Chapter Twenty-Five #3
Campbell rolls his eyes, and now it’s my turn to laugh. I love him like this: so close to me, and so careful with me. “I’m sure,” I say, softly. “Are you sure?”
He runs the pad of his thumb over my nose, the spot where my piercing used to be. “Never been more sure of anything.”
Then he props himself onto an elbow and reaches over me, his body covering mine as he pulls open the nightstand drawer. “I have condoms,” he says. “Let me just—”
“Why did you bring condoms on a work trip?”
Campbell glances down at me, then shuffles into the box and tears off one foil square. “I didn’t,” he says. “I had to buy them in that store off the lobby.” He knocks the drawer shut and rolls back onto his elbow at my side. “They were, like, fifty dollars.”
I look at him, running my lip between my teeth as I consider this. “When?”
Campbell lets out one gust of a laugh. It’s shy and bitten-off. “After you touched my ankle on the beach.”
I brush my foot over his ankle now, then slide my leg between both of his. “That was such an erotic experience for you, you needed condoms?”
He’s blushing. It’s my favorite thing that’s ever happened on his face. “Basically.”
I take the condom from his hand and kiss him. Indulgent and long, the bare lengths of our bodies pressing closer. When I pull back just far enough to speak, his eyes are still closed. “How’d you know we’d wind up here?”
“I didn’t.” Campbell’s eyes draw open to find mine. “I just really wanted us to.”
I rip the foil and reach between us. Whisper, “Me, too.”
“Yeah?” he says, settling onto me. I tilt my chin so he’ll kiss me, but Campbell holds himself just out of my grasp until, finally, I relent.
“Yeah,” I confirm, and his mouth drops to mine. The deep slide of his tongue, the hard line of him against my stomach. I bite his lower lip. Use me.
“I want you all the time,” Campbell rumbles into my mouth. “All I think about.”
“Say please,” I whisper, and Campbell’s eyes lift to mine. His face is right above my own, his hips shifting to line us up. I feel him against me—I’m still sensitive, still pulsing with the rush of my blood.
“Please,” he says, and rocks his hips.
I draw a shuddering inhale. “Call me Mattie.”
Campbell’s eyes are inky, his pupils blown out and bottomless. His voice is wrecked when he says, “Please, Mattie.”
“Okay.” The word shakes. “Since you’re begging.”
Campbell takes one of my ankles in his hand and bends my leg, using his other hand to press himself against me. Just so, just enough to make me whimper. “More,” I whisper. He starts to move into me and wraps my lifted leg around his hips.
“Okay,” he says. Quiet, more an exhale than a word. “Since you’re begging.”
In one fluid motion, Campbell slides into me until our hips are flush.
It’s detonating—he’s incandescently hot, one hand angling my jaw to look at him, all of me spread wide and wanting.
I feel like my entire body is a heartbeat.
I feel it in my cheeks, in my throat. Most of all in the warm, aching place where we’re connected.
“Fuck you,” I breathe, our mouths brushing. “Why are you so good at everything?”
“Because,” Campbell says, his voice tight. He slides out long and slow, then pushes back into me on a broken exhale. “I’m always trying to impress you.”
“Tell me more about the book.”
Campbell turns his chin and lifts an eyebrow. I’m propped on one hand in bed beside him, the sheets pooled at my waist. My other hand is on his chest, fingertips absently tracing circles over his heart.
“We don’t have to talk about that,” he says. His cheeks are pink, his hair still damp from the shower. My entire body is loose and exhausted but still, I want more of him: his voice, his arm on the mattress between us and his fingers brushing a rhythm over my thigh.
“I want to.”
Campbell holds my gaze. “It’s depressing.”
“No,” I tell him. “It’s impressive.”
Campbell looks straight up at the ceiling and lets out a rush of air. “Look, I want you to think I’m extremely cool.” His neck rolls so we’re eye to eye again. “And this story makes me sound like a massive loser.”
I laugh, and his eyes crinkle at the edges. “All the more reason to tell it.”
He shakes his head, but there’s still the echo of a smile on his mouth.
“It takes so long to figure this stuff out, you know?” His eyes skate over mine, like he’s checking this with me.
“How to write a whole book, and then how to try and sell it. You need an agent—that’s nearly impossible to pull off in and of itself—then they have edits, so you spend half your life working on those, then your agent tries to sell the thing and”—he waves a hand in front of him—“then it can still go to shit.”
