Gavin Lucas (viciouscircle) wrote in shadows_rpg, @ 2017-12-23 18:17:00 |
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Entry tags: | #september 2017, charlie, charlie x gavin, gavin |
Who: Charlie & Gavin
What: More work to be done, but mostly talking
Where: Charlie's place
When: Saturday afternoon, 9/23
Status: Complete
It had been a busy day for Gavin, taking the dogs out early before opening the bar, driving out to an edge of town KMart to beat up Jason Randall. Busy. He felt a little better now, at least he'd gotten his rage out of his system for now though he was sure it'd surface again soon when Ollie got wind of what had happened, that was to say if she actually had the gall to bitch about it. He had no doubt she did. Right now he was calm, finally getting that particular nuisance off his mind helped pave the way to go see Charlie again. He brought the dogs this time, curious to see how she'd react to them and, possibly more importantly, how they'd react to her. There was a whole lot of work left to do on the porch but there was some finishing up that needed doing. This time around he'd need the nailgun so he could show that to her if she actually wanted to.
He felt a bit like a dumb teenager as he parked on her street and peered up at her house. "You don't have to stay long," he muttered to himself and took a deep breath before getting out of the truck and opening up the back. "C'mon boys. Let's go see Charlie."
Charlie had woken early to go have breakfast with her mom, as requested. It was a nice meal, once that could have been derailed quite easily when Poppy mentioned her friend Laura calling her the evening before to let her know of the "Lucas boys" tearing up Charlie's porch. Charlie drank her coffee and calmly explained that Aaron and Gavin were fixing her porch, not tearing it up, and while Charlie knew Poppy was searching for more in that statement than the simplistic truth, her mother let it go. Charlie could only imagine the lecture she would get if her mom knew Charlie had an attraction of any kind to Gavin Lucas. His family, that bar, his kids, his wife. But thankfully the conversation steered toward the weather and school and Charlie left the restaurant feeling as good as she had when she arrived.
The grocery run didn't take terribly long. It never did when she only had to shop for one. So Charlie was home by late morning, and she started working on the house, small projects like getting a few more shelves up on the wall and unpacking two more boxes of books that she dragged in from the garage. The hours ticked by although Charlie paid no attention to the time until she heard a truck pull up in front of her house. It had a familiar sound to it and she got up from her place on the floor in front of the book shelf to wander to the front windows. It was Gavin. And some new visitors. Pleased, Charlie watched him unload the dogs from the back of the truck for a brief moment before she moved to the front door to unlock and open it. She stepped out onto the porch and smiled, giving him a brief wave. "Okay, which one is Rude and which one is Max?" Charlie asked as she walked down the porch steps to greet them in her yard.
It was usually easy to differentiate between the dogs using their behavior as Max tended to cower in the back while Rude did the exploring but today both dogs were curious about the new person, crowding Charlie a bit as they sniffed and licked at her hands.
"Easy boys," Gavin told them but Charlie didn't seem to mind so he didn't call them back. She remembered their names too which was a good sign. "The bigger one's Max," he answered her question and he was pretty pleased to see the dogs seemed to like her right off the bat. Having them there was comforting too, he felt a little more at ease than he had the day before, that was for sure. "How are you today, Charlie?"
Charlie certainly didn't mind the attention, and she crouched down so they could get a better feel for her. Grinning - because who couldn't be ecstatic around dogs? - Charlie held her hands out for them and then rubbed her fingers along the jaws and ears. Their tails were wagging excitedly, so she took that as a good sign that maybe they liked her already. God, they were cute as fuck too. Charlie looked up when Gavin asked how she was and her smile softened. "I'm doing great today, Gavin, what about you?" The porch was looking fantastic, but she figured he was there to finish up. Charlie had already noted that Aaron wasn't with him, but it didn't seem like a two person job any longer. Charlie was already wondering if she could convince Gavin to stay for a bit after he finished up.
"Yeah, I'm good," Gavin said with a little nod and it was true, he felt better after punching Randall's stupid face even if he was more baffled now about Ollie's choice in a man than he had been beforehand. The guy was pathetic, to put it mildly. The upside to that was something Gavin wasn't quite sure he could put a finger on but it was there, a sort of vindictive feeling, amusement, spite. Meanwhile he was here talking to Charlie Harris who looked every bit as beautiful and sweet as she had way back when in high school. She could do better but women seemed not to always realize this about themselves which was both a pity and a blessing. "Figured I'd introduce you to the boys... Finish up the porch."
