Chapter 34 #2
She steals my ability to answer by announcing that dinner is ready before she slaps the table with the pasta dish she made, spilling some of the sauce.
Dinner is awkward as fuck. Cameron plays the role of perfect hostess, but it’s just that—a role. She asks Macy a range of questions and laughs at the right times, but a ton of hate fills her eyes, and they’re firmly homed in on Macy.
I can’t stand that. Macy hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s the only one rooting for us, so doesn’t Cameron realize that wedging a divide between us is injudicious and immature? No good will come from it. Not for Cameron, anyway.
When it’s time for dessert, I get another reminder from my watch. I fill Macy’s glass again and hand it to her with an apologetic smirk. She rolls her eyes like my apology is solely about overloading her bladder before she sips on the water. Even without using words, she’s a horrible liar.
Eager to get this shitshow wrapped up, I enter the kitchen to gather the pie and plates. I find Cameron at the sink, rubbing her bloodshot eye.
“Are you all right?” My concern feels fake, and I hate to admit it, but it’s time to be honest. I’ve been lying for too long.
Cameron blinks in rapid succession before wincing. “I’ve got something in my eye. An eyelash, maybe.”
“Let me see,” I say, moving closer.
She’s too short for me to get a good look, so I lift her onto the kitchen island.
Her girlish giggle bounces around the kitchen before she angles her head toward the pendant light dangling above us.
We’re close—closer than we’ve been all night.
But there’s no spark. No thickening below the belt. There’s nothing.
“I think I see it,” I say, needing to distract my head from its thoughts.
My hunt for the felonious black lash in the corner of her eye brings our faces to within an inch apart. Her breath batters my cheek, and I can’t miss the flecks of gold in her eyes. We’re so near that someone outside of our bubble could misconstrue what we’re doing.
Which is precisely what happens when a loud crash reverberates from the kitchen’s entryway. I inch back from Cameron before twisting to face the noise. Macy is standing barefoot in the entryway, surrounded by shards of glass glistening in the dim light of the hallway.
“I’m so sorry.” Her voice is shaky. It isn’t in fear or pain. Well, not physical pain, anyway. “It slipped.” Her wet eyes dance between us for two heart-thrashing seconds before she asks Cameron where her dustpan and hand broom are so she can clean up her mess.
“In the linen closet. Third door down the hall.”
Macy is so desperate to hide her inflamed cheeks and wet eyes that she’s forgotten a broken glass circles her. I yell for her to wait, but she’s already moving. As she steps on the shards of glass, she winces and blood blooms from her heel.
I cross the room in three lengthy strides, uncaring that I stomp right through the glass I just warned her about. My foot throbs, but I collect Macy in my arms and head to the bathroom, ignoring the pain.
After setting her on the edge of the tub, I grab a towel and press it against the cuts in her feet. Cameron hovers in the doorway. Her eyes are wide but not at all apologetic. She’s not at fault, but concern is free. It can be given to anyone.
“I’m fine,” Macy says when I hiss upon removing the towel and finding a large shard wedged in her heel.
When she attempts to stand, she howls, and it rips through me like a knife.
“Sit.” I hit her with a stern glare that sees her backside returning to the tub’s rim before I can remind her that I carry my cuffs everywhere I go. I have ways I can make her sit, and not all of them involve an instrument. Most that run through my head include only the use of my body.
After gathering a first aid kit I spotted peeking out of the bottom of the vanity upon entrance, I kneel in front of Macy.
“Stay still,” I plead when her foot naturally jerks from me placing tweezers near the shard.
I can’t hurt her.
I won’t.
I remove the shard with a bit of coercion, wipe her foot clean, and then check for any more felonious debris. A handful of minor cuts surrounds the larger gash, but nothing overly deep or concerning.
“I’ll patch up your foot with a couple of Band-Aids, but when we get home, I’ll need to bandage it properly.”
After she drags her teeth across her lower lip, she nods.
As I mend her foot the best I can with Cameron’s minimal supplies, Macy whispers, “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. You have nothing to be sorry about. It was a glass. I’ll pick her up a new set tomorrow.”
“I’m not talking about the glass.” Before she even speaks, her eyes reveal that she thinks Cameron and I were kissing in the kitchen. “I shouldn’t have snooped. I just…” She chews on her lower lip as she struggles to find an appropriate response. “There’s so much I need to tell you.”
When tears gloss her eyes, my hand instinctively moves to caress her freckled cheek. The tension shifts from distraught to electric with a single brush of my fingers against her skin, and it brightens the hue on her cheeks rather than fading it.
“You can tell me anything, freckles. You know that, right?”
