Won't Let You Go | Owen Grady

Chapter Eighteen

Three Years and Seventeen Days Ago

Owen jogged his way up Charlie's cabin stairs, looking forward to inviting her over to dinner. He had been grilling, some ribs with a barbecue sauce he had whipped together himself, and damn it if it didn't smell delicious. And they hadn't hung out in a minute either, which Owen hated. His closest relationship on the island was Charlie, and it was his most important in his opinion. And there had been this sort of nervous bubbling in his stomach, that he wasn't used to. When it came to women, he never got nervous like this. He was always good at being casual, laid back. Relaxed even. So what was it about her that got him like this?

He saw her there, sitting out on her patio, a radio beside her on a small brown table, a cup of something too, and she was staring out at the sea in front of her. He couldn't see her face, she was turned away from him still. Actually, it was pretty weird that she hadn't turned around at the sound of his footsteps on her patio.

It almost felt like he was intruding on an incredibly private moment, a secret side of her, where she did nothing but sit, knee tucked under her chin, staring out at the ocean waves. It was very...intimate, in a way he wasn't used to.

"Hey, Charlie," he said, stepping forward and dragging a chair to sit beside her, finally getting a good view of her face. It was stained with tracks of tears. One was still dribbling down her cheeks and onto the skin of her chest above the edge of her olive green tank top. "What's wrong?" he asked, voice suddenly filling with concern as he pulled his chair even closer to hers, his knee bumping against the leg that wasn't tugged beneath her. "Talk to me, Charlie."

Charlie shook her head, rubbing fiercely at the tears trying to leak out of her eyes still, as if she could attempt to hide the evidence now. Charlie wasn't the type of person to let others see her cry. In fact, this had to have been the very first time he had ever seen her crying. She stared out at the waves still as they crashed against the shore, lower lip tucked between her teeth.

"It's just been a really long day," she hiccuped, sniffling again as she rubbed more at her eyes, blinking a few times afterwords. "Had to do some surgery earlier, on one of the Stegosauri." She shrugged, and Owen studied her closer as she did so. Her hands were shaking a little bit, and it looked like there was maybe some dried blood by one of her fingernails, but he couldn't be certain.

"Okay," Owen replied slowly, "You usually love surgery. What happened?" It was true, she usually did. She loved that she could heal, save lives, teach people new methods of medicine. And she had always excelled at it too. It made her incredibly good at her position that she held here on the island.

"I do, yea," Charlie replied with a shrug, "But the Stegosaurus didn't make it through. I still am trying to figure out what went wrong. What happened. What I-" she cut off, snapping her lips shut and locking her gaze at a point far on the horizon. Owen knew if she finished that sentence she would have been in tears.

It was that evening that Owen really understood a part of her. How much Charlie really did care about the everything she did here. Cared about the dinosaurs because they were alive, not because they were part of the parks property, because they gave them jobs. She was a healer, a helper, and she hadn't been able to do what she came here to do.

So he did what any good friend would do. He held her hand. Let her cry. Brought her food. And he tucked that memory back in his mind, unsure of when it would resurface again.