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Waiting for Charles had become a habit. If only the guy would be reasonable and agree to have his tutoring sessions in the library like most of the other people who requested Derek’s services.
This put Derek and Anne, and occasionally Charlie, in interesting positions.
One afternoon it started to come to a head. She had let Derek in, telling him that Charles was running late. When she returned to the living room to play with her nephews, he followed her, settling into one of the sofas where he could watch for Charles to get home.
Ten minutes later, Charlie knocked on the door. “Is Etta here? She told me to meet her here.”
“She went shopping with Isa and Mary. They’re upstairs looking at their bounty now. Just go to the living room and hang out with Derek and I’ll let her know that you’re here.”
“Derek’s here?” Charlie’s face blanched. He was the last person Charlie wanted to be stuck in a room with even if Anne was acting like a buffer.
Anne, moving towards the stairs, didn’t see his reaction when she confirmed it and then called up the stairs to Etta.
Returning to the living room, she didn’t notice the guys were carefully avoiding the other. Instead, she noticed the smell coming from her youngest nephew. “Oh great,” she mumbled. Looking up at the ceiling, she was tempted to call out to Mary to take care of her offspring, but she also knew it wouldn’t do any good.
Reaching for her smelly nephew, she held him within arm’s length as she carried him over to the corner of the room where somebody had dropped the diaper bag. “Please don’t have escaped the diaper,” she whimpered. “Please don’t have escaped the diaper.”
Kneeling on the floor, she pulled out the portable changing mat and situated everything around her. She even pulled the nearest trashcan towards her.
“Anne!” Little Charles called from his place in the playpen. “Play!”
“I’ll play with you in a minute,” she called back. “I have to change the baby.”
“Play!”
She didn’t know that he had figured out how to escape the playpen until she felt the little hands climbing on her back as she attempted to change Baby Henry’s diaper.
“Little Charles, get off my back,” she sharply commanded, trying to turn her head to get her nephew’s attention. It would be so much easier if Mary didn’t pitch a fit every single time somebody tried to call the toddler ‘Charlie’.
Wiggling around on her back, his tiny hands managed to snag in her hair, pulling it. Anne once again cursed not pulling it back in a ponytail, but she’d stopped trying to tame the mess as soon as she grew tired of being the meek and quiet Anne Elliot. “Ouch! Little Charles, that hurts! Get down!”
Trying as she might, she couldn’t move her head enough to look at where Charlie Hayes was playing on his phone with his headphones in, steadfastly ignoring both Anne and Derek’s presence in the living room.
She had thought, originally, if she had gotten out of their line of vision that she could change Baby Henry’s diaper without grossing either of the guys out. Anne had not taken into account that Little Charles – why couldn’t that kid have a nickname, even if it was his middle name! – could escape his playpen and did when her sister, Etta, and Isa were upstairs giggling over the haul from their shopping trip.
A shopping trip Anne had not been invited to join in on as somebody needed to watch the boys and Allie Grace already had plans.
“Charles!” Anne snapped, about ready to cry as his combined weight pulled on her head. “Get down!”
A moment later, the weight was lifted as somebody, she assumed Charlie had finally looked up from whatever it was he was doing, removed her elder nephew off of her back. It wasn’t until he had passed in front of her to return the boy to the playpen that Anne realized it had been Derek who had helped her out.
“Thank you,” Anne said, unable to turn around to fully look at Derek as she still had Baby Henry in front of her.
It didn’t matter; Derek had taken to playing with her nephew in an obvious attempt to avoid having a conversation with her. She could hear the train sounds he was making as he rolled the toy around the top of the playpen in an attempt to keep the toddler’s attention.
Later somebody would have to figure out just how that barely two-year-old child had escaped.
Finally becoming aware that something had been going on, Charlie looked up from his phone. Noticing that Derek was no longer sitting on the sofa and that Anne was still kneeling on the floor, Charlie started to glower at Derek and barely said a word until Etta had walked down the stairs from raiding Anne’s closet.
“Hey, Anne?” the girl asked, “Can I borrow your dress?”
“Didn’t you just go shopping?” Anne retorted instead of giving Etta a yes or no answer.
“Well, yes,” Etta drawled, smiling at Charlie and then at Derek. “But I didn’t buy a dress.”
Only it didn’t have the reaction that Etta was expecting, and Anne could have warned the younger girl that she was playing with fire if she thought that trying to make Charlie jealous was going to help her situation any.
“You know what,” Charlie said as he stood up from where he had been sitting. “I just got a message from one of my friends. I have to go. He needs me to help him do...something.”
Derek and Anne both quietly watched the exchange.
“But...” Etta stumbled. “I thought... I mean... We’ve been planning this date for a week.”
