Chapter Twenty-Five
Twenty-Five
Things become pretty hopeless, after that.
I beg Dexter to work late with me, just to prove I’m still committed to the pitch.
Just to give me an excuse to say yes when Campbell texts, Still working?
Just to give me something—anything—to think about that isn’t Campbell Porter and the drag of his fingers inside of me, the press of his body on mine, the grit of that sandy voice I’ve known so long moving around the word baby.
I find myself shutting my eyes, constantly.
Like I could blink him away, or maybe just live a little longer inside the memory of him rocking me against his hand.
When we see the Slater Faust team at breakfast the next morning, Campbell’s wearing his glasses, and it hits me so forcefully I take a piece of toast and immediately leave the room.
“Beach,” I tell Dexter and Iris. “Just need some air.”
The private cove is busy—solo travelers reading on lounge chairs under striped umbrellas, parents spread out on Wicksteed towels as their kids weave into the surf on Wicksteed boogie boards.
I stick my toes in the water and take an enormous bite of toast. Chew while I squint into the sun.
It’s only eight days, now, I tell myself.
Trying to swallow how sharply that tastes like grief, how everything in my body is screaming to go back and pull Campbell out of that breakfast room and nudge those glasses down the bridge of his nose.
Feel the hot slide of his mouth on mine, dip my hands into his jeans and return the favor.
I always want you looking at me, he told me that first night. So we’re even.
I don’t know that there’s any getting even, in this. That I’ll ever feel steady with Campbell on the other end of the equation.
When I call Ava, she picks up on the second ring.
“I miss you,” she says by way of greeting.
My mouth is full of toast when I garble out, “I miss you.”
“What are you eating?”
“Bread.” I swallow. “Whole grain, you’ll be glad to know.”
“Are you outside?”
“On the beach.” I glance back toward the hotel, but no one’s followed me out. “I had to—I needed some space.”
“From…?”
“Yeah.” I hear the implication, the name she doesn’t say. Of course we’re talking about the same thing. “Right.”
“Is he—are you—” Ava breaks off, then redirects. “Well, I guess just tell me how you’re feeling, first. I’ll save my questions.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose and mash my eyes shut. “I feel like a fool,” I say, so quiet she probably can’t even hear me over the wind off the water. “I feel totally out of my depth, Ava.”
“Because—” She hesitates. “Because you like him?”
“Yes,” I say, miserably.
Ava sucks in a breath. “Okay, I can’t say I expected it to be him, but I knew this day would come—I knew, with the right person you’d—I mean. Mattie, this is big!”
I groan. “Don’t say that. I don’t want it to be big.”
“Why not? Love is a good thing. You—”
“It’s not love.” I start pacing in the packed sand at the edge of the water. “He doesn’t even—I know he doesn’t want that. And I don’t, either. You know that. You know me.”
I want her to say: Absolutely. You’re so right. You aren’t the kind of person who feels these things. You’re exempt. This was a weird little fluke, and soon it’ll be over.
Instead, she says, “I know how much love you’re capable of.”
It stops me short. “But not with—not, like, romantically.”
“Why not? Just because you haven’t before?”
It lands in a soft, terrified part of me. Well-hidden and tender to the touch. I watched my parents’ love rob them of the people they wanted to be. I’m watching Ava’s love deconstruct the scaffolding of my life.
“I don’t want this,” I whisper.
Ava’s voice is close and careful. “Which part?”
Every part. The unsteadying need that’s rattled through me for weeks, now; the way eight days feels far too short to get Campbell out of my system; the way I know I don’t want him out at all.
I have a flash of Ava and Lev in our kitchen the morning I left for Aspen: their bodies turned toward each other, the obvious and inextricable weave of their lives.
What it means to belong to someone else.
What it means that I think of that moment, now, and feel longing.
“I don’t want to rely on a man,” I say. I look out over the water and hold my eyes open into the glare of sunlight—like I could blind myself to all this. “You know that.”
In the beat before she responds, I worry I’ve offended her. Stepped a toe over the line we don’t cross: the twilight zone of the life Ava wants that I don’t, the divide between our futures.
“Being with someone isn’t about being reliant,” Ava says, haltingly. “Or, it doesn’t have to be. You’ve always taken care of yourself, Mattie—I mean, you’re the most capable, independent person I know. Why would this have to change that?”
“Wouldn’t it?” I ask.
Yes, I want her to say. I want so fiercely for her to talk me out of this.
