Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
“What is your problem?” I snap, glaring at Campbell in the dark. There are no lights on, and the room is only blue moonlight and shadows.
“You.” He scrubs both hands through his hair, then waves one toward the door. “You’ve almost blown my cover twice in the last hour.”
“ ‘Cover’?” I repeat. “How was I supposed to know the book was some big secret?”
“I don’t know, French, context clues?” His eyebrows yank up. “The fact that I was taking that call alone on the beach, far away from my coworkers? Or that you’ve never heard me bring it up before?”
My back teeth press into a line. I don’t like the implication that I missed something, or that I’m stupid. “Why is it such a big deal?”
“Because I’m working, here,” Campbell says. He’s a foot away from me, flushed down to the collar of his shirt—a change I can track even without the lights on. “Because I don’t want anyone to think I’m distracted.”
I take a step closer to him. “Are you?”
Campbell’s eyes look nearly black in the darkness. They dip to my mouth before dragging up to meet my own. “Sometimes.”
I think of us at that restaurant in Aspen, what it did to me then to have his gaze drop to my lips. Since you’re begging. What it does to me now, a desire so flooding I nearly need to gasp for breath to get my words out.
“Doesn’t seem like it to me.” My heart is moving in my chest like something trapped that wants to be let out. “Seems like you’re as absurdly good at this as you’ve always been.”
Campbell’s lips part on a fast exhale that sounds so irritated it turns my skin prickly. He’s been here with me for two weeks now, showing me up essentially the entire time, and he isn’t even invested?
“In case you missed it on the beach,” he says, sharply, “I’m actually failing.”
“Jesus, Campbell, spare me.” I lean further into his space and he doesn’t budge even a millimeter, just sets his jaw. I can feel the heat of him from here. “You’re such a good writer it’s sickening, okay? It’s on you like a neon sign, how talented you are. Don’t act like you don’t know that.”
His eyes narrow. “Not if you ask the twenty editors who rejected my book.”
“Are they the only ones who get a say?” My voice is rising, but I can’t rein myself back in. “What about Nolan? Everyone on the board at Cannes? Me?”
Campbell shakes his head, letting out a humorless laugh.
“I’m serious,” I say. “And you’re so unflappable all the time. I don’t get it, how you can take this all in stride. Like when Lucia made us present outside at the last minute in Aspen?”
“Because I don’t care.” Campbell’s voice rises angry and uncontrolled, Southern drawl slipping through on the swell of his temper. “I’m paid to be here, French, same as you. My skin’s not in this.”
I flinch, taking a step backward. But Campbell’s still talking.
“It’s not exactly my life’s work to write ad collateral for sneaker brands and fancy hotels.” He waves a hand in the direction of the lobby. “Social media captions at eight p.m. because they’re so urgent.” His eyes flicker over mine, unsteady. “You think I want to be doing this?”
The words climb in me like acid. They come out on a barbed whisper. “Fuck you.”
Campbell blinks, recoiling like I hit him.
But it’s him doing the wounding here. This entitled, infuriating person who’s stolen every win from me at every opportunity and doesn’t even care.
Who’s so beautiful in the shadowy moonlight it’s making me feel sick—how badly I want him, how badly I want to shout at him.
Why put me through all this, if it’s never even meant anything?
“You don’t have to shit on our job just because you’re upset,” I say. Something’s humming under my skin, a rattling that shakes my voice. “You don’t have to belittle my whole career because you had a bad day.”
“That’s not what—”
“I’m not done!”
Campbell bites down on his words. Muscles tense at the corners of his jaw, and when I tip back toward him, he stands perfectly still.
“Just because you have another dream, it doesn’t make this one a joke.
It’s not, for me. It’s not some stepping stone, Campbell.
I actually want to be here.” My voice frays in the space between us.
“I love Iris’s rants about mining for truth nuggets in every brief.
I love hearing talent read the voice-over scripts I wrote.
I love when Dexter and I look at each other at ten o’clock in the office on a Tuesday and know we’ve finally nailed it.
And just because I didn’t go to ad school—”
“Jesus, let it go about ad school,” Campbell snaps, tilting his chin to the ceiling.
He sounds exasperated, unchecked—out of control in a way that courses straight through me.
“You always bring that up like it’s this huge thing between us, but it doesn’t fucking matter.
” We’re standing so close now that I’m not sure where this heat is coming from: the fury in my own body, or the mirror of it radiating from his.
“Good ideas come from everywhere. My account managers have the winning idea, sometimes. Being a good copywriter isn’t about the training; it’s about being observant.
Noticing what people think, what they feel, keeping your eyes open.
Anyone can do that.” His eyes move over mine, sparking with something that straddles anger and awe.
“I don’t know anyone who does it as well as you. ”
“Don’t flatter me,” I grind out. I’ve never heard anyone so succinctly describe the value of this career, the reasons it means so much to me. Even when he’s being an asshole, Campbell’s brain works in all my favorite ways. “Whether or not it’s enough for you, I love this job.”
“Good!” Campbell practically shouts, throwing his hands up. His fingertips brush my arms with the movement. “Because you’re fucking great at it, Mattie. Better than anyone.”
His eyes are shining and wild. Mattie. It wraps around my heart, bruising.
