Page 23 of Betting on the Best Friend
“So you’ll help me pick a photo?” he asks.
I hold out my hand for his phone. “How many do you get?”
“The limit is five but I’m shooting for the minimum, so two.”
The first picture is a selfie from the shoulders up. He looks cute enough, I guess. Collared shirt that gives vintage rather than business, so it hints at his style. Ditto with his hair that’s too long to be corporate and too short to be rock and roll. He’s wearing his glasses, which he does at work, but not usually when he’s off. The picture says “harmless nerd.” In a way, that’s right. But it’s not capturingCharlie.
“There’s no way they’re that bad,” he says.
I blink and realize I’ve been quiet for a while. “I’m on the first one. I’m analyzing.”
“You have to look at them like you don’t know me and think whether my bio would make you want to swipe right.”
“That’s what I’m doing. Let me concentrate.”
This selfie is wrong, but why? Would I understand enough about Charlie if this is all I had to go on?
All of my roommates have commented at some point that the better you get to know him, the more attractive Charlie becomes. It’s probably because he’s low-key confident, like ithasn’t occurred to him to worry about other people’s opinions. Charlie is also . . . super present? Maybe that’s the way to say it. You always feel like you have his attention, and it makes people dial into him. I see it all the time. Even frazzled or grumpy patrons settle and center around him, as if they realize they can’t possibly inconvenience him. They sense that he believes whatever they need is important, and somehow, that decreases their urgency.
This photo also misses the nuance of Charlie’s smiles. They aren’t all the same, and they give you a window into his personality. The soft one when something makes him happy, wide when he’s amused, crooked when he’s calling me on something without using words. To borrow a phrase from one of my favorite Regency romance authors, he’s got a rogueish smile when he’s about to mess with you. Once, I saw him flash that smile at a patron we’d both agreed was hot, and she looked like she might do a Regency swoon on the spot.
I got it, actually. Charlie hasn’t been in a relationship since I’ve known him, but he’s dated. He has “game,” as my brothers would put it.
This polite librarian smile is generic. I swipe to the next picture, and my eyebrows shoot up.
“Now what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I fix my face. It’s Charlie rock climbing. He’s outdoors in this one, and the photographer shot this from beside and slightly below him. Charlie’s arm partially obscures his face, but that might be the point, because it shows the wicked definition in his shoulders and biceps, and as I scan the photo, his legs too. My theory was right. Charlie is muscly now. Not bulgy gym muscles. Lean, cut, and gold-tanned rock-climbing muscles.
I clear my throat. “This one for sure. But you need a different profile pic.”
“What’s wrong with that one? I looked up a tutorial on how to take a professional selfie.”
“It looks like you looked up a tutorial on how to take a professional selfie. It’s a good picture for the library website. But this is not who Sexy Sydney the Paralegal comes in every Wednesday to see, hoping you’ll ask her out.”
I swipe through his photos, looking for a better option. He’s not much of a selfie-taker. Mostly it’s pictures without a theme. Nature pics he probably snapped while rock climbing. A bright blue plate. A wall of graffiti.
“You need something candid. We still have five minutes. Let’s go take one outside.”
I head for the employee exit, and Charlie follows me to our picnic spot. I point to one of the oaks. “Lean against that tree.”
He walks over to it then hesitates. “With my back? My side?”
“We’ll try both. Side first.” He leans against the trunk, but I start laughing. “What’s going on with your arms, Charlie?” The one against the tree is hanging straight down and his other arm is untethered, by his side but not touching it. “Is it caught in a freeze ray?”
He looks down at it with dismay, like itiscaught in a freeze ray. “I knew how to lean against a tree until you told me to do it, and then I forgot.”
“Try this while you lean.” I cross my arms loosely.
He crosses his arms, and I snap a couple of pictures, but his smile feels stilted.
“Good pose, but think about funny stuff.”
“I can’t do it on command.”
“A spoon with a hole in it,” I say.
“What?”
