Chapter Twelve
Twelve
The next morning, Campbell steals my notebook. I leave it on our breakfast table when I go up to the buffet, and it isn’t until I’ve finished two kiwis and a bowl of yogurt that I realize it’s missing.
“Hey,” I say to Dexter. He’s hunched over his laptop beside me, fiddling with the layout of a digital ad for someone back at the office in Chicago. “Have you seen my notebook? It was right here.”
Dexter looks up, blinking like he’s trying to get me in focus or remember where he is. He glances around the room, then points and says, “That notebook?”
Campbell’s standing in the entryway. Leaned against the doorframe as if he lives here, and reading from my notebook like it’s the morning paper.
My hand tightens around my napkin, just as Campbell snaps the notebook shut and smiles at me across the room. He uncrosses his legs where they were entwined at the ankles and rights himself in the doorway before disappearing through the lobby.
Immediately, my phone buzzes on the table. It’s a text from an unsaved number, but one I already recognize as Campbell’s from the coffee group text back at O’Hare.
Seems only fair, he’s sent. My phone buzzes again.
You can have it back when you return my pen.
I drop my crumpled napkin and reply immediately: I have no idea what you’re talking about.
“Did you steal Campbell’s pen?” Dexter has tilted closer to read over my shoulder.
When our eyes meet, his expression is so chastising I make a strangled noise. “He stole mine first!”
I hear, immediately, how stupid it sounds. How does Campbell always manage to orchestrate this shit, where I look like a fool because of something he’s done?
“It was at the headline-off,” I try to explain. “He stole mine first. And he was so smug about the whole thing and I just—well, I just—”
“Absconded with his property,” Dexter finishes.
“No, I was returning the favor. The fountain pens are so pretentious.”
Dexter regards me, considering this. We were up late last night writing pitch ideas for Iris, who wants to chat about them later this morning. She took breakfast to her room so she could video-call her daughter.
“Mattie,” Dexter says wearily. He has circles under his eyes. “How old are you?”
I gasp. “Don’t do that! Don’t take his side, Dexter. I told you he started it.”
“I’m not taking a side,” Dexter insists, “and obviously I’m on yours. But you’re twenty-seven, not seventeen; you don’t need to steal the guy’s pens to get his attention.”
I gasp even louder. “I don’t want his attention. I want to beat him.”
Dexter takes a sip of his orange juice and skewers me with a long, flat look. “Are you sure it’s not both?”
“I think you know how much you’re betraying me by even asking that question.”
“Okay, where’s the pen?”
“In my trash can,” I lie. It’s on my nightstand.
I spent twenty minutes last night staring at it, wondering if becoming a Fountain Pen Person would be the thing to get me ahead in this career.
If everything about Campbell—from his backyard childhood vacations to his horseshoe shirt to his pen preferences—has somehow fundamentally primed him to be better at this than I am.
Also wondering, a bit, if his fingers had been exactly where mine were as I held it.
And if the heat I felt as I twisted it under my bedside lamp was just from the light bulb, or from the memory of his hand there.
“Is there anything in the notebook he shouldn’t be seeing?” Dexter asks.
“No,” I admit. “It’s just notes from client meetings. Stuff he’s heard before.”
Dexter regards me, quiet.
“What?” I demand.
“Remember what Greg said, before we left?”
“Of course,” I say. It’s supposed to be all I think about. “That we’ll get promoted if we win this.”
“The other thing,” Dexter says. “Before that.”
I know what he means. And I don’t want to acknowledge it, so I shake my head.
Dexter sighs. “He told us to play nice. Don’t stoop to Campbell’s level, okay? He’s spent years playing mind games with you. You don’t need to engage with it just because we’re here. I mean, you’re better than this.”
My face floods with heat, but Dexter isn’t finished. “You don’t need to do this shit to beat him, Mattie.” He looks at me pointedly. “You can do it all on your own.”
That’s the problem, isn’t it?
I’m not sure I believe that I can.
Ava texts me a picture of Pancake as we’re leaving dinner the next night, belly-up on the couch beside Lev. She’s got all four paws in the air, slightly cross-eyed as she regards Ava through the camera.
She misses her mom, Ava says. And then: Are you surviving World War C?
Iris holds open the restaurant door for me, and the three of us spill out onto Aspen’s Main Street. Ava texts again: World War Campbell
“Walk back?” Iris asks, looking between Dexter and me.
I slip my phone into my purse and shove away the thought of WWC and how I’m pretty sure I’m having my ass handed to me.
I think of Campbell more than quite literally anything else: the Miami trip I’m supposed to be planning, my precious baby cat, the Wicksteed pitch itself.
