Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
Slater Faust Chicago Headquarters
Five years ago
“What are you so scared of?”
Campbell has a messenger bag slung across his chest and a look on his face so smug I want to wipe it off with coarse-grit sandpaper. He props a foot against the back wall of the elevator like he owns it.
“I’m not scared,” I say. “I just don’t want to burn my esophagus with jet fuel and wind up with a voice like yours.”
He lifts one hand to his throat, squeezing. “What’s wrong with my voice?”
I look at him, framed by the mirrored wall of the elevator. We were included in a client presentation today, and he’s wearing a tie with a repeating pattern of trout on it. My own reflection hovers over his shoulder.
“You sound like you gargle sand,” I say. “Surely, someone has told you this before.”
“Mm.” Campbell lifts his chin and strokes the column of his throat. “You mean my sexy rasp.”
“No,” I say as the elevator slides open, “I assure you that’s not what I mean.”
The design interns, Imogen and Miguel, are already waiting for us in the lobby. It’s 6:12 on a Friday and they’ve pulled together a last-minute plan for happy hour at the bar on Dearborn that only lets people order drinks after they’ve taken a shot of Malort.
“You two joining?” Imogen asks, her face lighting up. The only Chicago native among us, she had this idea—some sort of initiation I want no part of.
“Not French,” Campbell says before I can open my mouth. “Too scared. But I’m coming.”
“I’m not scared,” I insist. “I just—”
“Every party has a pooper,” Campbell cuts me off with a shrug. “She’s ours.”
“I’m not”—I pause, and Campbell raises his eyebrows at me, daring me to repeat the word pooper—“that. I just already have plans.”
“With who!” Imogen cries, like I couldn’t possibly know anyone else in Chicago after a month of working here.
I glance toward the revolving doors that open onto the sidewalk, where Ava’s been waiting for me since 5:50. I’d told her I’d be done at 5:45, but Campbell was still working and I’d long ago decided I would never leave the office before him.
There’s this thing that happens, when either of us get absorbed in a project: the writing tunnel.
Where the world falls away and it’s only us and the page, the blinking cursor.
It took longer than usual for Campbell to break himself from it tonight, and I can tell from Ava’s texts that she’s sort of pissed.
But at least I hadn’t let Joaquin see me cut out for the weekend while Campbell was still sitting at his desk.
“My best friend,” I say. When I point to the doors, to Ava’s unmistakable red hair, all three of them turn to look. “We’re getting dinner.” I step around them, lifting a hand. “I’ll see you all on Monday.”
They end up following me out. So when Campbell shouts, “Don’t forget to live a little, French!” over his shoulder, Ava witnesses the whole thing.
I scoff, and she frowns at me. “Is that Campbell?”
I’m digging around in my tote bag for a tube of ChapStick. “In the flesh.”
“Hm,” Ava says. “Weird tie.”
“Yeah, I told him.”
“Hm,” she says again.
I look at her. Long floral dress, mascara, her hair wavy and loose around her shoulders. This morning she met Lev, the new guy she’s been seeing, for breakfast before his shift at the pharmacy. “What?” I say.
Ava squints. “He’s cuter than you said.”
“I don’t think I said he was cute at all.”
“You didn’t.” Ava turns to watch Campbell cross Michigan Avenue. He’s laughing at something Imogen is saying as she gesticulates eagerly through the humid air. “Strange detail to omit.”
“Is it?” I ask, uncapping the ChapStick and smearing it on. It’s hot out here—already, I feel sweaty and flustered. “I didn’t tell you he’s cute because I don’t think he is.”
“Okay,” Ava says, hooking her arm through mine. I know Ava so well, better than anyone. What every look of hers means, every mannerism, every tone of her voice.
This one—this Okay—means: I don’t believe you.
Later that night, as Ava gets up from our couch to use the bathroom, my phone buzzes on the coffee table.
It’s Imogen, who gave me her phone number on the first day of our internship.
The message she’s sent has no text; it’s just a picture of Campbell and Miguel with their arms slung around each other in a low-ceilinged bar.
Campbell’s neat hair looks finger-combed to oblivion, rakish and wild.
His eyes are heavy-lidded, his mouth pulled into a lopsided smile.
Drunk, and so uninhibited I find myself pinching the screen to bring him closer to me.
I’m still zoomed in on his freckled nose when I get another notification, this time from the Slater Faust internal messenger app. It’s Campbell, his work headshot right there next to the words Do you actually hate my voice
I blink, his face still blown up in the palm of my hand, and the notification slides away. I tap it back open. Three dots appear and disappear below our chat history, Campbell typing.