"Well, hello boys," Charlie said to the dogs, still scratching under Rude's chin before his tongue swiped her cheek. She laughed and stood, still keeping her hands down for them to sniff if they wanted to. "You and Aaron have done a great job on the porch," she added as she began to lead Gavin toward the house. "I know I didn't really prove my carpentry skills with a hammer, but if you need any help today, I'm willing. I would rather be useful than standing in the corner watching you." Although Charlie felt like she could do that quite happily, just for different reasons. "Do the dogs need any water?"
"Think we could all do with a drink," Gavin muttered before tutting softly at Rude to leave Charlie alone as the dog was getting a little too pushy. Gavin supposed he couldn't blame him, Rude loved the ladies and there weren't many of them coming by the house lately. "You can always just keep me company out here," he added as he patted the dogs once they returned to his side, bumping into him in their excitement. "And uh, you're gonna have to use the back door for a couple of days after we paint the porch, that's not a problem is it? I could do half now half later if it is."
Admittedly, Charlie was a little surprised when Gavin suggested she stay outside and keep him company. That didn't necessarily mean he would be super chatty, but Charlie considered it to be some progress. Which was a strange way to think about it, she knew. It was probably best not to think about it too much, and just enjoy the day, no matter what happened. Charlie stepped up onto the porch and opened the door for Gavin and the dogs. She didn't mind them inside the house in the least. "It's not a problem at all, I don't mind using the back door," she told him. "Is Aaron coming back to help you paint? I don't mind helping with it if he has other things to do. I'm pretty good with a paintbrush." It would make her feel a little bit better about taking up Aaron and Gavin's time if she was able to contribute a little.
"Yeah?" Gavin said cautiously because if she helped and turned out to be useless with a brush it'd mean he had to correct her and he really didn't want to be an ass to her. "Yeah you can help," he said anyway because chasing her off would be weird. "If you got nothing better to do," he added in case she was just being polite and God, when had it become this hard to talk to people? More accurately, when had he started giving a shit that it was hard?
Charlie had done plenty of painting before, especially since moving into her home, so she knew her way around a paintbrush and some wood. She was a hell of a lot better with a paintbrush than a hammer, at least, and she didn’t want Gavin stuck painting the whole thing on his own. Charlie flashed a grin at Gavin as she led him into the kitchen to get a couple of drinks and a bowl of water for the dogs. “I’ve got nothing better to do,” she confirmed. “It’ll be a nice change from grading papers, to be honest. It’ll go by faster with two of us, and I don’t want to keep you here all day when I’m sure you’ve got other things to do too.”
"Just the bar," Gavin muttered. "Need to be there tonight." He accepted the beer and drank while glancing around. There was something about Charlie's house that made him want to stay there longer, come back more often. To be fair it was probably Charlie herself but the place itself had that lingering feel of her settling in. It felt nice, calm, friendly.
"Don't worry, I got plenty of time to finish up here, especially if you help out... Did you get a good deal on the house?" Was it weird he was already looking for more things to fix? One of the cupboard doors looked a little crooked, not blatantly so but enough that he wanted to fix it. There were other little things but this wasn't his house and she didn't need all the flaws pointed out.
Charlie filled a larger bowl with water and set it down carefully on the kitchen floor for Rude and Max. Then she opened her own beer and leaned against the counter. She was well aware of her home's flaws and the small things she needed to fix or replace. It was a work in progress, for sure. But then again, so was she, so it seemed to fit. "I... got as good of a deal as I could," Charlie said with a small smile. "It needed some work, and I've got a budget, so I took what I could get. It's cozy, though, I like it. What about you, where are you living now?" Charlie asked before taking a small sip of her beer.
