Through the glass storefront, she couldn't see Charlie at the front cash, which concerned her a little. The poster for the grief group was still on the door and she paused when she spotted the thing. So much trouble over some letters on a piece of paper. Purple letters, at that. Never trust something written in purple letters, she decided. Hard facts were always in black on white paper, preferably bound in a hard cover and printed by a University press.

Kennedy walked into the store, greeted by the familiar faint scent of patchouli and sandalwood. She walked up to the empty till. She'd waited only a few moments before a woman, somewhere between thirty and forty, with waist-length, curly black hair and several facial piercings walked out from behind a stack of bookshelves.

"Can I help you?" she asked in the polite, bland voice of clerks everywhere.

Kennedy sagged. She'd never thought that Charlie wouldn't be here. He'd mentioned having someone else cover the shop once or twice, but she'd gotten so used to him always being here, it was a shock to see someone else in his familiar place at the cash register.

"I'm looking for Charlie. Is he here by any chance?" Kennedy asked. Please let him be here. She wasn't sure she had the courage to try this trip again.

The woman smiled warmly. "Sure, he's upstairs. Hang on and I'll call him."

The clerk picked up a phone behind the counter and dialed a number. She briefly told Charlie that 'someone' was downstairs asking for him. After thanking her, Kennedy wandered among the shelves, not seeing anything, moving in an attempt to burn off some of the nervous energy tensing her muscles and furrowing her brow. She found herself being drawn nearer and nearer to where she knew a set of stairs was hidden near the back of the shop.

Her head snapped up when she heard Charlie's door open. He looked first to the cash register, then scanned the shop. His eyes landed on Kennedy and grew wide.

Kennedy froze in place, drinking in the sight of him. The blue streak in his hair had faded a little since she'd last seen him. He'd not shaved in a day or two, and short stubble covered his cheeks around his mustache and small goatee, though the dark shadow on the lower half of his face only accentuated the perfect planes of his face rather than hide them. Charlie rested a hand against the door still, and the angle of his arm had pulled his shirt tight against his firm chest. He was just as mouthwatering as he'd been the day she'd first walked into this store.

"Kennedy," he breathed.

"Hi, Charlie," she said in a small, tentative voice.

He ran his eyes up and down her body, as if checking that she weren't a mirage, though he didn't move towards her. "It's good to see you."

"You, too. I..." Words failed her. There was so much to say, she didn't know where to start. They all rushed for her mouth at once and got clogged in her throat, preventing any of them from being spoken.

"Can we talk? Would you come up for a bit?" he asked once it became clear that Kennedy wasn't about to finish her thought anytime soon.

"Yes," she said. The word came out in a rush of air and carried echoes of all the things she wanted to say, most of which started with 'sorry' and 'please'.

Kennedy walked over to Charlie, who gestured for her to go first up the stairs, though he didn't touch her. She climbed the stairs, wishing he'd gone first, or that she'd worn jeans that were less baggy in the seat, but she couldn't bring herself to disagree with him, even about something so small, not when he'd offered her an olive branch by inviting her up.

On the way up the stairs, Kennedy resolved that she would speak first. She walked into Charlie's living room and sat on his couch. As soon as his perfect ass hit the cushion beside her, she spoke.

"I'm so sorry that I made horrible assumptions about you. I should have come in that day and asked you about the poster. I was thoughtless and I hurt you and I hurt me and I miss you and I'm so, so sorry," she said in a rush.

Charlie slid closer to Kennedy, close enough that they were touching from hip to knee. He put his arm around her and she tucked her head against his shoulder, warm and comforting.

"I missed you, too, beautiful girl. Scary how much I missed you, actually. It turns out my life is a lot brighter with a bit of hard math in it."

"I was so stupid. I saw that poster and I just freaked. It hit pretty close to home."

"How so?"

Kennedy sighed. "I've had some bad experiences with a medium who claimed to be able to contact the dead. Not me, personally, but the whole family had to watch as my grandmother got taken for a large sum of money. We all missed Grandpa when he passed, but Grandma was shattered by it. They'd been together for forty-five years."

Kennedy snuggled closer to Charlie. He stroked her hair, gently so as not to mess her ponytail. She should have done this the minute she'd had doubts about Charlie. It felt good to share her worries with someone, especially someone who could listen quietly without jumping in with inane advice.

