10. Cam
Tabs gasps and tries to pull away. “Let me go,” she snarls.
I pull her closer, so tight I can feel her heartbeat against my sweaty chest. “No.”
She struggles. As much as I hate restraining her, I cannot release her before she understands what I said. Before she knows the truth. Then, if she still wants to bolt, which she very well may, I’ll give her all the space she needs.
“That’s not what I meant, Tabs. Please, stop fighting me. Let me explain.”
She finally stops struggling, but the hurt expression on her face makes my heart ache.
I loosen my hold and place my now free hand over her heart. “I need to show you something.”
“Okay…” she says tentatively.
I open the drawer to my bedside table and pull out a journal, gripping it like it might fly out of my hand and escape on its own. “There’s something I want you to see.”
I hold it out to her but don’t let go when she takes hold of it. “I’m sorry I’ve kept this from you for so long. I hope you’ll understand.”
I release my grip and the journal slips from my fingers, and I know there’s no turning back.
I don’t take my eyes off the woman who has been the inspiration of virtually every word I’ve written in my daily morning pages practice. Words, feelings and fantasies I have in the precious moments before my brain fully engages and starts to think, question, and edit how my body feels.
She opens the journal to the first page. It’s dated from about four months ago. Of course, I can’t remember what I wrote on that day—or any day—but I know that she’ll see her name. I know that she’ll read something that just a best friend should never write about or feel for his ride or die.
I can’t read her reaction. It seems too calm. Almost disconnected. Tabs reads silently, her lips moving ever so slightly, the way they do when she’s lost in a story.
Does she not understand that I’ve just torn out my heart and placed it in her hand? I dare not make a sound.
She flips to the last page with my handwriting on it; yesterday morning’s entry where I’d written that I was thinking of telling her how I feel.
“You were going to tell me you love me,” she whispers. “Even if I didn’t say anything today.”
I nod.
“How long?” That’s all she says, in her normal Tabs voice. “Cam, how long have you felt this way?”
I shrug. “Years.”
“How many?”
“Many.”
She opens my journal again. “I don’t even know where to start.”
“Well, I guess first maybe you could tell me you”re relieved that we feel the same way about each other?”
She nods. “I guess. I mean, yes. I am relieved.” She smiles with her eyes. “And I want to come back to that, but this,” she points at the journal, flipped open to a few weeks ago, “the way you’re writing—in your journal—it reads like a romance novel. Which suggests that you’ve been reading romance all along and never told me. Why?”
And there it is. The perfect opportunity to tell Tabs the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the heart-stopping, terrifying, likely friend-ending truth.
“You know that’s not something to be embarrassed about, right?”
I grimace. “I was afraid of everything I could lose if you knew.”
Tabs frowns. “What do you mean?”
My blood is rushing so loudly in my ears it drowns out my thoughts.
She lays her hand on my thigh, and my abdomen tenses. We’re both still naked, and for a split second, I consider stalling this discussion with round two. Until Tabs asks, “That you secretly read romance? Or that you’ve secretly been in love with me for years?” and I know I have to tell her the truth.
“Neither. There’s more. And it will explain my reaction—which I’m so sorry for. I didn’t mean what we just did, what we had, what we have is wrong. It was everything, Tabs. Everything.” I pause. “What I meant was…”
She nudges me. “What?”
I hold her face and kiss her on the mouth. “I have one more thing you need to see. I’ll be right back.”
If I tell her, I’ll breach the anonymity clause in my contract with the publisher. If they learn about it, it will be career-ending. But I’d rather give up my income than give up Tabs. I should have told her years ago.
I pull my laptop, and the journal with the pages I’d drawn inspiration from for book five, off my desk. The journal is flagged with at least twenty Post-it notes. I flip to the page I want her to see as I walk back to the bedroom.
Tabs is sitting exactly how I left her, reading another page from my most recent journal. She places it on the bedside table, then wipes a tear from her cheek. I hate that I’ve upset her—especially in the precious minutes after making love. I should have kept my mouth shut about my expectations for our first time.
“It was transcendent, Tabs. It was next level. It was perfect.”
“Then why did you say?—?”
I hold out the dog-eared journal. “Read this. Please.”
I watch as she reads scribbled notes about a couple making love. It’s mechanical. A rough, first draft. And it uses only the character’s first letters to indicate who is doing what to whom, which means that Ian, the Duke, is written as “I.”
Tabs swipes the tear away and shoves the journal back at me. “So, you had sex with some woman whose name starts with G. Why are you showing me this? Because sex with G was boring?”
I just stare at her in speechless confusion.
Tabs scrambles to her feet, and I have to hold her to keep her from bolting.
“No. That’s not me. It’s the Duke and Gabriella.”
“As if! You think I’m going to believe you’re writing fanfic in your journal? Please. You can lie better than that, Cam.”
“I’m going to let you go so you can read from my laptop. But you have to promise that you’ll let me explain before you kill me.”
I sit beside her in the bed and find the passage I’m looking for in the manuscript. I pass my laptop to Tabs, who silently takes it. She reads quietly, scrolling through two or three pages. And hands it back to me without saying a single word.
“That is how I envisioned our first time. That’s why I said it wasn’t right, because I’d built up this whole fantasy of how it would go. But Tabs, the reality was a hundred, a thousand times better than the way I’d pictured it. When I said it was all wrong, what I meant was this,” I poke my monitor, “the draft, my manuscript, was all wrong.”
I wait. Let her process. Thank my lucky stars that she didn’t throw my laptop at the wall or strangle me to death.
“You’re telling me you wanted our first time making love to follow some fan fiction you wrote about imaginary characters from a romance novel?”
“Not exactly. I’m telling you I wrote the Duke and Gabriella’s first time how I imagined ours would be.”
Her reaction is, yet again, not what I expected. She laughs. She laughs so hard her sad tears turn to gleeful tears, and I realize she still doesn’t understand, or perhaps, she doesn’t believe me.
“Fine,” she finally says, “let’s try it your way, Duke.”
Tabs lies on her back with an arm behind her head.
And, because I’m not a Duke—I’m just an idiot who plays one in a romance novel—instead of clarifying and making sure she knows the truth, we make love again. This time slowly, with me making all the moves, in full control, following the scene exactly.