Gavin had an unwelcome stray thought that it was a good thing Charlie liked fixer-uppers because Gavin was pretty fucking broken. He pushed that away because no, he wasn't trying to do anything here. Or was he? "It is cozy," he agreed. "Me I got a little house down on Green Street. It's not far from the harbor and the dogs love the beach so that's good, yeah." He cleared his throat, wondered if Charlie would ever show up unannounced on his doorstep like he'd been doing with her. The thought alone had uncomfortable connotations and he wasn't sure which was stronger - the hope she would or the hope she wouldn't.
Green Street was a street Charlie knew well thanks to a boyfriend in high school who lived there on the corner, and it wasn't terribly far from her house now. She wondered which house was his, but thought it might sound a bit creepy to ask him. She didn't want Gavin thinking she was going to start stalking him or anything. "That's one of the nice things about Point Pleasant... you can get pretty much anywhere by walking if you're feeling up to it... and there's not six feet of snow on the ground." Which would be coming soon enough, unfortunately. Charlie smirked softly. "I used to run through the backyards on Green Street as a shortcut to get home before curfew in high school. I remember being chased by a dog or two. Now it seems like everyone has fences in their yards."
Gavin grinned a little at that because he liked fences whereas she didn't seem too happy about it. "Yeah I put up a big fence around my place, don't want the dogs getting in trouble." He also didn't want uninvited people or other things in his yard, it was his space - his and his dogs'. "Bet you would have climbed those fences easy, there isn't much that'll stop kids from going where they want." Not that he really had that problem. His dogs looked scary and even if Gavin knew they would never hurt a child it wasn't as if he was advertising that to strangers.
Charlie didn’t mind fences at all. She wanted to redo her own, after all. But it did speak to her a little about the subtle changes that had occured in her hometown since she moved to New York. People were more private these days, which she supposed she could understand. She grinned and lifted her beer. “I would probably put Spiderman to shame scaling those fences back when I was sixteen,” Charlie said. “Nothing would have kept me from getting home in time to avoid getting busted by my parents. A few splinters or scraped knees would have been better than getting grounded over the weekend. I think just about every teenager in this place tends to figure out the quickest way from point A to point B, even if that includes cutting through private property from time to time.”
"Especially if it includes cutting through private property," Gavin admitted with a lopsided grin. He remembered her well as a teenager though their paths hadn't really crossed much save for at school. She'd always been there in his peripheral vision though, when they attended the same parties or school events. he'd been drawn to her then and still was though he still felt the same way as he did at fifteen - that she was too good for him and yet always so nice to him for some inexplicable reason. "You don't think you could scale them today?" he asked. "I bet you could."
Charlie laughed, trying to imagine herself climbing over six feet privacy fences in town. It was an amusing mental image for sure. Knowing her luck lately, she would end up getting her clothes stuck on something, or falling and breaking a bone. Charlie stayed pretty active and she tried to exercise when she could, but she hadn't dealt with climbing over fences since she was a kid. She glanced out into her backyard and to her own crooked fence. How many kids had jumped that fence to cut through the yard before she moved in? Or even after. "I think I could," Charlie said finally, her eyes dancing with amusement as she returned her attention to Gavin. "But let's hope I never have to try. I'm not a much better runner than I am a climber. Thankfully I no longer have a curfew I have to race home to meet. Maybe if you're willing to help me put a new fence in, we can test it out, see how difficult it'll be for the kids in this town to climb."
Gavin couldn't help but chuckle when she laughed because it was infectious and God she looked pretty when she smiled like that, that hadn't changed. "These kids today all know parkour," he muttered. "The only thing keeping them out of my yard is they're scared of the dogs." Or possibly him, probably both but he wasn't about to say that to Charlie. She'd find out soon enough that he was a dirtbag, hopefully by then he'd earned enough good will for her to ignore it. "You're really putting in a large fence?"
Charlie had no idea what parkour was, but there were a lot of things students in her classes said that prompted pause from Charlie. Her own memory of 'slang' dated her, just as it would date all of them in due time. She realized that his dogs were sweethearts, but they could be mistaken for mean just from the looks of them, especially for trespassing kids. Charlie didn't think for a second that they would avoid Gavin's yard because of Gavin himself. She knew full well the Lucas reputation, but all Charlie knew of Gavin was that he was a quiet guy. A bit stoic, but he had been that way for as long as Charlie could remember. She had never thought of him as 'dangerous' or even mean. Maybe that was because he had never been mean to her. Charlie shook her head and pushed her hair back behind her ear. "No, I think I'll go more for a four foot fence. I don't want my yard to feel too closed in. I think anything higher sort of deters neighbors from talking to each other too… which I understand is probably the point of a privacy fence. Privacy. But I’m not really built that way."
