Chapter Twenty
Twenty
Dexter is seasick from the moment his foot touches the boat deck. We’re only twenty minutes into the ride on a Wicksteed-branded cabin cruiser when he lurches over the railing and returns his dinner to the ocean.
“I shouldn’t have eaten before this,” he mutters as he straightens up. It’s a sunset cruise, nearly seven o’clock.
“You all right?” Iris asks. She’s holding her own glass of champagne in one hand and Dexter’s in the other, after he shoved it at her on his trajectory across the deck. We hit a wave and some of it splashes onto her hand.
“I need Dramamine.” Dexter closes his eyes, gripping the railing with both hands. “Or a lobotomy.”
“I don’t think that’ll help,” I say, reaching out to squeeze his bony shoulder. “I’ll ask about the Dramamine.”
The clients are across the deck talking to the Slater Faust team, who are seated before them like students at a lecture. Campbell’s in khakis and the blue button-down from Aspen, sleeves rolled up his forearms. He tips champagne into his mouth and meets my eyes as I cross toward them.
“Lucia,” I say, and she turns to look at me. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but Dexter isn’t feeling well. Do you know if there’s a first aid kit on board? Maybe with some Dramamine?”
“Oh, poor thing.” Lucia peers across the deck to where Dexter’s still white-knuckling the railing. The sun sinks over the water, licks of pink and orange. “Let me ask James.”
“I can do it,” I say, glancing at Suni and Alan on a small smile. “No problem.” I narrowly miss eye contact with Campbell, whose gaze I feel like a fishhook. It tugs after me as I cross the deck toward the uniformed man driving the boat.
“Won’t kick in for about an hour,” James tells me as he roots through a zippered first aid kit and then shakes two tablets out of a pill bottle into my palm.
He peers around the steering column at Dexter, then looks back at me.
“We’ll be nearly back by then. May want to just have him lie down on the bench at the bow.
” He points toward the front of the boat, where a padded bench butts up to the railing.
“Tell him deep breaths. Eyes on the horizon.”
“Got it, thank you.” I close my fingers around the pills. “Is there any water?”
He hands me a plastic bottle from the cooler at his feet.
When I return to Dexter and loop an arm around his waist, he groans. “Don’t jostle me, Mattie.”
“I’m not jostling you. I’m moving you somewhere you can be horizontal.”
“Oh, good,” he says. Iris laughs, then covers her mouth with one hand.
“Sorry.” She pats Dexter’s forearm. “It’s not funny.”
“It’s a little funny,” I say, and Dexter whimpers. He’s leaned into me with his full weight; I maneuver my shoulder around his armpit to get a better angle. “I’ve got him, Iris. If you want to, you know—” I nod toward the group clustered at the far side of the boat.
“Schmooze,” Iris supplies. The wind whips a dark braid across her forehead, and she pushes it out of the way with the edge of one of her champagne glasses. “Thank you. Dexter, I’m assuming you don’t want to finish your drink.”
He groans. “Do not even say the word drink near me.”
Iris smiles at me before turning away and making for the clients.
Around her shoulder, watching us, is Campbell.
He’s leaned forward with his elbows braced on his thighs, empty champagne glass dangling from his fingers.
His brow furrows, but then Dexter gags and I stop paying attention to Campbell entirely.
I get Dexter to the bow just in time for him to throw up over the very tippy top of the boat, like some kind of drunken figurehead. He withers onto the bench and I help him pull his feet up to get flat on his back.
“Dramamine,” I say, pressing it into his palm. I decide not to tell him that it won’t help for an hour. “And water. Take deep breaths.”
He shifts himself up just far enough to glug back the pills, then collapses onto the bench. “I should’ve stayed home.”
“At the hotel?”
Dexter cracks an eye open to look at me. “In Chicago.”
I grip the toe of his sneaker and shake his foot, sitting down beside him. “No, you shouldn’t have.”
“Tell me why.”
“Because we’re a team.”
He drapes an arm over his eyes. “Can you take some of my nausea, then?”
“You all right?”
I look up; Soraya’s making her way toward us, followed by Campbell. She frowns at Dexter, who doesn’t respond or even open his eyes.
“Seasick,” I say for him.
“Ah, that’s shit.” Soraya’s in a gauzy blue dress that turns her ethereal in the wind off the water, like one of those seahorses with frilly fins. “Did you take anything for it?”
“Dramamine,” Dexter says without moving.
“You should really open your eyes.” Campbell stands behind Soraya, one hand in his pocket and the other still holding his empty champagne glass. He points the glass over the water. “You’ll feel better if you look at the horizon.”
Dexter opens one eye to assess him, then closes it again. “I think I’ll keep them shut.”
“Suit yourself,” Campbell says, then looks at me. I think of us in the hallway last night. Good night, French. The mirrored ways we must have moved behind our closed doors, the narrow wall between our beds as we slept. Now that I’ve met his gaze, I’m finding it nearly impossible to look away.
“Mind if we sit?” Soraya asks, already situating herself beside me. I blink as Campbell sits next to Dexter’s head and props one arm on the railing so he’s facing us. “The grown-ups have all started talking about their children.”
