes and made a sound in the back of his throat that sounded like he was choking on exasperation. “What agreement?”
    “We decided we would play it cool until Allie was over you, remember?”
    Darwin shook his head. On the Darwin-ometer, Charlie knew that after anger came stony, furious silence.
    “I don’t want to be accused of stealing my best friend’s crush!”
    “But didn’t Allie steal
your
crush?”
    “No,” Charlie said quietly, trying to calm things down before Darwin’s iron curtain fully descended. “I set her up with you when we were broken up, remember? I encouraged it….” Charlie sighed, grasping for the right words. It sounded crazy in retrospect, but at the time it seemed to make sense to set up Allie and Darwin. Connecting him with Allie had been Charlie’s only way to keep him close, to make him happy after she’d dumped him.
    “And now, she’s more important to you than I