CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER THREE
I didn’t bother reading her texts; I didn’t need to. They would all be some variety of Call me right away! If I didn’t respond to her soon, she’d start calling me. Nonstop. I was about two more texts away from that happening.
If I’d been able to, I would have just turned off my phone. I couldn’t, though, because we had two of our staff working as bridesmaids at an event in New Jersey with a bride who was, shall we say, very enthusiastic about perfection. I took pride in coaching them through her drama because I was something of a bridezilla whisperer.
But it meant I was available to my mom, as well.
I dialed her number and she somehow picked up before it even rang on my end.
“Rachel! Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you!”
“I’m working,” I told her, glancing around to make sure that no one could overhear me.
“Oh! Right. In Hawaii. How is it?”
“It’s beautiful here. You and Dad should come visit.”
She let out a sigh of disgust. “I didn’t mean the scenery. I meant the men. Are there any attractive, eligible men there?”
I couldn’t help it. My gaze was drawn to Camden, still engrossed in his own conversation.
Unfortunately, my mother correctly interpreted my momentary silence. “There is! What is his name?”
I sighed. It truly wasn’t worth the fight. “His name is Camden. He works in tech.”
“So he’s smart. That’s good. Then my grandchildren will be smart.”
I’d been a late-in-life baby. My parents had suffered from infertility and then my mother miraculously got pregnant with me when she was thirty-nine years old. I was apparently their reason for existing, and there had never been such helicopter parenting as I had growing up. They thought every fever meant I had meningitis and every bruise must mean internal organ failure. I was pretty sure they were the reason my pediatrician had been able to buy a second home in Aspen.
“Mom, I just met Camden. No one is giving you grandchildren.”
“I know! That’s the problem!” she said in an exasperated tone.
Because she’d been older when she had me, that meant all of her peers not only had grandchildren, but some of them even had teenage grandkids. For some reason this made my mom desperate and she’d been pushing me since my twenty-first birthday four years ago to fall in love and have babies as soon as possible.
I pointed out to her once that even if I did find a guy, I might have the same fertility issues she’d had. That conversation had not gone over well.
When I didn’t respond she added on, “I’m not getting any younger and neither are you.”
I was only twenty-five but she acted like I was close to retirement age. “So, Mom, other than me depriving you of babies, how are things going?”
“Oh no, you don’t get to change the subject on me. I want a picture of this Camden. I need to see what we’re working with here.”
Closing my eyes, I counted silently to ten. No wonder I was so good with demanding brides—my mom could be the worst. “I’m not taking a picture of him.”
“Please send your poor, deprived mother just one picture. I spent thirty-seven hours in labor with you.”
I could feel the guilt trip coming on, and I wasn’t interested in booking passage. I didn’t need the laundry list of all the ways I’d made her suffer before I was even born.
“Fine,” I grumbled. “Hold on.” Better to give in to this small bit of madness than for her to escalate things. I looked up to see where Camden had gone, but he wasn’t on his phone.
I had one heart-stopping moment where I was terrified he’d returned to the table and was standing behind my chair listening to every word, but when I turned around he was talking to Dan’s mom, Irene, at the next table over. I let out a sigh of relief and then got up to walk past him, turning my phone at the last second to catch him laughing. I checked the photo, seeing that his face was mostly visible if a bit blurry, and sent it off to my mom.
“Done,” I told her as I headed to the outskirts of the party, not wanting anyone to overhear. I’d lost track of Camden once; I didn’t need it to happen again. One of the camera crew had pointed his camera at me, and I put my hand up in front of my face so they’d stop filming me.
“How do I find it again?” she asked. I had to walk her through how to put me on speaker and then scroll to her messages to find the photo.
“Well, he’s handsome!” she declared. “I approve.”
Just what I’m living for. Your approval of a relationship that’s not happening.I smiled, even though she couldn’t see me. I’d read once that your tone changed when you smiled. “It was so great catching up with you but I need to go and get something for the bride to eat.”
“It feels like you’re trying to get off the phone with me.”
I am,I wanted to say, trying to ignore the hurt in her voice. It was a lot of pressure being a long-waited-for child. I headed to the dessert table, piled a plate with chocolate-covered strawberries, and then brought it to Sadie. There. Not a lie.
