Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
I have to circle the lobby twice before our hallway is free enough to steal undetected into Campbell’s room. He’s pacing at the foot of his bed when I finally step inside, and barely waits until the door’s fallen shut to press me against it.
“Why did that take ten years?” he says into my throat. I think I blacked out from the moment he left the business center; my brain’s had nothing in it except a repeating loop of Campbell’s calloused voice saying I’ve spent years wanting to make out with you.
I slide my hands under the back of his shirt, where his skin is smooth and stretched over tightly drawn muscle—miles and miles of it, my fingertips learning him by touch. I say, “Take this off,” instead of answering him.
Campbell looks down at himself, then back at me. He smiles under the hot flush of his cheeks and he looks suddenly so boyish. So young, and practically glittering under the spell of all this. “I thought you liked this shirt?”
“Too much,” I say, and he leans in to chase my lips as his fingers work the buttons.
“You do the rest,” he says against my mouth.
When he leans back, the shirt is undone—long, exposed strip of his skin.
The cobalt placket is brilliant in his dim room.
I trace it with one outstretched finger, and Campbell holds his breath as he watches.
When I slip my hands under the fabric and over his chest, his inhale is audible. My palms rise with it.
“Why’d you pick this one?” he murmurs as I push it over his shoulders. His skin is freckled everywhere.
“Because you look good in blue,” I say, not quite able to meet his eyes. I run my hands down his arms, pulling the shirt with me. “Why’d you ask for my help?”
“You know why,” he says. I pull the sleeves over his wrists and the shirt drops to the wood floor.
“I don’t.”
“Because,” he says against my ear, “I always want you looking at me.”
His thumb skirts up the flare of my ribs, so light it makes me shiver in the bookends of his arms. “Why?”
“So we’re even.” Campbell gathers the hem of my sweater, lifting it an inch as his eyes come to mine. I nod and he rucks it the rest of the way up and off, then tows me in against him so I can feel every line of his body. “Because I’m always looking at you.”
“Is this us getting even?” I whisper, my voice going thin and shapeless when Campbell cups me through my thin bra. His thumb traces my nipple and it tenses under his touch.
“I hope so,” he says, bringing the words to my mouth. He walks us to the bed, slowly, a care to his movements that I didn’t know he was capable of.
But that was before I saw these parts of him: The Campbell at the bar, holding his arm between me and that man.
The Campbell with his hands on my shoulders while I hyperventilated over Pancake.
This Campbell, easing me onto his bed with one big hand supporting the back of my head.
The cool kiss of his signet ring at the nape of my neck.
“Now what?” he asks, quietly, pressing his lips to the hollow behind my ear. This bed is as wonderful as the one in Aspen: same hand-tufted mattress, maybe. “Tell me what to do.”
The words lick a hot line down my body. “Say that again.”
I feel Campbell smile against my neck. “Tell me what to do,” he repeats, the syllables stuttering as I fold one leg around his hips and press him into me. “I can be agreeable.”
“Can you?” I ask.
Campbell lifts a hand to hold my leg in place, running it up the length of my thigh. The heat of his palm seeps through my linen pants. “Try me, French.”
French again, then. I’m horrified to find how much I want to be Mattie to him.
“Take this off,” I say, running a fingertip over the right strap of my bra. Campbell props himself on an elbow and studies me, his eyes dark and discerning. All that focused attention of his, gale-force on me.
Finally, his fingers slip beneath my shoulder blade. “Arch your back for me.”
“I thought I was telling you what to do,” I say, even as my spine lifts from the bedspread.
Campbell reaches beneath me with both hands, so I’m suddenly in the circle of his arms.
“You are,” he says, unhooking the clasp and skating the straps over my shoulders. He piles the fabric beside us, his body hovered an inch above mine. “What now?”
“Look at me.”
He swallows thickly and lifts himself higher, his gold eyelashes shifting in the low light as he takes me in. When he swears, I scrunch my eyes shut and say, “You can touch me. But you have to call me Mattie.”
For a held breath of a moment we’re both motionless.
