Chapter Twenty-Three
Twenty-Three
Something taps from across the room, and I catch sight of him—down the steps to the suite’s lounge area, facing away from me at the driftwood table with his laptop open.
He’s pulled on a T-shirt with a hole near the neckline.
His hair’s as mussed as I remember it from when we finally fell asleep.
He stops typing, scratches the curve of his ear.
I slide soundlessly out of bed and make for the bathroom.
Campbell’s toiletries are lined up on the colossal counter like soldiers: deodorant, contacts case, a travel-sized bottle of face wash that strikes me as so endearing I know—I know—I’m in over my head.
I find his drugstore cleanser charming. The thought of Campbell making a trip to the CVS on North Clark specifically for this, the thought of him packing everything into a clear zip bag for airport security.
The thought of him thinking of me, maybe, and the month of travel ahead of us.
I meet my eyes in the mirror and breathe out, slowly, through my nose.
I’m in my underwear and the Vanderbilt T-shirt Campbell pulled out of his suitcase past one in the morning.
It’s soft, like it’s been washed a hundred times.
I reach for his toothpaste and squeeze some onto my finger.
I rinse out my mouth, and then I pee, and then I go to him.
Campbell jumps when I run my hands down his shoulders and over his chest.
“Jesus,” he says. He leans back in the chair so our heads are level. “You’re like a ninja.”
“I flushed the toilet,” I say. “Ran the sink. Maybe your ears are the problem.”
“Mm.” Campbell’s eyes move across my face like he’s looking for something, or confirming that I’m real. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him in glasses—matte black frames with a notch right over his nose. “It was the writing tunnel.”
It sends me back five years: Campbell twenty-three, me twenty-two. Faced off at our intern desks. The way we used to get so absorbed in our work, that soundless space we both went to when the writing was flowing so well we couldn’t be pulled out of it for anything.
I roll my chin along his collarbone to look at his computer. “What are you working on?”
“That social post,” he says. “Soraya’s out for blood; I forgot about it last night.”
I circle the chair and sink onto his lap, balancing on my tiptoes as his hands come to my waist to steady me. Campbell leans back to meet my eyes.
“Did you tell her?” I ask.
His hands slip down to my thighs, then track slowly up my bare skin. “No.”
The glasses are criminal. Between his finger-raked hair and the glasses and the pillow crease on his right cheek, Campbell in the morning is enough to ruin me for anything else, anyone else. Seeing him in this quiet, private way.
“We have to keep this between us,” I say.
His eyes pass back and forth over mine. His hands settle at the divots of my hips, fixing me to him. “Of course. It’s only ten days.”
I’m not sure what he means by it—that it’s only ten days until we go home; that it’s only ten days until this ends; that it’s only ten days until the pitch is over and we don’t need to hide anymore. I’m too scared to ask.
Instead, I slide his glasses down the bridge of his nose. “Can you see without these?”
“Not so much, up close,” he says. I set them on the table behind me, twisting in his lap, and when I turn back there’s so much transparent desire on his face it brings heat to my throat. Campbell’s fingertips dig in, pulling me closer. “But I know you.”
His mouth opens under mine immediately, the slide of his tongue and the mint of his toothpaste.
My lips feel swollen and half-numb from all the hours we spent doing this last night and still, I’m ravenous—for the scrape of his stubble at my chin, the wet heat of his mouth, the bite of his teeth at my bottom lip.
Every way I’ve hated Campbell all these years feels soothed by this one, obliterating thing: being wanted by him.
“Campbell,” I say, his head in my hands as he presses his mouth to my collarbone. The neckline of this shirt is blown out and gaping. “I still don’t want to have sex.”
His hands are under the long hem of the shirt, cupping my ass. Without lifting his face, he rocks me along the hard length of him and says, “Oh, me neither. Not even a little.”
I squeeze my legs around his hips and he swallows a moan. Lifts his head so I can see him. “Mattie,” he rasps. “Are you trying to kill me?”
I brush my thumbs over his cheeks and rake my fingers into his hair. His eyes flutter closed and open again. “Not even a little,” I echo.
“Go easy on me,” he whispers. I roll my hips and breath punches out of him—half a laugh, half a groan. “Not like that.”
“When have I ever gone easy on you?”
“Never,” he admits, letting his head fall backward. I arch against him as his hands skim up to my waist. “Not even once that I can remember.”
I smile and drop another kiss to his mouth, slow and gentle. His fingers spread across my back, holding me flush. “Campbell,” I say, quietly. “What’s Plover House?”
His eyebrows stutter upward in surprise. “Oh,” he says. “It’s—”
“Mattie?”
I jump, nearly falling off Campbell’s lap as someone starts pounding on the door. Not just anyone—Dexter. And not just any door—the door to my room, through the wall.
“Mattie?” More pounding, louder this time. “I am worried! This is a welfare check!”
“Shit,” I hiss, scrambling off Campbell’s lap. He stands to follow me, adjusting himself in his shorts. Longing coils through me so keenly it nearly feels like nausea, swirling with the panic of Dexter finding me like this. “He texted me, like, ten times last night. My phone’s dead. I’ll have to—”
I glance at the patio, then scoop my clothes off the floor beside Campbell’s bed.