She smiled up at me, saw I was on my phone, and said softly, “Come find me later. There’s something I need to tell you.”
I nodded to show that I’d heard, and was about to ask her what was going on when the director came over, wanting to set up some shots of Dan and Sadie playing the games.
So instead I told my mother, “I really do need to get back to this party.”
“Are you taking fish oil? You need those omega-3s for fertility. And you should probably be taking folic acid, too. Just in case.”
If they gave out medals for patience, I should have been awarded the Purple Heart. “I haven’t even kissed him.”
“I have faith in you! Use your wit and beauty. Go get him!”
“Bye, Mom.” I hung up my phone. That woman had no boundaries whatsoever. I looked at my calendar and realized it was the night for my dad’s weekly poker game with his buddies. He was usually the voice of semi-reason and had the effect of helping to dial back most of my mom’s obsessiveness.
I went back to my table and saw Camden seated there, shuffling the deck of cards.
“What are you doing?” I asked. He set the cards back in their spot on the board.
“Nothing.” He gave me a sheepish look and I sat down next to him, not able to hide my grin. I grabbed the cards and started tabbing through them. Every other one was a large number.
“You’re cheating,” I said. This should have upset me, but it tickled me. That he was so desperate to beat me that he’d resort to cheating. And doing it so openly and badly was just icing on the cake.
“I’m not cheating,” he responded in a tone that was both indignant and teasing. “I’m just ... giving myself a strategic advantage.”
“You were literally stacking the deck in your favor. Do you know what this means? It means you know I’m better at this game than you. I don’t even need to actually win at this point because I’ve already beaten you.”
He grinned at me, his green eyes dancing with delight. That surprised me. I’d dated a guy in college who was competitive, too, but in an ugly way. If I’d accused him of cheating, he would have thrown the cards to cover up what he’d done or gotten up and sulked for two hours while I tried to make things better. I’d told myself that I’d never date another competitive guy again, but I appreciated that Camden was willing to own his competitive streak and somehow managed to make his cheating seem playful. That he seemed to thoroughly enjoy that I challenged him. I probably shouldn’t have thought that was cute, but I did.
I could date a guy like him.
No, you cannot,I told whatever inside me had come to that conclusion.
It was hard to remember that as he leaned in toward me, and I got a whiff of that delicious clean smell. I swallowed hard as he said flirtatiously, “You caught me. I hate to lose. But the game’s not over. Nobody’s beaten anyone yet.”
“Semantics,” I replied, with a wave of my hand, willing him to not come any closer. “Potato, tomato.”
He looked amused. “What? That’s not how the saying goes.”
“It should be because do you know anyone who says poe-tah-toe? No. Everyone I’ve ever met pronounces it exactly the same. So, potato, tomato has always made more sense to me. Two different items that sound alike.”
“You surprise me. You seem like the type to be a stickler for saying things correctly. I like that.”
I shrugged, inwardly delighted at the idea that he liked something about me.
“It’s the third time tonight you surprised me. The first was when you brought Sadie some food. It’s very cool of you to look after her that way.”
“It’s my job.” The words fell out of my mouth before I could stop them, as I felt all warm and fuzzy inside that he’d been paying attention to me. I pressed my lips together. What was it about this man that made my tongue so loose? I was usually the best at hiding this stuff and watching my words and it was like he exuded some kind of truth serum that made me want to tell him things. Things I wasn’t legally allowed to tell him. “As her maid of honor. It’s my job to look after her.”
“You did that earlier today, too. It made me think you were a kind person.”
The warm fuzzies intensified, preening at his praise. Feeling a tad embarrassed about my reaction, I said, “I might have my moments.”
“I get the feeling you have a lot of moments.”
“So what was the second moment?” I asked. “When I surprised you?”
“That would be when you took a picture of me.”
Those warm fuzzies fled as icy shock gripped my spine. I instantly felt both foolish and like I’d been exposed. I thought I’d been so nonchalant and careful. How in the world had he seen me?
There was no way I could admit to it. I would look so, so stupid if I did and I didn’t have an explanation that would make sense as far as my mother was concerned.
“Vain much?” I countered.
“I saw you,” he said in a low voice that made my skin flush.
“You have a great imagination.”
