Chapter 21 – Camille
Olivia woke up as we were about to leave. I knew Erich wanted to say goodbye to her, and I made myself be at peace with that. I hoped he knew he needed the closure, and she needed it too.
“We have to go,” Erich spoke up as Olivia poured herself a cup of coffee. She was wearing a pair of plaid pajama pants and an oversized white T-shirt. With how perfect her luscious, unruly bed hair framed her face, I believed it was intentional.
Olivia turned to stare at Erich, her lips pursed in confusion as she squinted her eyes at him. Her coffee mug was a tourist souvenir—white, with a red heart in “I Heart NY.”
“Already? You just got here yesterday.” Her squinted gaze moved to me, and then back to Erich. “We were going to show Candace around town.” She whined with the obvious poke at my butchered name.
“Camille. And we have to go,” Erich corrected her.
“Take me with you.” She pleaded, setting her coffee down on the countertop and closing the distance between herself and Erich. She nearly cornered him against the wall. “I missed you. It would be like before. Maybe this time we won’t make any mistakes.”
“You know that can’t happen.” He held his ground, tensing up as her fingers traced patterns on his chest. “You fucked up last time… You left a trail. You need to focus on yourself. Here. With your mother.”
A trail? Of what? I pondered what that could mean.
“Bullshit.” She hissed. “You and I both know we did what we had to do. They tried to hurt me. It was self-defense. And didn’t we have fun last night?
Why do you want to leave so early?” I could nearly mistake her pouting for genuine hurt.
“You can’t keep fucking leaving me here.
And you need to get over your grudge. How many times do I need to tell you I wouldn’t have killed them without good reason? ”
That last part was spoken so nonchalantly I almost missed it. Erich’s gaze shifted to me, then back to Olivia just as quickly.
Olivia killed people? What was the story behind her apparent… serial killings?
“We talked about this,” Erich murmured as Olivia’s fingers traced the outline of his collarbones. “You know I can’t stay, and you can’t come with.”
Olivia’s pouty lips turned further into her frown. She sighed and then threw her arms around Erich’s waist, resting her cheek on his chest. “You’ll come back?”
“I always do.” Erich brushed Olivia’s hair out of her eye with one hand, the other on her back. The same comforting embrace he gave me the night I accidentally killed a man.
Olivia pulled away. She glanced once at me before taking Erich’s face in her hands, attempting to pull him down for a kiss. He brought his hands up to remove hers before she could successfully kiss him, peeling them away and setting them back down at her sides.
“No,” was all Erich had to say.
Olivia raised an eyebrow. There was no humiliation, but that same tension from yesterday was thickening in its determination to choke me. “You can sleep with me, but you can’t kiss me? Is that what I am to you?”
“It’s not like that,” Erich defended himself.
“Fuck you, Erich.” She backed away, shaking her head in disbelief. “I thought maybe you would’ve changed, but you’re still the same heartless asshole you were before. When do you realize I have feelings?”
I sucked in my lips as she grabbed her mug with enough force to send a wave of coffee sloshing off the rim and onto the floor before marching down the hall and back to her bedroom.
The door slammed. Erich said nothing to acknowledge how poorly he handled Olivia, instead reaching into his pocket for the car keys.
“Do you want to follow her?” I asked quietly.
“No,” he answered. He turned around, reaching for the doorknob. We had been packed for a while up until Olivia woke up.
“But that’s what she wants,” I added. “She wants you to show you care about her. She wants to understand why you rejected her.” I was saying that with the knowledge I’d do the same, with the hope he’d chase me as well.
Erich turned to face me, a question marking his clenched jaw and furrowed eyebrows. “How do I finally let her go if I keep chasing her?”
I didn’t have an answer. And I didn’t dare ask for clarification on Olivia’s apparent serial killings when she was with him last.