I crawl my hand up his chest, his neck, to his jaw. Tilt him toward me so his gaze falls back to mine. “You’re still extremely cool.”
Campbell’s eyes soften as he exhales through his nose.
“It’s basically taken an anvil to my confidence.
As a writer, and a creative, and just—in general.
I spent four years on this, and now it’s just over.
” His eyes drift to my mouth and back up again.
“I started writing it that fall, after we met.”
“Can you write another one? Try again?”
Campbell sighs. “Yeah. I mean, that’s what my agent wants. I just don’t know if I can actually do this.”
I hesitate, pulling my lips into my mouth. But I mean it—and, in the end, I say it. “I think you could probably do anything, Campbell.”
He groans and drops an arm over his eyes, his head tilting backward. “You can’t say shit like that to me, Mattie.”
“Why?”
Campbell peeks out at me from under his folded elbow. Sweeps his eyes down my body, outlined by the thin sheet. “I thought you being mean to me was my kink. But you being nice to me…”
I laugh and push him in the chest. He drops his arm and draws me into him, pressing a hard kiss to the top of my head. “Thank you, though,” he says. “Seriously.”
My cheek against his chest, I ask, “What’s it about, the book? I know memory, but—why did you pick that?”
He lets the question linger, his fingertips tracing a line up and down my forearm where it’s draped over his stomach. “Ah—” he says, then breaks off again. “That phone call I got, the other night? You asked about it. Plover House?”
I rise back onto my elbow so I can see his face. Campbell’s eyes have gone tight. “It’s residential memory care,” he says. “My dad lives there.”
I blink. “In North Carolina?” It’s a pointless question—inconsequential, but something to say while my brain scrabbles to file this into everything else I know about Campbell Porter.
“Yeah,” he says. “Back home.”
“And he was—calling you?”
Campbell swallows. When he props himself a little higher in bed, I move with him.
“Sort of. He doesn’t remember who I am, most of the time.
But he has these moments where it’s like he remembers that I’m important, and he wants to talk, but—” He stops, his eyes lighting over my face and then away.
Across the room. “You don’t want to hear about this. ”
“No, I do.” I sit up straighter, pulling the sheet with me and tucking it under my armpits. Campbell looks at me, unsure. When I reach out and touch his face, just lightly, he blinks three times in rapid succession. “Hey, I do.”
Campbell looks down at my hand, where it’s fallen to his arm. I squeeze his bicep.
“He’s been sick since I was in high school,” he says, finally. “Early onset. I think I was processing a lot of it in this book—maybe it was too personal, I don’t know. That could be its whole problem, really. But it felt important, I guess, to me.”
Our eyes meet. “Yeah,” I say, softly.
Campbell draws a deep breath. “But now it’s over, and I have to figure out if I want to open myself up to all that rejection again. I mean, my whole family’s invested, and now I have to go home and tell them I failed. As, just, an extra layer of shit.”
I want to ask more about his dad. I want to know every bit of what that’s been like for him, spanning a whole decade and the entire time we’ve known each other. But I can see this pivot for what it is: Campbell would rather talk about the book, and he didn’t even really want to talk about the book.
So I only ask, “Are you going home soon?”
“Next Friday,” he says. “My middle sister, Josie—she’s getting married next weekend. I’m flying straight there after the pitch.”
I think of him in Aspen, on the phone in the Pantry. Yes, Ma, but I can’t get in until seven. I think of us a week from now, flying to different states.
I falter. “Oh, wow.”
“Mm,” Campbell says, smiling a little. Under the sheet, his palm spreads over my thigh. “Wow.”
“Are they not supportive, your family? I’d hope they’d be nice to you about this.”
“No, they are,” he says. “Too much, if anything. But Jo’s so soft—it’ll probably make her cry, you know, and on her wedding weekend?
” He lifts his eyebrows as if to underscore his point.
“Vivian’s more levelheaded. She’s the oldest, always in fix-it mode.
” Campbell leans his head back into the pillows.
“But there’s nothing to fix, here. I just couldn’t do it. ”
“Yet,” I say. I’m picturing his family, those women from his desk back when we were interns. I’m picturing his father, who remembers that Campbell’s important but isn’t sure how.
I rise onto my knees and lift one hand to his cheek to kiss him. When I lower back down, Campbell settles me squarely into his lap.
“But you will,” I say, hugging his head to my chest.
He kisses my collarbone, but he doesn’t respond.