“Let me see your phone, then.”
I grabbed my phone tightly. “No.”
He had a self-satisfied look on his face. “That means you did take a picture of me.”
“You coming to a conclusion doesn’t mean you’re right.”
Camden shrugged. “You could easily disprove it right now.”
“Not going to happen.”
“You seem like the kind of woman who enjoys being right.”
This had nothing to do with being right because I obviously wasn’t. “I like my privacy.”
“Me too,” he agreed. “I noticed you don’t have any social media.”
I had two immediate reactions to this information. The first was a giddy, “Yay! He looked me up!” and the other was its polar opposite—a sinking sensation in my stomach of “Oh no, he looked me up.”
Camden’s phone rang again. He glanced at the screen. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to take this.”
He again excused himself and walked away from our table, despite the fact that we’d been in a pretty intense back-and-forth. If some girlish part of me had hoped he was interested, he’d just laid out where I stood in priority to his phone. My mom had told me to win him over with my wit and beauty and it looked like that wasn’t happening.
Wit and beauty—zero; technology—one.
You don’t care,I reminded myself. It didn’t matter.
Except it did.
Which was annoying.
Sadie had just finished filming a segment and I remembered that she’d said she needed to talk to me. I walked over to her to see if she had a minute.
“Rachel!” she exclaimed, hugging me again. I wasn’t really a hug type of person, but with Sadie I never minded.
“How are you?” I asked. “You probably have so much to deal with. There’s a ton of people here.”
She grimaced. “Dan and I would have preferred something small and intimate. Just us and our immediate families. But the sponsors wanted a bigger gathering. And not everyone’s even here yet. There’s some people who are coming just for the wedding and reception.”
“Speaking of immediate families,” I said, “I checked on your mom and she was a little ...”
“Drunker than a frat boy on New Year’s Eve? Not surprising.” She let out a big sigh. “Part of me wishes she hadn’t come. That’s awful, isn’t it?”
I didn’t have a parent who, if not a full-blown alcoholic, was at least an understudy for the role, so I didn’t know. “I have often wished that my own mom would disappear for a little while. Not permanently, but I’d love it if she could go to the magical land of Don’t Bug Your Daughter About Grandkids and have a long, extended vacation there.”
This seemed to reassure her, as her smile was only slightly still sad. “I know I’ve probably made her sound horrible, but once you get to know her she’s ... even worse. I mean, she’s in Hawaii for her only daughter’s wedding, and she’s drunk in her hotel room instead of being here to support me. I’ve never asked her for anything and she can’t even do this?”
“I’m sorry.” I didn’t know what else to say. I’d have to talk to Krista about redoubling our efforts to make sure that Brandy was relatively sober and started coming to the events.
“No, don’t listen to my whining. I’m marrying the man of my dreams in paradise. Everything else is just a nuisance.”
“That’s a good attitude. Focus on what matters.”
“Or ... I could distract myself. By asking how things are going with Camden. Are you two hitting it off? I told Troy to seat you two together tonight.”
I did not sigh. Even though I really, really wanted to. “It’s fine. But you need to be careful what you say about me to him.”
“Why?”
“You forgot to tell me that you were poor growing up.”
She visibly swallowed, her lower lip trembling for a moment. “It’s not something I like to think about. Why does it matter?”
“Because our backstory is that we met at summer camp. Something that’s typically expensive and in a different state than the one you grew up in.”
“Oh.” She blinked slowly, her mouth twisting to one side. “Don’t they have like, scholarships or something?”
“I mean, we can say that if we’re specifically asked, but the more we elaborate, the more unbelievable the lie becomes. Especially with someone like Camden, who seems to notice everything.”
“Yes, he’s very attentive.” Her cheesy grin told me exactly what she meant by that and this time I did sigh.
“Speaking of, did you tell Camden to flirt with me?”
Sadie frowned. “I didn’t. But he’s the reason why I wanted to talk to you. Camden decided to flirt with you all on his own.”
I found myself literally holding my breath. As if we were in high school and she was about to tell me that Camden had told Dan, who told her, that he thought I was, like, so cute and totally wanted to take me to homecoming. I forced myself to breathe out and pay attention.
“Why?”
“Because he thinks you’re a spy.”