She really wasn't built that way and that was what Gavin had been expecting when she talked about the fence. Something small, something pretty, just enough to keep her flowers or dogs contained and safe but not enough to tell people to stay out. He kept up with the slang better than people expected but that was only because he watched a lot of TV shows in his free time. It was something to do for a guy who didn't get out much except to work and walk his dogs so there was that. "Those kids will scale a four foot fence easy," he said and gave her a little smile again. "So if you're planning on planting flowers maybe don't put them somewhere safer." He glanced around as he tugged his pack of smokes out of his pocket. "Want me to take this outside?"
Charlie shrugged one shoulder softly, figuring she wouldn't be likely to plant anything until spring anyway. It was far too close to winter to want to even break ground. But at least she would have something to look forward to when warmer weather finally came around. Her gaze ticked to the cigarettes before she arched a brow and shook her head. "You don't have to go outside if you don't want to." She pushed away from the counter to push open the kitchen window. "I used to smoke far too much back in the day, but I've cut it down to smoking socially, and I consider this to be social." She turned back to Gavin. "You're willing to share, aren't you?"
"Of course," Gavin murmured, happily surprised by that. "Cutting down is probably smart," he added as he tapped a cigarette halfway out of the pack and held it out to her. He couldn't imagine quitting, even if it killed him far sooner than was his time. So be it. He couldn't even stomach the thought of switching over to vaping either, it just looked so pretentious and all those prissy little flavors were dumb as fuck. The Lucas clan was hardy anyway, old Joseph refused to fucking die for one. "I don't remember you smoking," he said but that didn't mean much. She'd moved away and he'd flunked out of school so he hadn't really seen her much since they were sixteen.
Charlie moved close to take the offered cigarette from the pack and arched a brow curiously. "Would you remember such a thing?" They hadn't run in the same social circles in school, though they had a few classes together over the years before Gavin dropped out. She remembered seeing Gavin at a few parties and out and about from time to time, but Charlie had never thought he'd really given her a second thought, save for the times at school she all but forced him to interact with her. "I started smoking my senior year," she explained. "It helped with stress,and you know, it looked cool." Charlie rolled her eyes. "I quit when Drew and I tried to start a family. Then I just... never picked it up again except for parties, or when I was with friends who smoked." She shrugged. "It's a bad habit, it's hard to shake completely."
"I remember the smokers," Gavin muttered and hoped he hadn't just made it pretty obvious that he'd paid a lot of attention to Charlie at school. He'd been good at hiding it, peripheral vision and all but she had always been on his radar. "There was a group of us always getting into trouble for smoking on school grounds, you weren't one of them." He fished out his lighter and offered her a light before lighting up his own cigarette. He wanted to ask her about that bit about starting a family but it didn't feel like it was any of his business. "Can't be easy being back here," he said instead though the reason why that couldn't be easy was also an intensely personal one. He remembered her sister Joanna. Everyone did. It wasn't the only horrible and unsettling death in Point Pleasant but it had cut closer than most of them. Charlie's sister, he'd wanted so badly to do something for her back then but they'd never been friends and he was bad at social things without tragedy making it even more awkward.
"Oh, no, I never smoked on school grounds. I was a good girl, remember?" Charlie grinned before she took a small drag from the cigarette. It was really her only vice back in the day. Her parents hadn't been happy about it, but they were at least relieved she wasn't drinking or doing 'hard' drugs. Besides, Charlie knew her dad was a secret smoker who hid his cigarettes in the garage where her mother couldn't find them. It had been an unspoken agreement between them that Charlie wouldn't rat him out and her father wouldn't give her grief about smoking herself.