I picture him in the bar from Imogen’s photo: exposed ductwork, brown beer bottles on a cluttered bar top, red light glowing from one corner.
Head ducked over his phone to text me through an official work channel because he doesn’t have my number.
The way he might’ve had to squint to steady himself, write without typos.
Everything that’s going on around him, and the fact that what he’s thinking about, instead, is some petty thing I said to him in the elevator.
The dots materialize and then vanish twice more before I hear Ava open the bathroom door.
I jump, then quickly type Yes and hit send. I hide my phone under a throw pillow before Ava can ask what I was doing. Before I can spend one more second thinking about the freckles on Campbell Porter’s nose.
Campbell tilts the beer bottle to his lips with one long finger wrapped around its neck.
We haven’t talked about yesterday at the beach—about his book, or my existential crisis, or any of it at all.
But when Soraya says, “So, what’s everyone make of Bodega?
” he looks right at me like I’m the answer.
“Bit less ostentatious than Aspen,” Dexter says.
We’re on the back patio of a spot called the Half Shell, where someone’s tossing oyster shells out the kitchen window onto a slope into the ocean.
It’s almost sunset, a little after six o’clock.
“Though I guess we haven’t been taken out by the skipper yet. ”
During our meeting this afternoon, Lucia walked us through the remaining immersion activities: tomorrow’s boat ride, yoga on the beach, a final client dinner the night before our pitch presentations. Less than two weeks to go, now, which makes every day—every hour—feel all the more pressurized.
“I do love a boat ride,” Soraya says. It’s windy this close to the water, and she wraps her thick-knit cardigan tighter as a gust startles the napkins on our table. “And I know you do, Cam.”
His eyebrows lift, like he wasn’t quite paying attention.
“Should feel like home, maybe,” she says. As she sticks a fork into a mussel and pries it free, Campbell nods.
“Sure,” he says. “Yeah. Fancier than I’m used to, though, I’d bet.”
“Do you own a boat?” Dexter asks. He made it halfway through an enormous plate of shrimp linguine before leaning back in his plastic chair and folding his hands over his stomach. “Like, on Lake Michigan?”
Campbell smiles into his beer. “Ah, no. My family has one back home in North Carolina. But it’s just a fishing boat, and to be honest it hasn’t touched water in years.”
“Why not?” Dexter says. The patio’s dressed in string lights that loop lazily above our heads, stubby tea candles in mismatched jars on each plastic table. “Tired of fishing?”
Campbell’s eyes move to Soraya, and the corners of her mouth lift into something that’s nearly a smile. Sadder, though, and gone as quickly as it came.
“Something like that,” Campbell says.
Campbell’s as good as it gets, she told me at that bar in Aspen. Don’t speak on things you don’t know about.
What does Soraya know about him that I don’t? I think of his hand looped around my ankle on the beach. The unfamiliar sadness in his dark eyes.
“Well, I’m frankly dreading it,” Dexter says.
He starts on about his motion sickness, the way the ocean magnifies UV so he always gets a sunburn.
But I’m watching Campbell: how he’s peeling the label off his beer bottle, his shoulders curved inward.
Something’s still muted about him, like what happened yesterday dimmed him.
He tugs against the adhesive and I feel it in my chest.
“What about you, Mattie?” Dexter’s voice brings me back to the table. “You’re quiet tonight.”
“Am I?” I reach for my wine, chardonnay so cold it’s left condensation on the glass even in this chilly California evening. “Sorry. Just thinking.”
“About what?” Campbell asks in a low voice. All three of us turn to him. He’s looking at me like Dexter and Soraya aren’t here at all, both of his hands still working the bottle. I watch his fingertips move, and I swallow.
You, is the truth.
The way the sun hit your eyes yesterday. How it felt to wrap my fingers around your ankle and hold you still. How much more I want to know about you, now that I know what I do.
“The pitch,” I say, faintly.
I think Campbell will call my bluff, but he doesn’t. He only keeps his gaze on me for the rest of the night, so that by the time we get back to the hotel I feel restless and overexposed.
“Good night, French,” he says when we get to our adjacent rooms. One hand on his cracked door, the other in his pants pocket. His voice quiet and rough and so ludicrously familiar, even in this place so far from home.
I only manage to nod. Then I go into my room, and press my forehead to our shared wall, and close my eyes.
I tell myself I’m not listening for him, desperate for just a little bit more.