“Patio?” he offers. He’s put his glasses back on, and I can’t help but kiss him one last time—the surprised press of his mouth, the skim of his hand across my hip as I hurry away from him.
“Patio,” I confirm, and then I’m bursting onto Campbell’s sunrise-soaked terrace and launching myself over its low barrier into the scrub grass that divides it from my own.
I jerk open my door just as Dexter says, “Mattie, I’m seriously going to get security if—”
“Hi.”
I lean into the frame, one hand on my hip, trying not to sound out of breath. I yanked on my pants and swapped shirts on the patio, leaving Campbell’s in a heap in the sun. Didn’t have time for the bra. Dexter assesses me with a slow track of his eyes up and down.
“Why are you wearing the same thing you wore yesterday?”
“I slept in it,” I say. “I passed out super hard.”
He squints. “Really.”
“Really.” I hold up my phone. “And this died, so if you were trying to reach me—”
“If?” Dexter tilts toward me. “You can’t disappear like that. Especially not after Campbell hauls you away to locations unknown. I thought you were in trouble. Soraya had to talk me off the ledge.”
“She did?” I think of her in Aspen: Don’t talk shit. “What did she say?”
“That you two have beef you need to settle. That Campbell wouldn’t hurt a flea.” He props both hands on his hips. “She said that—flea. Even when she gets an idiom wrong, she makes it sound cool.”
I have a flash of Campbell’s hand cradling my head as he laid me out across his bed last night. Shirtless in the thin, shadowy moonlight. I swallow.
“What happened?” Dexter demands.
“Nothing,” I say, unconvincingly. His eyebrows hike. “I mean—really, nothing. He was mad at me.” I scramble, my cheeks sweltering. “He’s been mad at me. Since dinner in Aspen. For what I said in front of the clients.”
Dexter stares at me. “He’s still mad about that?”
“Yes,” I say, leaning my hip into the doorframe and crossing my arms. “He’ll take any excuse to hate me; you know that.”
Dexter nods, assessing. “He does seem like the type to hold a grudge.”
“Yeah, for five years,” I say, a little too eagerly. “Even though he’s always the one beating me.”
“Well, not this time.” Dexter straightens, lifting his chin. “We’re going to crush him.”
“Like a flea,” I agree, and he smiles. I smile back.
Somewhere behind us, my bra lies in an incriminating heap on the patio. Baking under the late September sun.
Ava doesn’t pick up her phone until the last ring. “If you’re calling about the Miami restaurants,” she says in a rush, “I promise I’m looking at them. I just—”
“I’m not calling about the restaurants.”
“Oh.” Ava hesitates. “What’s that tone? What’s wrong?”
I blink at the wall above my headboard, as if I could see through it to Campbell in his room. I’m still in my hopelessly wrinkled pants and no bra, pacing in my bare feet. The door had barely fallen shut behind Dexter before I plugged my phone into the wall and called Ava.
“I did something of—questionable morality.”
“You did something—” Ava breaks off. “Oh my god, what did Campbell make you do? Did you sabotage him? Is it illegal, Mattie? Do you want me to talk to Lev? His brother Isaac is an attorney—remember, he’s the oldest one? With the little comb-over?”
“I don’t need legal help from Comb-Over Isaac,” I say, staring down at my toes. I wiggle them, almost as if to confirm I’m real. Then I shut my eyes. “Ava, I kissed him.”
There’s a long, horrifically quiet pause. Then, Ava’s tiny voice. Barely a whisper. “You did what now?”
“I k—”
“I heard you.” She’s still whispering, like I really did confess to a crime. “Was it consensual?”
“Ava, god, of course. I would never kiss someone without—”
“Not you,” she says. “Him! This guy’s spent five years ruining your life!”
“I know.” I squeeze the bridge of my nose. “Fuck, I know.”
“So what changed!” Her voice rises. “Last I checked he was antagonizing you over the accidental poisoning of our daughter Pancake!”
“He wasn’t—” I break off. That’s exactly how I’d described the Pancake incident to Ava: Campbell making it worse for me, rather than the truth, which was that Campbell had been the only thing to get me through that night. “I twisted the truth, on that one.”
“You lied to me?”
“No, I altered the tone of the story to suit the audience—you—and actually—”
“Don’t copywrite at me, Mattie! Not in a time like this!”
A laugh bubbles out of me before I can help it. I sink onto the edge of my bed and prop my elbows on my knees. “Ava, I’m sorry—”
“Why are you laughing!”
“Because it’s funny,” I say, scrubbing a hand over my eyes. “Because I’m so fucked.”
“Why?” Her voice gets suddenly clearer, like she’s brought the phone closer to her face. “Does somebody at work know?”
“No,” I say, and my phone buzzes.
“Then, why?”
“I think I’ve been wrong,” I say, quieter. “I think I might actually—I think he’s good.”
In Ava’s stunned silence, I pull my phone away from my ear to check the notification.
It’s Campbell, five simple words.
Can you come back yet?