She knew what Gavin was referring to when he mentioned it not being easy being back in town, but it didn't bother Charlie. There would always be a dull ache in her chest whenever she thought about Joanna, but time had healed that particular wound as much as it possibly could at this point. Charlie turned away to open one of the kitchen drawers. It took a big of rummaging before she found the small, plastic ashtray she'd brought home with her. Charlie set it on the counter. "It hasn't really been hard," Charlie said after a moment of thought. "I've come home enough times over the years that the better memories started to crowd out the bad ones. And I think about my sister no matter where I am." She shrugged and brought the cigarette back to her lips as she glanced at Gavin. "Did you ever think about getting out of here? You and your wife?"
Gavin thought about how Charlie had said smoking had looked cool back when she was eighteen and he felt like that immature eighteen year old watching her with a cigarette. It still looked cool, shitty habit or not. Her question threw him a little and he made a soft sound in his throat as he shrugged, tapping his cigarette against the ashtray. "All the time," he then muttered as if it was somewhat of a revelation. Maybe that was why he was always amazed when people left and then actually came back. They'd been out already, why fuck that up? "There was always something though, you know." He didn't correct her about Ollie, even if a small nagging part of him wanted to. She was still his wife, even if it hadn't felt like it for over four years now, technically and in the eyes of the law she still was.
"I know," Charlie said with a nod. She folded her arm under her breasts and enjoyed another puff from the cigarette, the nicotine smooth and calming. She was aware of Gavin's situation thanks to Roxy, but it felt strange to say 'ex-wife' when Olivia technically wasn't an ex. Not in the legal sense. "It's not so bad being back," Charlie said after a moment. "My mom is here, my friends. It's familiar. Sometimes when I'm walking in the halls at the high school I forget I'm not the student anymore. Nothing has changed." She chuckled softly. "Well, some things have changed, but you know what I mean."
"Like everyone's on their phone all the time," Gavin said with a little smile. "Went in there a while ago and I swear every one of those kids had a phone. Don't get me wrong, I love my phone but... remember when we had nothing on those things but contacts and... what, Snake?" Shit like that made him feel old but at the same time it had changed so fast. One minute there was no such thing as a cell phone and the next they were everywhere. "Even my nine year old has a phone," he added with a shake of his head but it wasn't like he was going to let his little girl not have one. It was a matter of safety as much as it was having it as good as her friends.
"Oh! Right. My phone had a very generic looking version of Tetris. And activating the internet button, even for less than a minute would charge like... thirty dollars to the bill," she said with a laugh. Charlie tapped her cigarette into the ashtray. "I have a very strict no phone policy in my classroom. Not that everyone adheres to it, but what can you do. I think there's some benefit to kids having a phone, even as young as nine. At least for safety purposes." As long as they didn't disrupt her class, Charlie didn't care who had a phone these days. "I do sort of miss the days before smartphones and I know how old that makes me sound. It felt easier somehow."
"Really?" Gavin asked since he felt exactly the opposite. He liked texting and he liked having information at his fingertips but then he also didn't have any problems ignoring calls or turning his phone off. "Do you feel like you have to pick up every time it rings?" he asked, guessing that was her problem with it. That constant availability, people expecting her to always be there. Gavin didn't give a shit. Sometimes he put his phone on Do Not Disturb, only allowing calls from his kids to come through. Then again people knew he was a grouchy misanthropist so they weren't expecting more from him.
"Only if it's my mom," Charlie said with a soft laugh. "It's just... the constant updating of everyone's lives. Oversharing at my fingertips. I don't know, it's hard to explain." She had a Facebook, as did most people these days, though Charlie had been avoiding social media for awhile now. She wasn't 'friends' with Drew, but they had mutual friends, and it was impossible to avoid all the evidence of his happy new life. What was worse, was that the urge was always there to look, to torture herself with it. "It is nice to have answers and information so readily available, though. Not so much when you're trying to educate a bunch of teenagers more interested in sneaking a selfie in class." Charlie grinned at Gavin. "I'm going to take a wild guess here that you're not on social media."
Gavin huffed a little laugh at that. He guessed he was just that predictable because no, he did not indulge in social media. More accurately he didn't torture himself with the damn thing. "I get more than my share of that nonsense through the bar," he said and it was kind of a wonder how often she was making him smile today. "With less advertising and viral marketing too." He arched his brows as he remembered something and then grinned at her again. "I did have a MySpace back in the day for a very brief period of time."