I glance past Campbell toward the cluster of them: Nolan, Iris, the three Wicksteed clients.
They’re all standing, swaying with the movement of the boat.
Nolan says something, and Lucia’s head tips back in a laugh.
I can’t imagine him as a father, his specific brand of common bigotry—the kind that doesn’t announce itself, just permeates in a nearly missable way.
The most dangerous kind, maybe. I hope he doesn’t have daughters.
“Would you have them?” Soraya asks, looking straight at me.
I feel my eyebrows pitch up my forehead. “Kids?”
“Right,” Soraya says. “Frenchlets.”
I glance at Campbell, whose lips have lifted into a smile.
It sounds so much like something he’d say, a Campbell Porter turn of phrase, that I can’t help but wonder whether she got it from him.
I think of what he said, sitting beside me in the sand just a couple days ago—Plenty of people don’t want that.
“I don’t think so,” I tell her, slowly. “I used to, but I don’t know if that’s because I wanted them or because I felt like I was supposed to.”
“That,” Soraya says, pointing at me as she takes a sip of champagne. “Hard to parse your own voice in all of it.”
“Isn’t it?” I angle toward her. “I think I thought I was supposed to want all of it at some point—a life with one man forever and a yard full of weeds to pull on weekends and a kid wiping their Popsicle hands on me. I keep waiting to want it, and it keeps not happening.”
Soraya laughs, her dark eyes crinkling. “Who doesn’t want Popsicle hands on them?”
“Do you?” I ask, and she shudders. It feels simultaneously freeing and like a betrayal of Ava to talk to another woman about this. The closest person in my life, the person I turn to for everything—who’s never understood this one, enormous way we’re different.
“Absolutely no,” Soraya says, swiping one hand in front of her for emphasis. “I have a brother with three boys. They’re plenty for me. Cool Aunt Soraya until I’m in the grave.”
I glance at Campbell, thinking of the two blond women in that photo on his desk back when we were interns. His sisters, and whether they have children now. He’s watching me steadily, his expression intense and unreadable.
“Well, I want them,” Dexter says straight up at the sky. “My own vomit’s not enough, I guess; I need to clean up someone else’s.”
Soraya laughs. “There’s a bit more to it than that.”
“One man forever,” Dexter says, weakly. “I’d even take the weeds.”
“Softy,” I say, nudging his foot. Against my better judgment, I turn to Campbell. “What about you?”
“Ah, I don’t know, French.” He smiles in that particular way he has, the one I recognize now—this is a brush-off. “Few things I want to accomplish before I think about that.”
It’s about memory, he’d told me on the beach. His book. “That makes sense,” I say, nodding. “Like your b—”
“Soraya,” Campbell cuts me off immediately, “how old are your nephews now?”
She takes another sip of champagne, either oblivious or choosing to ignore the way he interrupted me. I frown at Campbell, but he isn’t looking at me now.
“Three, five, and seven,” Soraya says. She leans closer, like she’s about to tell us a secret. “Absolute mongrels, every one of them.”
I laugh, nudging Dexter in the process, and he groans. “Mattie, don’t move me.”
Campbell reaches for Dexter’s arm and pulls it away from his face. Dexter’s so startled that his eyes fly open, taking in Campbell as he leans about five inches over him and says, “Man, I’m serious. Look at the horizon.”
He points at the water, and for whatever reason—shock or some sort of newfound trust—Dexter’s gaze follows Campbell’s outstretched finger.
“Better?” Campbell says.
Dexter keeps watching the water. “Not really.”
“It will be.” Campbell looks at me, our eyes catching and holding. “Promise.”
As we walk back through the hotel lobby after the cruise, Soraya checks her phone and lets out a cranky groan. “Damn.”
I glance at Nolan and Iris, walking ahead of us with Lucia, but they don’t seem to have heard.
“Yeah,” Campbell says, also looking down at his phone.
Dexter’s pale but steady beside him—Campbell was right; watching the horizon helped. “What is it?”
“Nothing important,” Campbell mutters, swiping at his email. His hair is windswept and tousled over his forehead. The top button of that blue shirt is undone, cobalt line hooking my gaze directly to the dip in his collarbone. “Urgent social post request from the office.”
He looks at Soraya, who sighs through her nose. “Nine a.m. deadline,” she says. “Which means we work on it tonight.”
I glance between them, my gaze landing on Campbell as he pockets his phone. “Is this usually when you’d be working on your b—”
“Hey!” His voice makes me jump, the fast jab of the word. Soraya looks at him, alarmed, but Campbell just reaches for my wrist and says, “Can I talk to you?”
“I—” He’s leading me toward reception before I can actually respond.
I glance back at Dexter and Soraya, frozen in the lobby.
At our clients and the creative directors, oblivious, ahead of them.
And down at Campbell’s long fingers circling my arm, his ring pressed to the bone of my wrist. “What are you doing?”
“Shutting you up,” Campbell says, tightly, as we move toward the business center. We toured it on our first day here: a lounge-style office space with a few desks and a long, narrow conference room. “Before you say something stupid.”
“Stupid?” I splutter.
But Campbell doesn’t respond. He just pulls me into the business center and slams the door shut behind us.