Shrugging, he grabbed his jacket and looked at Etta. “Sometimes things change. People change their minds.” And with that parting shot, he got up and left.
Isa, her timing perfect as always, then came down the stairs, Mary close behind her. “Was that Charlie?”
“Oh, did Charlie leave?” Mary innocently asked. She still favored Derek for Etta, even if he had never shown a preference for her.
Come to think about it, Anne idly thought as she watched the calculating expression passing over Mary’s face, he didn’t actually show a preference for Isa either. It was the girls who were always approaching him.
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It didn’t take a very long time for Etta to realize she had made a huge mistake when it came to Charlie Hayes. After unofficially dating for about six months, including the time they spent apart during Summer Break, she wanted to shake herself for letting her eye wander in Derek Worth’s direction.
She wasn’t a complete twit, unlike her sister-in-law and on occasion her own sister. She liked talking to Charlie about anything and everything. They’d even had some interesting conversations a few times when Isa wasn’t interrupting them and Mary wasn’t begging for attention.
Etta was very much aware that she had majorly screwed up with Charlie.
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Later that night, Sophy found Derek working out on the treadmill in the exercise room. She couldn’t know that he had already used the barbells, the bench press, and the elliptical all in an attempt to get his brain to shut down and let him get some sleep.
“What’s the matter?” she inquired from the doorway.
“How do you know something is the matter?” he asked back, not even out of breath as he ran on the treadmill, waiting for his knee to give him a sign that it was time to stop.
“Because you are working out at eleven o’clock at night instead of curled up in bed with whatever history book has gotten your attention.”
“I can’t sleep,” he admitted.
Sighing, Sophy wrapped her housecoat tighter before sitting down on the bench. “What’s the matter?”
“Anne is everywhere,” he admitted.
“I thought this had to do with Anne Elliot,” Sophy stated. “Why did you have us rent this house if you knew it was Anne’s.” She moved into the room and sat on the weight bench.
“I thought it would help.”
“And.”
“It’s not. And then I agreed to tutor her brother-in-law. I didn’t know he was her brother-in-law at the time. How could I know? I deleted all of my social media accounts after...”
“After she gave you back your engagement ring.”
“How did you figure out it was her?”
“Bob deduced it by her reactions that day she came to pick up a box of books she had forgotten. She didn’t have a clue you were my brother and you would be staying here with us. Her father had neglected to tell his daughter that piece of information.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
Derek slowed down his pace, beginning to tire out as he started getting everything off of his chest. “Charles’ little sister, Louisa, has started to cling to me. I don’t think she’s realized I’m not that interested in her.”
“Well,” Sophy grinned, “have you told her.”
“Not in so many words.”
“In any words?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because Anne’s always around.”
She wasn’t really. He knew that he was being hyperbolic, but it felt as if she was always around. In his bedroom... which was originally her bedroom. In his bathroom. He’d even found a loose tampon behind the toilet and toilet paper holder the first week he was in the house.
And of course, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago brochure was stashed away in his sock drawer. On occasion, he would pull it out and torture himself by looking at it. How much would be different if Anne had never been accepted into the art school of her dreams? The dream she had to give up because her sisters couldn’t take responsibility for their own lives.
“Derek,” Sophy softly said, putting her hand on his shoulder after he had stopped walking. “It’s okay to forgive her. She was eighteen and you were nineteen. Most of the time relationships go south really quickly when people are that young. She might have even started to resent you for stealing away her dream, even if you would have been together in Italy.”
“Instead she gets to resent everybody else for stealing it from her,” he bitterly mumbled, angrier on Anne’s behalf than he ever believed Anne had been at the situation.
“I think she’s angrier about her father stealing her college fund.”
“What?” Derek asked, jerking around in surprise at his sister’s pronouncement. “How do you know that.”
“Mrs. Musgraves gossips,” Sophy admitted. “Margaret told me over dinner a few weeks ago.”
“Wow,” was all Derek said, all emotion draining away from him. “Her semester must really suck.”
“Her year, if you think about it. Margaret told me that Anne’s graduating in the Spring, same as you.” Sophy held up a finger as she started counting. “She lost her college fund, she’s living with her sister and brother-in-law and their two boys, she lost the college that she really wanted to attend, she’s having to watch Isa constantly hitting on her ex-boyfriend, who is still angry with her because she had the sense to realize that they were moving forward too quickly.” Waving those five fingers in the air, she asked if she needed to go on.
Shaking his head, Derek admitted he got the picture. Giving his sister a hug goodnight, he returned to his room – Anne’s room – and stared up at the ceiling.
Maybe. Just maybe. He needed to work on forgiving her.
Avoiding her certainly wasn’t working anymore.