Don’t let this become about him, Ava had warned me back in Chicago. It’s far too late, and I can’t decide which of us I’m angrier with: Campbell, for knowing exactly how to twist me into a knot, or myself, for twisting.
“I’m up for it,” Dexter says. We took a cab from the resort into town for dinner, but it’s only a twenty-minute walk, and a perfect autumn evening. Downtown Aspen is a postcard: brick streets freckled with fallen yellow leaves, all of it framed by the darkening mountains. “Mattie?”
I wore my heeled leather boots again, which aren’t great for walking. But what am I going to do, be the wet blanket? “Let’s do it.”
We’ve only made it a couple blocks when the door to a Vietnamese restaurant swings open and Soraya steps through it. Blue dress, gold chain earrings that nearly touch her shoulders. She holds open the door behind her as, of course, Campbell appears. Nolan brings up the rear.
“Look who it is,” Iris says, lifting a hand to wave.
Campbell’s eyes lock onto mine immediately.
I haven’t seen him since he stole my notebook in the breakfast room, and his smile now is a red handkerchief in front of a bull.
He reduces me to a seething animal, all instinct, and right now my instinct is to get away from him as quickly as possible.
But Iris and Dexter are already making their way toward Soraya—and besides, I can’t run in these boots.
“Good spot?” Iris asks, gesturing at the restaurant’s sign.
“Delicious,” Soraya confirms as the door falls shut behind Nolan. “I love pho. Campbell’s was so spicy he wept.”
I look at him, the way his head tips back when he laughs. The soft stretch of his throat. “I did not weep.”
“You wept,” Soraya repeats. He does look a bit pink: the tops of his cheeks, the bridge of his freckled nose. I think of him in the breakfast room doorway, leaned into the frame with my notebook spread open in his hands.
“Where’ve you all been?” Nolan asks, and Iris points over one shoulder.
“Italian place down on the corner.”
“Ravioli party,” I say for no good reason. Campbell’s eyebrows twitch like this delights him.
“Cam and I were thinking of drinks round the block.” Soraya pulls up the map on her phone and types in a name.
Cam? The familiarity grates: that Soraya, someone I already admire so much, likes Campbell enough to have given him a nickname.
“It’s this hotel bar, old spot. Supposed to be a real mood.
” She peers up at us. “Interested in joining? If we get lucky, maybe Campbell will even have a few and start slinging around his y’alls. ”
Campbell scoffs, hands punching into his pockets. “Takes more than a few for my North Carolina to come out.”
“Please,” Soraya says on a laugh. “You’re so Southern when you drink.”
Campbell shrugs, glancing at me. “Moonshine summons the accent, I guess.”
“As tempting as that sounds,” Iris says, “I think I’ll get some rest.” She turns to Dexter and me. “Y’all feel free; I can get myself back.”
“I’ll walk with you,” Nolan says. “A bit tired myself.”
I feel Dexter look at me. Think again of this morning at breakfast: Play nice. Think of Campbell’s voice moving around the word y’all.
I meet Dexter’s eyes and very determinedly do not look at Campbell as I say, “Sure.”
The bar is in the lobby of a hotel that claims to date back to the 1800s. It’s all glossed wood and leather chairs, framed windows that look over the lamplit street. There’s a long, narrow photograph of silver miners hanging above the brass beer taps.
Campbell gets to the bar first and orders four tequila shots. When the bartender, gorgeous and blond with a full sleeve of tattoos, smiles up at him, he grins back and says, “Let’s make it five.”
Soraya snorts beside me as the bartender turns away for the bottle she’s after.
“How do you tolerate him?” I mutter. Campbell sucks up all the air in every room he enters; I can never catch a full breath when he’s around.
Soraya looks at me. “What?”
“Him,” I repeat. Dexter’s next to Campbell at the bar, but we’re standing far enough behind them to be out of earshot. There’s old, croony music playing and enough of a Friday-night crowd that I have to raise my voice even with Soraya right beside me. “He’s so—”
There are a hundred words at the tip of my tongue.
A ticker tape of Campbell Porter: arrogant, pretentious, scheming, smug.
Also, in the hazed light of the bar, a little bit devastating.
The crooked tug of his mouth into a smile.
The stretch of his shirt across his back when he leans over the bar on his elbows.
“Much,” I finally say. “Doesn’t he drive you insane?”
Soraya’s eyebrows draw together the slightest, assessing distance. She leans back a little like she’s trying to get a clear look at me. And then she verbally punches me in the throat. “Don’t talk shit, Mattie.”
My mouth pops open, but no sound comes out.
“Campbell’s as good as it gets.”
“At ad writing, maybe, but—”