When I risk opening my eyes he’s looking right at me, and we lie like that: holding each other’s gazes in a challenge, or a promise.
Campbell blinks, and then he drops a soft kiss to the sensitive spot between my breasts.
It’s so gentle that all the air rushes out of me.
“I can do that,” he says into my skin. He fills a hand with me, wanting and firm as he kisses a line up my body—my collarbone, my throat, the curve of my jaw. My lips, finally. “Mattie.”
I pull him closer and rock my hips against his, anything to break the intimacy of what just happened. He says my name again, cracked in half this time—“Ah, Ma-ttie.”
“Now your pants,” I say into the shell of his ear. “Off.”
He reaches between us for the button on his khakis, and then something starts vibrating. I gasp and Campbell says, “Shit.” We’re a tangle of limbs as he pulls his phone from his pocket and makes to put it on the nightstand. I catch sight of the caller ID at the same time he does: Plover House.
Campbell goes still above me, the hard lines of his torso pulled taut.
He stares at the screen for one more ring and then, as if breaking himself from a trance, says, “I—fuck.” He looks at me, half-naked beneath him, and then jerks out of bed.
“I have to—I’m so sorry, I have to take this.
” He re-buttons his pants and shoots me a pained look, his face so contorted with a mixture of longing and regret that it might be funny if he weren’t leaving me here.
“I just—” He glances at the phone, then back at me.
Holds up one hand. “Don’t move. Please. I’ll be right back. ”
He scoops his shirt off the floor and then he’s gone, the door falling shut behind him.
If Plover House is a client, it’s not one I recognize, and even then—why would a client be calling at this hour?
I stare up at the ceiling. It’s some sort of off-white stucco beneath pale wooden beams, dark iron pendant lights all turned off.
Campbell must’ve left his patio door cracked before the cruise; there’s a delicate breeze rustling the shadowed curtain at the far side of the room, and I can hear the ocean breathing across the street.
I’d left my patio door open, too. Thinking it would be nice to feel the salt air when I came home.
Thinking in some deep part of myself that maybe it would bring me a little closer to Campbell: my door open to the ocean beside his.
Maybe he was thinking the same. Maybe he was listening for me last night, too.
Or maybe I’m just looking at all of it, now: these things between us, the stunning and sudden ways I’m learning I’ve misunderstood him, what all of it means. It’s impossible to pretend it away when I’m lying in the middle of his bed.
I feel, overwhelmingly and all at once, like I might cry.
My phone is in the back pocket of my shorts, wedged between my ass and the mattress. I pull it out and the screen illuminates with a pile of text messages:
AVA: How was the boat? Did Dexter survive?
DEXTER: What the hell was that?
Matilda, are you still with Campbell?
Hello????
I inhale through the frantic squeezing of my throat. What the hell was that?
I press my phone face down into the bed at my side, blinking up at the ceiling.
When I turn my head, I can see Campbell’s nightstand—his phone charger, a pair of folded glasses, a clear cup with one swallow of water left in it.
I think: His mouth was on that. And then: His mouth was on me. And then: Fuck.
I can hear Campbell’s low voice from the hallway, the cadence of his words but not the actual shape of them. What’s Plover House? What am I doing in here? What did the person at reception think when I was circling the lobby like a deranged homing pigeon?
Don’t move, Campbell said. Please.
I yank back the bedspread and scurry under all the layers until I’m buried enough to pull everything over my face. I breathe into the hot dark, the million-thread-count sheets that smell like Wicksteed and Campbell. When I blink, the fabric shushes across my eyelashes.
I’m here to work. I’m here to win this client and prove to Dexter and Iris and everyone that I’m serious enough to get promoted. I’m here to show Campbell that I can beat him. I’m here to be a professional.
All of it matters. All of it’s true.
But this is true, too: How the spread of Campbell’s hand over my lower back felt like something sliding into place. How the past two weeks have felt like a slow roll into the inevitable, with Campbell waiting for me at the honest end of it all.