"Grandma went to see a psychic. The woman told her that she could put Grandma in touch with her husband. The first session was full of messages of light and love, and Grandma was hooked. She kept going back, but the so-called psychic suddenly had 'trouble' contacting the beyond. That didn't stop her from charging full-price for each session, though.

"Grandma was so desperate for another chance to talk to her husband that she ended up buying crystals and spells that were supposed to improve the connection with the afterlife. Some of them were extremely expensive, and amounted to little more than rocks and scented salt. But she was in so deep, she kept going, spending all of her small savings, then going into debt. She's on a fixed income and trying to keep a whole house running, so getting out of debt is nearly impossible. That damned woman nearly ruined my grandmother."

When Kennedy finished talking, Charlie let out a long sigh. He took a long time to reply, so long that Kennedy's muscles tensed up as she waited for him to speak.

"First of all, I'm very sorry for what happened to your grandmother. Losing someone in your family is hard enough. Watching someone spiral into self-destructive behavior makes a hard situation even worse," Charlie said at last.

"Thank you," Kennedy said.

"You told me one time how it irritates you when people don't take you seriously because of how you look. For the record, I love the way you look, and I hope you feel like I take you seriously. Brains and a body aren't mutually exclusive. That said, I would have thought that you would know not to lump people into categories. Your grandmother got caught up by a bad psychic, no doubt. But we're not all like that. And I've never called myself a psychic, if you recall, just a reader of signs."

A cold, heavy stone settled into Kennedy's stomach. Charlie was right. She'd made assumptions about Charlie, and negative ones, based on his line of work. Rule one in statistics was to avoid bias lest you skew the results. Make no assumptions. Let the analysis speak for itself.

"You are one-hundred percent right, Charlie. I should never have declared you guilty of someone else's crime."

Kennedy thought about the data she'd collected on Charlie. He'd looked after his mother when she was sick. He'd been considerate and caring with her, especially when she was stressed or tired. Although she believed that the things he sold in his shop were ineffective as magical objects, they weren't offensively expensive, and didn't claim to cure physical illness or promise any other far-fetched results. He listened to his customers, really listened. He liked baseball and buffalo steak and fractals. He looked unbearably sexy when he was drumming.

Charlie pulled his arm out from behind her and turned so he could face her. "Is your dislike of my profession related to your thesis? Is your project trying to prove that card readers are frauds?"

"Oh. Yeah, it is. Not good, huh?"

"Kind of insulting."

"Well, if it makes you feel better, it hasn't been going well. I'm thinking I need to make some major changes."

"How major?"

"Possibly starting over from the beginning. Without bias this time."

Charlie let out a sigh. "I'm still a bit hurt that you could think so badly of me based on so little evidence, but given what you went through, I understand how you could react that way."

"I am sorry about that. Looking back, I'm shocked that I jumped to such an awful conclusion, too. You've been the one pulling this relationship forward, and I've been dragging my feet all the way. We're just so different, you and I. I'm in unfamiliar territory a lot with you. It can make me nervous sometimes."

"We're no so different. You want to know what and I want to know why. We both think family is important, and truth, and learning. We're both trying to be open-minded about the world as we walk through it. We both like baseball, but not crowds. And," his voice dropped and he leaned closer, "I think we both enjoyed that night on the rooftop patio."

Kennedy ducked her head and smiled at the memory. "Yeah, I liked that night. And I like you, Charlie. Maybe that's part of why I pushed you away. Maybe I was scared about where this is going."

"Where do you see this going?"

"If we can convince me to trust more and jump to conclusions less? Anywhere we want."

Charlie laced his fingers with hers. "I'd be a very happy man if I could keep you in my life for as long as you'll have me."

She sighed with relief. "Really? You forgive me?"

"Of course. It would take more than a few hurt feeling to change the way I feel about you."

Kennedy rested her forehead against Charlie's chest. "Thank you," she said to his shirt.

"The way I see it, there's only one thing to do now," Charlie said. He lifted her head until she was facing him, then glanced at her lips with an echo of his pillaging pirate smile and a raging fire in his eyes. "Kiss and make up."