The bob of her chin brings her lips within touching distance. I could use the firmness of her bite as she battles her desires as an excuse to drag my thumb over her mouth, but as I said earlier, I’m done lying.
After tugging her lip free from her teeth, I smudge her lip gloss with my thumb like my mouth is dying to do. The air is heavy with need before a loud huff rips me out of a dream too surreal to be reality.
“Just friends. Right!”
When a black shadow appears in the corner of my vision, I shelter Macy with barely a second to spare. The bottle of perfume Cameron tosses across the room hits me square in the back, but it doesn’t get close to Macy. Thank fuck. I don’t know how I’d react if she had gotten hurt on purpose.
“That’s not how a friend treats a friend!”
It is at this moment I realize this isn’t a dinner party.
It’s an ambush.
This is why I finished senior year with hardly any friends. It was easier to distance myself from my friends and brothers than try to protect them from Cameron’s aggression when she got jealous.
While standing with my back to the door to protect Macy from further onslaught, I say, “You should go.”
Macy looks at me as if I have grown a second head. “No, she’s—”
“Cameron. This is Cameron.” I thrust my hand at the hallway, which is echoing Cameron’s rant about how men can’t keep their dicks in their pants even after they’ve caught the winning catch.
I can’t believe I forgot this side of her. Her jealousy featured more than anything when we dated. The fights were insane, but I thought the makeup sex made them bearable.
I was an idiot.
Macy moves to stand next to me, hobbling. “Grayson, I need to tell you—”
Cameron’s nasally squawk interrupts us as she returns to the bathroom.
“Get out of my house! Now!” Her words aren’t for me.
They’re for Macy, whom she glares at as if she is dog shit stuck in the tread of her shoe.
“I invite you into my home for a meal, and how do you repay me? You eye fuck my boyfriend in my presence.” When Macy doesn’t flinch at her vicious words, she shouts again. “Get out! Now!”
“She’s going.” My tone is a silent warning that I will retaliate if she forces me to place myself between her and Macy, and it won’t be to block Macy’s retort. I may even encourage it.
Macy is not in the wrong here, and I won’t allow her to carry the burden of my mistakes.
“I should stay,” Macy whispers as I guide her to the door.
Even though she can’t see me, I silently disagree. While I am grateful for her offer, I need to speak to Cameron alone.
This is also embarrassing. Cameron’s psychotic rage isn’t love. It’s manipulation and control. It is demoralizing. The fewer witnesses to the meltdown of a woman I once painted as a saint, the better. If word of this gets out, I’ll never be trusted by my colleagues again.
I profile people for a living, so how did I miss all the signs? I could blame being sidelined by love, but that isn’t it. If it were, I would have been out of the game years ago, right around the time I let Macy take the blame for a murder she didn’t commit.
Macy attempts to dig in her heels, but I’m too strong, so she returns to words. “Please don’t make me go. I’m the reason she’s angry, so shouldn’t I be the one who settles her rage?”
“This isn’t on you.”
“How can you say that?” My hand slips down her back when she blindsides me in the best way possible. “She didn’t lie. I was inappropriate. I admired a taken man more than I should have.”
“I’m not with anyone, so you can look all you like.”
Now she’s eager to leave. She beats me to the door before her inability to let a liar off scot-free sees her blurting out, “I saw you kissing her, so her confusion on where you stand is understandable.”
“You saw me removing a lash from her eye. That’s all you saw.”
We undertake an intense stare-down like smashing glass isn’t booming down the hallway. Macy’s expression is apprehensive, revealing that she’s unsure whether she can trust me.
I hate that more than anything thus far.
“I have no reason to lie to you, freckles. But I understand your hesitation. I haven’t exactly been honest with you.” I stroke my fingers across her cheek before cradling her jaw. “But I need to fix this first before I can fix us.”
“Us.” She’s not asking a question. She’s testing out how it feels.
Her assessment is fast and accurate.
My body responds to her smile more positively than it did when Cameron’s lips were a hair’s breadth away from mine. She likes the sound of us, and she approves of it.
Doesn’t mean she’ll let me off the hook, though.
“I’ll wait for you in the car.”
“Mac—”
It’s a fight not to kiss her sass off her face when she interrupts. “I wait in either the car or here.” She dumps the shoes I handed her, their clatter and bong routine scarcely heard over my furious pulse. “Pick your poison, Malfoy.”
It takes a minute for me to reply, and it isn’t the response my head and heart deliberated on. “Are you carrying?”
“Is it really a party if you turn up without party favors?”
I laugh, the huskiness odd in the setting.
Against the better judgment of my head, I press my lips to the edge of her mouth before I gently push her into the corridor. “I’ll be down in ten.”
Cameron is on me not even a nanosecond later.