We can’t be doing this, and I want him like I’ve hardly wanted anything.
I want him to come back into this room and bury me under the weight of him, all that freckled skin.
I want to forget every way I’ve always been so fucking buried by Campbell and let this one—fervent and primal and good—replace all of it.
I want more of his voice beside me on the beach, telling me every wicked way I feel is allowed.
I want to know who’s on the phone.
Already, the thought of going back to before feels impossible. Impossible, to avoid him. Impossible, to go a day without hearing the coarse rush of his voice. Impossible, to forget what his face did when he saw me half-naked beneath him.
I don’t want any of that. I’m terrified by how much I don’t.
The door clicks open.
“I’m sorry,” Campbell says from across the room. His footsteps, bare on the hardwood. The thud of the door falling closed. Then, a pause. “Mattie?”
I squeeze my eyes shut under the covers. Mattie, Mattie. What that does to my stupid heart.
“Hey,” Campbell says, his voice careful and close. The mattress dips beside me. “Please don’t panic.”
“I’m not,” I say, though it’s exactly what I’m doing. Under the duvet, lightless and insulated, it feels like my muffled voice might be the only real thing.
“I know what it sounds like,” Campbell says, shifting on the bed. “Your brain working.”
“What does it sound like?”
“You know how there’s that frequency only dogs can hear? It’s like that. I have this Mattie detector.” He hums. “Whirring, whirring.”
I roll my eyes under the blankets, and Campbell lets out a faint laugh.
“I heard that, too,” he says.
The covers peel back from my face, and suddenly Campbell’s right there—suspended above me. “Hi,” he says, gently. “It’s just me.”
As if Campbell Porter has ever been just anything to me.
“Hi,” I say. He smiles, small tug of his mouth to one side.
“You okay?”
I think of us on the beach, his foot pressed against mine as the sun lowered into the water. I think you’re scared.
I nod, and my hair sweeps against the bedsheet. Campbell reaches for the far edge of the covers and tucks himself in beside me. His shirt is unbuttoned; when he pulls me into him, he’s almost unbearably soft.
“I don’t want to have sex,” I tell him. It’s such an egregious lie that I have to shut my eyes as I say it.
I want him too much to hand myself over to this; in the forced intermission of his phone call it all crystalized so sharply.
I’ve done casual before, and Campbell is anything but casual to me.
If I let him in all the way, let this go where it’s going, what’ll be left of me on the other side?
Campbell’s thumb tracks a line down my shoulder blade. “Okay.”
My face is pressed into the warm plane of his chest. He can’t see me, and it’s the only reason I’m brave enough to say, “Do you want to have sex?”
Campbell exhales, and his breath tickles through the hair at the nape of my neck. “There hasn’t been a time since I’ve known you exist that I haven’t wanted you, Mattie.”
Above the soft thud of his heartbeat, I bite my lip. Campbell shifts so we’re looking at each other. His pupils are enormous in the dark. “But I meant it, before. You tell me what to do, here.”
Looking at his face this close, shadowed blue in the thin moonlight through the curtains, I know that what I want him to do is stay here beside me. That I want to be Mattie to him, not just for tonight. That this feels different than anything else in my life, and that I want to keep it.
“Can we just sleep?” I ask, quietly.
It feels like the right side of some bargain I’m making with myself.
I don’t want to be away from him, but if we’re only asleep here, together, some line stays uncrossed.
We won’t have quite made it real—this thing that’s unfurling between us after so many years wrapped tight as a clenched fist. I’ll still have some power, maybe.
“Yeah,” Campbell says. His hand skims up my arm, the curve of my neck, to frame my face. I tilt my cheek into his palm, instinctual as a blink. “Here?”
I nod. My room, just on the other side of the wall, feels intolerably far. “If that’s okay.”
“Yeah, Mattie.” Campbell kisses my cheekbone. I think of what his voice will sound like when he wakes up, husky with sleep. How his chest will rise and fall when he’s dreaming. These things I’m crushed to learn how badly I want to know and hold close to me. “Of course it’s okay.”