Campbell swallows hard and looks away from me. He draws air like he’s trying to steady himself. I watch the tendons work in his neck and feel the echo of his voice—Mattie, Mattie. The long, lingering A drawn by his accent.
“I’m so jealous that you love it like that,” Campbell says, turning back to me. “I’ve only ever loved one kind of writing that way, and I can’t make it happen.”
“Yet,” I say, and something breaks in his face. It’s instant and entire—with that one word, all the fight goes out of him.
“Sure,” Campbell says, quieter.
“I am sure.” Campbell’s all I can see: the shadowed planes of his face, the defeated slope of his shoulders, the red flush of his throat. “You don’t get to be so good at this and pretend you aren’t. You don’t get to not believe in yourself.”
“No?” he asks, softly. His mouth is so close that I’m unsure if I actually hear the word, or if I’m only watching his lips move.
“I won’t allow it,” I say.
Campbell’s hand lands on my hip. Searing and firm, very much on purpose. Lowly, he asks, “Who put you in charge of me?”
“Campbell.” My voice is shredded. Everything happening in my body feels like a question only he can answer. “I’ve always been in charge of you.”
His smile slices through the dark. “There she is,” he murmurs, and then he hauls me into him.
Every inch of it is a relief: the heat of his palm splayed over my spine, the bunching of his shoulders when I fold my arms around them, the way he moves me bodily across the room until the door meets my back. “I’m sorry for being a jackass.”
“You’re always a jackass,” I manage. His hand at the small of my back isn’t close enough; I want to feel his skin, want so much less between us. When his eyes lift to mine I’m scared he can see all of it: how sharply I need him, the one person I swore I’d never let close to me.
A rumble rises from Campbell’s throat. He tucks in closer to me, our hips brushing, then lowers his hand to slide it under the hem of my thin sweater.
His fingertips route up my back before he flattens his palm and pulls my stomach flush to his.
“Would it make me more or less of one if I kissed you now?”
“Same,” I say. I fist my fingers into the back of his hair and his breath hitches. “So you might as well.”
Campbell brackets my jaw with his free hand and drags my mouth to his in one, sure movement. Like all he’s been waiting on, all these years, was permission.
It’s greedy and impatient—the part of his lips and the draw of his tongue.
How he holds me where he wants me, his fingertips under my shirt urging me closer.
The way he shifts to deepen the kiss and groans when I arch into him, his hand mapping new territory up my spine.
None of it careful. All of it urgent and starving, like he’ll run out of time.
It’s the undoing of something I’ve held on to so tightly. The whispered answer to a question I’ve spent years too afraid to ask.
“Mattie.” Campbell’s voice is hoarse, moving over my name like it’s something significant. And it is—what happens in my body when he says it again. His lips brush my ear with every word. “I’ve been so miserable, not being able to do this.”
“But I hate you,” I say into the pulse at his temple. A last-gasp effort to keep us somewhere safe, even as I hold him against me.
“I don’t believe you.” Campbell presses wet, open-mouthed kisses along the curve of my neck, and I feel each one like a tether tugged between my hips.
“But you hate me.” My head angles up, my eyes closed, as his lips meet my throat, then the edge of my jaw, then my mouth. He presses me into the door so that I can feel all of him.
“Mattie,” he says again, both hands settling at my waist. He tightens his grip, like he’s trying to hold me here. “That’s never been true.”
“Hasn’t it?” I plead, and Campbell breathes a laugh.
“No.” He reaches for my face, thumb brushing across my cheekbone as he stills. “Hey, look at me.” When my eyes open, his are right there. Dark and earnest. “No.”
“No,” I repeat. And I know it, too—that it wasn’t hatred, that evening sitting beside each other on the beach.
The way he trusted me with something, the way he listened to me about Ava.
It wasn’t hatred the night Pancake got sick, either, or in that dimly lit bar when the man in the cowboy hat wouldn’t let me go.
Quite possibly it’s never been hatred, but something different—something scarier.
“Mattie French,” Campbell says, quiet and close. His freckled nose brushes against mine. “Did you just agree with me?”
“Don’t get used to it,” I say, but he’s already grinning. The unchecked enormity of it is so good; so much better than his sadness, than the defeated way he’s carried himself the past few days. I want to keep seeing it. I want to keep putting it there.
“Campbell.” His entire body responds to his name, pressing into me. “Let’s go to your room.”
“Let’s stay here,” he counters. He’s still holding my face, and tilts me toward him to press a hot, lingering kiss against my lips that nearly makes me forget what we’re talking about. “I don’t want to stop touching you long enough to get over there.”
I meet his eyes. “I’m not making out with you in an office.”
“Why not? I’ve spent years wanting to make out with you in offices.”
He says it guilelessly, like it’s the simplest thing in the world. But it scorches straight through me, destroying any lingering ability I might have had to string a sentence together.
Campbell mistakes my silence for irritation.
“Okay,” he says, taking a step back and peering through the window in the door.
“All right, fine. I’ll go first and leave my door unlocked.
” He raises his eyebrows at me, and I manage a nod.
“You’ll count to ninety and follow. If there’s anyone in the hallway, you’ll take a detour and try again. ”
“And if there’s always someone in the hallway?”
Campbell tucks a hand around the back of my neck and draws me into him, covering my mouth with his own.
“Then I’ll drag you back in here,” he says against my lips. “We’re not negotiating anymore.”