Chapter Twenty-Four #2
After yoga, I take the coldest shower of my life.
Curmudgeonly-water-heater cold. We’re all supposed to reconvene for a presentation at eleven, which leaves me two hours to scrub the image of Campbell doing yoga from my brain.
His body piked into downward dog, the obscene way he smiled at me between his legs.
Upside down, his skin glistening with sweat.
The instructor cued us to let something go with each exhale, and I prayed for relief from him—from the hot ropes of desire threading in me so tightly that by the end of the class I could barely even remember my name.
I get to the conference room last, and the only remaining seat is next to Campbell.
When I shoot Dexter a panicked look, he mouths, Sorry.
Campbell kicks out the rolling chair for me without breaking eye contact with Lucia, who’s telling him about the yoga retreat she attended last year with this morning’s instructor.
In Bali, I think she says. When I lower into the seat, Iris smiles at me from across the table.
“How’s everyone feeling after that flow?” Lucia asks, and Dexter rolls out his shoulders.
“Relaxed,” he tells her, and Lucia beams.
On the work front, this morning’s class was good for our pitch: the concept we’re running with is all about the long-term emotional benefits of a Wicksteed vacation. The staying power of it, the relaxation.
On the Campbell front, it was terrible. Under the table, his pinky finger makes contact with my bare knee.
“I found it very centering,” I add, lying through my teeth as I tilt my leg away. “A really grounding way to start the day.”
“Good for the mind-body connection,” Campbell agrees, looking at Lucia even as his finger finds my bare skin again. I’m wearing a skirt, which I could kill myself for now. “How often is that sort of thing on offer, here?”
“Oh, daily,” Lucia says. She taps open her presentation: Marketplace Analysis: Top 5 Competitive Set. “I’ll get into it a little more here, how our fitness program in particular really sets us apart from other players in the luxury resort space.”
“Great,” Campbell says. His entire palm spreads over my knee.
I echo, “Great,” and everyone turns to look at me. Dexter pulls his eyebrows together, a very clear: What are you doing? I turn pointedly toward Lucia’s presentation.
As she launches into it, Campbell’s hand drifts up my skirt.
So, so slowly. He never turns his attention from the projector, never glances at me or picks up his breathing or anything at all.
But when we’re fifteen minutes in and his pinky skims the laced edge of my underwear, I clatter out of my seat in the most conspicuous manner imaginable and spit, “Bathroom.”
Lucia nods, still talking, and I hurry out of the room.
I can feel Dexter watching me, but I can’t turn back.
Can’t even really breathe, or think straight.
When I cut around the corner of the business center—out of sight of the conference room and its fishbowl windows—I press my back flat to the wall and shut my eyes.
It’s only ten days.
Nine days, now, and nine days I won’t survive if each one of them is like this.
It’s not lost on me that this is already the second time I’ve fled to the bathroom in front of our clients to get space from Campbell.
I think of his hand on the bare skin of my thigh and imagine it higher, higher. I feel ravenous and unsteady.
I glance back toward the business center, where I can just hear the echo of Lucia’s voice floating toward me down the hallway. Then I make for the bathroom off the lobby and run my hands under the coldest tap water. I press my palms to my burning cheeks.
In the mirror, I look red and overwhelmed. In my body, I feel red and overwhelmed.
When I leave the bathroom, Campbell’s waiting in the hallway.
“Oh my god,” I say, immediately. But he only stands up off the wall, pulls his hands from his pockets, and shoots a glance across the lobby. Then he reaches for my hand and tugs me through a door marked Linens.
“Campbell,” I hiss. He flips on the light and slides over a towel cart to block the door. “We can’t do this.”
“We can,” he says, one hand settling at the small of my back. We’re surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelving, fluffy white towels folded in perfect rows. “We can, if you want to. We already are.”
God, do I want to. In his button-down and slacks he’s so much more the version of him I’ve known all these years: not the man with sea-swept hair dragging me into the business center after the cruise, not the one in that gray T-shirt showing up in my room last night.
This is the Campbell I’ve spent so long chafing against and I want to undo him, this version of him.
“I can’t believe you followed me.” My voice is acid, but my body is responding to him on its own. My hands lift to his biceps to steady myself. “They’re going to know we’re together.”
“I faked an asthma attack,” Campbell says. His pinky finger slips under the waist of my skirt, his thumb spanning up the line of my spine. “They think I’m in my room.”
I stare at him. “You have asthma?”
“Used to.” His palm presses flat to my back, pulling me in even tighter so our stomachs are flush. My temperature is climbing. “When I was a kid.”
“You’re insane.”
His eyes flit to my mouth. “You make me insane.”
“We have to go back—”
“You have to go back,” he echoes. “When I’m done.”
His other hand skims across my knee, up the inside of my thigh, and I gasp.