"I bet you dread every single time you've got to work the bar," Charlie said, amused. He wasn't much of a talker, and she couldn't see him taking on the role of a typical bartender who might willingly listen to everyone's troubles as he refills their liquor. He may listen if he had no other option, but Gavin Lucas doling out advice was difficult to imagine. She snuffed out her cigarette as her smile widened. "You had a MySpace? Oh, I would have loved to have seen it. I would say mine is probably still floating out there in the internet ether, but I don't think MySpace even exists anymore. Do you remember who was in your top eight?"
"I have no idea," Gavin admitted and while he did remember Ollie had been there he didn't want to bring her up yet again. "I remember a lot of bands popped up on there, it got a little annoying." And that was all those social networks really were: advertising, whether it was yourself or your company or your band. Not to mention 'friends' you forgot all about if they weren't active for over a week. "How many social media accounts are you juggling?"
Charlie couldn't remember her own 'top eight' beyond her two best girlfriends at the time. And probably a boyfriend, or a crush or two. She could remember constantly changing her 'song' though, depending on her mood. A part of her wished MySpace was still around so she could go online and try to find Gavin's teenage profile to see how much had changed between then and now. She folded her arms under her breasts and leaned against the counter again. "I only have a Facebook page," she admitted. "But I use it mostly to stay in touch with extended family and friends who have moved all over the country. Honestly, I can't figure out any of the other social media platforms and Facebook seems like more than enough for me. My life is not exciting enough to spread it out all over the internet."
"For the whole world to see," Gavin tacked on with a look that said more than words. "That's just asking for trouble anyway. It's good for business though, I guess." The Back Porch Pub had a facebook page but Gavin had as little to do with it as he possibly could, it was a good way to get out-of-towners to swing by and not much else. It was probably hypocritical of him that he wanted to see Charlie's facebook page now but that was neither here nor there.
Well, he had a point there. Complete strangers could see aspects of her life if they really wanted to. Charlie just couldn't imagine who would want to, or why. She rarely posted anything personal on her Facebook. Her problems weren't anyone else's business. But she kept a lot of her photos online. So many people did the same without any real thought as to who might be looking. "Free advertising," Charlie agreed with a small grin. "Although I doubt you need a lot of it here. Yours is the only decent bar in Point Pleasant." One of the only bars, really, but that was beside the point. "I try to keep my own page pretty simplistic, just in case a co-worker or student stumbles across it. Thankfully there seems to be an abundance of 'Charlie Harris's' online, so it would take some effort for them to find it in the first place."
"Out of all the bars in Point Pleasant," Gavin said with a little grin. "Mm the competition is rough." He had a feeling his bar would be even better if his old man didn't perch there every day being the snake that he was or if Gavin and Caden could keep their tempers in check but most days it was pretty good. At least Joseph didn't smell like the bum he really was so he wasn't scaring off customers.
"Lets see how hard you are to find," he muttered, placing his cigarette between his lips and keeping it there as he pulled out his phone and opened up a browser. Sure, part of it was to show her she wasn't as invisible on there as she probably thought she was - unless she had everything locked down tight and private - but part of it was also curiosity.
Charlie stayed leaning casually back against the counter, amused as Gavin took out his phone. It was an oddly appealing visual image to her. Gavin Lucas standing in her kitchen with a cigarette dangling from his lips as he searched for her Facebook on his phone. Maybe it wasn't all that odd, actually. The Lucas brothers certainly had their reputations, but they had also always been known for being stupidly good looking.
She realized she was staring, and also that her face had gotten incredibly warm, so Charlie cleared her throat and smiled. "I think you need to have an actual Facebook page to locate other pages, don't you?" She honestly didn't mind if he found it, mostly because she hadn't been lying when she told him her life wasn't that exciting. He would probably just find her page and be done with it. She didn't expect Gavin to actually look at anything.
Gavin let out a low growling sound because she was right and as soon as he hit the page he couldn't search or do a damn thing without making an account. He hummed and opened a new tab, not really deterred by that and a few seconds later he found that if he simply searched for her name and facebook on Google there was a way around it. She was right though, there were hundreds of people with that name and if he tried to search by location he hit the same wall. He took the cigarette from his lips and tapped the ashes off, breathing smoke through his nose when he glanced up at Charlie again. "Some of these are public," he muttered and arched a brow at her. Was she blushing? It was faint but there was definitely more color in her cheeks than before. "Is yours?"