“No?” Ava says it like it’s obvious. “You choose someone because they make you more of who you are. Because they see you, and they want you, and when you’re with them, you feel like yourself.
That’s how I feel when I’m with Lev, like I make sense.
It’s not someone leading you, or directing you, or—” She breaks off.
“My point is, you’ve always chosen exactly the life you want, and this doesn’t have to be any different.
It’s not a trap, Mattie. It’s just someone in your corner. ”
When I don’t respond right away, she says, “I mean, how does Campbell make you feel?”
Attack-y, I think, in spite of myself. It’s so ingrained in me, to push him away. But as I let the silence stretch between us, the truth bubbles in me, quiet but insistent: he makes me feel known, and wanted. He makes me feel like life holds more than I imagined. A little bit like I’m on fire.
“So good,” is all I can manage. A pitiful articulation of it.
“Okay,” Ava says, gently. “Then I think that’s what’s true right now. And I think it’s okay to let yourself have that.”
I don’t see Campbell for the rest of the day.
I know he’s working; when Dexter and I meet for lunch to go over some write-ups I’ve been putting together, he tells me he saw him with Soraya in the business center.
I let him have his space. I try to appreciate mine.
But when he texts to ask if I want to meet at his patio hot tub at ten—after dinner with Dexter and Iris, after everyone’s gone to their own rooms—I take Ava’s advice and let myself.
I didn’t pack a swimsuit, so I have to get one from the Wicksteed gift shop.
It’s not the $245 sneakers from Aspen, but I still spend over $100 for a crinkled lilac two-piece.
It’s not even a little bit my style. When I climb over the patio wall like a lemur, Campbell’s already watching me from the blue glow of the water.
“Mattie French in a pastel?” He’s shirtless, sitting on the low bench in the hot tub with bubbles foaming at his waist. “I’ll start drafting the press release.”
I cut him a look and sink one foot into the water, testing its temperature. It’s stinging and perfect, hot enough to shock me back into my body at the sight of him half-naked. “I had to buy it here. They didn’t have anything black.”
“Tragic,” Campbell says as I drift closer to him.
“Why, you hate it?”
He lifts his chin to meet my eyes; still standing, I’m taller than him. He parts his knees and uses both hands on the backs of my thighs to slot me in against him.
“It’s hideous,” he says. I take his head in my hands as he kisses the triangle line of the swimsuit at the swell of my breast. “We’ll probably need to take it off.”
“Nice,” I say, and he smiles up at me.
“I missed you today.”
“Did you?” I ask, softer.
Campbell’s thumb circles the back of my thigh. “Very much.”
I missed him, too. But instead of admitting it, I run my hands over the lines of his shoulders and down his chest. Even in the steaming water he’s his own heat source, radiant, water beading across his freckled skin.
“Campbell,” I say, seriously. His eyes find mine. “Do you shave your chest?”
He laughs, one surprised bark of it into the quiet. Besides the burble of the hot tub and the ocean across the street, it’s silent out here. We could be all alone in the world.
“Yes.” He lifts one hand from my leg to run it over his heart. “I swam competitively until I graduated college. That was, what, a decade of my life? It gave me a complex about chest hair.”
I swat his hand out of the way so I can spread both of mine over his smooth skin. Also so he’ll put his hand back on my leg, which is exactly what he does.
“Why?” He echoes me. “You hate it?”
I meet his eyes, liquid and near-black out here under the blanket of stars.
“No,” I say, quietly. I love his skin—the tan, freckled spread of it under my palms. I love everything about his body, is the truth.
I have the obscene urge to lick him: the divot along his sternum, the soft rise of muscle over his heart.
I squeeze my thighs together, and he answers the movement by pulling me into his lap.
“Hey, French,” he murmurs, when our faces line up.
“Hi.”
Campbell kisses the side of my nose, right over the tiny hole from my piercing. I lift a finger to rub at it. “I hate having that.”
His hands spread over the tops of my thighs, which are bracketed on either side of his own. “You shouldn’t.”
I study him. The way his face is tipped up to mine, the plain want there. I feel a little dizzy. “No?”
Campbell shakes his head. “It reminds me of that summer at Slater, when you still had the hoop in. What you were like, then.”
The water fizzes at our waists. “Was I so different?”
“No.” Campbell squeezes my thighs gently. “When did you take it out?”
“When I turned twenty-seven, over the winter.” I touch the hole again, absently. “An elder twenty-something, you know? I thought it was time to grow up, I guess.”
Campbell makes a small noise in his throat.
“What—” I say, “don’t tell me you liked it?”