Charlie arched a brow as she watched him on his phone. He had already put in more effort than she thought he would trying to track her down. It was honestly amusing, though Charlie realized she wasn't sure if he was just trying to prove a point, or if he was just using it as an excuse to be able to look at her page. Almost immediately she began to wrack her brain on what she actually had posted there lately. Not much in the way of updates. But there were plenty of pictures, all organized into specific albums. Her school back in New York, her family, friends both from New York and in Point Pleasant. Work parties, vacations she had taken with Drew. Plenty of Drew, but not for over a year or so. Charlie supposed it was time to delete them all, but she hadn't been able to do it yet.
She fought the urge to distract Gavin from his quest and instead began to chew nervously at her thumbnail before she recognized the bad habit and dropped her hand from her mouth. His question drew a dumbfounded kind of look from Charlie before she chuckled. "I think it's public. I should probably change that now that I'm home in case some students get curious. My profile picture is a cup of coffee I got from Joyland, if that helps. Yes, I know it's boring, but I'm not much of a selfie taker," she explained as she leaned over a bit to see how far he'd gotten on his phone.
Gavin scrolled down a couple more strokes. "That'll make you harder to find," he said in a tone that sounded approving, even if a part of him hoped she wouldn't go make her profile private before he could have a peek. It was weird, he didn't really care about people's social media or spend this much time with anyone that wasn't family. "There's a lot of people with obscure pictures," he added with a hum then clicked one that on the small thumbnail looked like a cup of coffee. "Not that hard to find," he murmured though he wasn't sure it was actually her profile until the preview photos loaded.
Charlie cringed a bit, because she recognized the photo as her own and he had found it rather quickly, although Charlie figured that was because she had helped him out a bit. She nearly went back to chewing on her thumbnail again. How had this conversation suddenly turned to Gavin pulling up her Facebook page? She should have steered him clear of it until she'd had time to clean it up. Charlie was acutely aware of the fact that it was ridiculous for a grown woman of thirty four years to be worried about impressing a guy she knew from school back in the day. It wasn't that her social media was embarrassing or anything. It was actually quite simple and to the point. But it was also her life, and it felt like it would be so completely open for Gavin to see if he wanted to. "For all the world to see," Charlie added. "Or... whoever decided they wanted to see it."
"Not unless you're logged in," Gavin said somewhat reassuringly as he showed her the demand for logging in he got if he so much as tried to view anything on her profile. It was a strange and unwanted incentive to actually get an account and he closed the tab with some bemusement before stubbing out his cigarette. "You wanna go paint the porch?" he muttered, recognizing he had made her a little uncomfortable though he was utterly unsure how to handle it. Mentioning it would just make it worse so letting the subject go entirely seemed like a safer bet.
There was some relief that he needed an account to see anything on her profile. It wasn't that Charlie wanted to somehow ban him from it. It was just that it felt like there might be something there Gavin would see that would trigger... something. Pity? Amusement? That despite how innocent her Facebook page was, Gavin would somehow be able to track the downward spiral of her life from Point A to Point B and decide she wasn't exactly worth knowing. Again, Charlie knew it was a ridiculous thing to think, but it was there, festering. Drew's fault, probably. She had always had her insecurities well in hand before he tossed them all in her face. Her gaze ticked away from his phone and she recognized he was letting it go, for which she was thankful. "I do," Charlie said with a small smile as she pushed away from the counter. She moved past him, touching his arm briefly. "Let me go change into something I don't mind getting ruined first, and then I'm all yours."
Gavin knew very well what she meant, of course he did, but the words 'all yours' still prodded at something inside of him he'd all but forgotten was there. "Alright," he muttered and finished his beer, setting the bottle down by the sink. He watched the dogs while she as away but his mind was elsewhere, trying to make sense of all of this, of Charlie and the weird ass shit he was feeling for her. It was honestly better not to think and he smiled faintly when she returned, pushing away from the counter to head on outside.