Chapter Twenty-Six
Twenty-Six
Campbell’s phone rings just after six o’clock.
I’m asleep on my back with the belt of his arm across my stomach. Thin morning light sneaks in around the gauzy edges of the curtain, just enough that I can see every frustrated shift in his expression as he rolls away from me toward the nightstand.
I turn onto my side and watch him pick up his phone, check the caller ID. His voice is thick and groggy when he moans, “Now, Soraya?”
He sends the call to voicemail and collapses onto his back. When she calls again, he cracks one eye open and types out a text message.
“She’s persistent,” I say.
“Like a terrier,” Campbell agrees.
He puts his phone on the nightstand and rolls back to me, pulling my body in along his. “Morning,” he says, nudging under my jaw and pushing his mouth into my pulse point. He kisses my lips, my cheek. The side of my nose.
I collar my arms around his neck. “Do you have to go?”
“Yeah,” he murmurs into my throat. “But you can stay.”
I drift my fingertips over his cheekbone. Meet his sleepy eyes. “I should work, too.”
“Mm.” Campbell’s hand slides down to my tailbone, along the curve of my ass, to reposition my thigh over his hip. “Don’t work too hard.”
“You wish,” I whisper, but then Campbell’s fingers slip between my legs.
“I do,” he says, softly, his lips at my ear. “I do wish.”
“I don’t want you to panic,” Iris says. She directs it at Dexter, whose face is pale-edging-green, but I’m halfway to snapping, myself. “It’s not an overhaul, just an evolution.”
Dexter looks at me. His jaw is tense and twitching. He wants me to respond because we both know he’s not capable of tone-checking himself in moments like this.
“We understand,” I say, as evenly as I can manage.
I glance at my laptop, where the Art Room’s video-calling software is still pulled open—Greg’s avatar grayed out and idle.
It took forty minutes for us to present our pitch progress to him, and only five for him to dissect it like so many bugs under glass.
“Greg trusts you,” Iris says, leaning closer to us over the table.
We’re in the fishbowl conference room in the business center, where the ghosts of Campbell’s fingers under my skirt linger just enough to raise my temperature.
“This isn’t him saying no; it’s just him wanting to make the ideas as good as they can be. ”
“Right,” I say. His feedback is extensive and fundamental; it certainly doesn’t feel like he trusts us. But with only a week until the pitch, we have no choice but to start working on revisions this afternoon.
“Look.” Iris taps a Wicksteed-branded pen against her notebook.
“Greg feels like he has a lot of skin in this, right? I say this in confidence, but—it’s a bit more emotional for him than our usual business.
He worked on Wicksteed for ages at OverComm, and it’s this legacy client for him…
” She trails off, looking between us. “What I mean is, don’t take his nitpicking personally.
There are a lot of reasons he wants his mark on this one. ”
“Then why’s he been so hands-off until now?” Dexter asks. It’s sharper than it should be, and he deflates immediately back into his seat. “Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m just—” He waves a hand around his head.
“I know,” Iris says. “It would’ve been nice to get this feedback earlier, but we didn’t. I have full confidence in both of you.”
“Me, too,” I say, directly to Dexter. “We’ll figure it out.”
He sinks lower in his chair and doesn’t say anything. The truth is, most of Greg’s feedback is on concepts and copy; he loves Dexter’s designs. It’s me with the lion’s share of work ahead of me. Me who missed the mark.
“Tell me how I can be of help,” Iris says. “I’m here for you.”
“Thank you,” Dexter says, quietly. And then, so begrudgingly it’s like he’s dredging the words up syllable by syllable, he adds, “We’ll figure it out.”
We spend the rest of the afternoon in Dexter’s suite—patio doors open to let in the ocean air, silver trays of room service sandwiches and heaps of French fries and three plastic cups of iced coffee at various degrees of melt.
His room’s on the far end of the hallway from Campbell and me, next to Soraya.
I wonder what she and Campbell worked on this morning.
Whether their executive creative director back in Chicago blew up all their work, too.
Probably not, a nagging voice reminds me. It’s Campbell.
It’s nauseating, to feel simultaneously so desperate to beat him and so desperate to see him.
I’m restless all day. I pace, and I drink far too much caffeine, and I think of what Campbell said to me that night after the sunset cruise: I don’t want anyone to think I’m distracted.
I have to forcefully shove down the idea that maybe my work wasn’t up to Greg’s standards because I’ve been distracted, too.
By the time Dexter and I polish off our room service dinner, I have a tension headache so severe I have to squint every time I open my eyes.
“I think I need to call it for today,” I say, dropping the lid of my laptop. It’s nearly eight o’clock, and the sun has already set beyond the stretch of Dexter’s patio. “If I don’t close my eyes for a bit my brain might start leaking through them.”
“Yeah.” Dexter rubs at his forehead with the knuckles of one hand. “I feel like we’re closer. Do you feel like we’re closer?”
“Definitely.”
He drops his hand and looks at me. His eyes are a little bloodshot—we’ve been at this for six hours. “Are we fucked?”
I think, unbidden, of Campbell’s face. The freckles on the bridge of his nose and the crooked cut of his smile. I am most certainly fucked.
“No,” I tell Dexter. Even with his designs almost entirely approved, fixing this is a team effort—everything is, for us. His stress is mine and vice versa, for better or worse. “We’ve got this.”
He nods, considering me. “We’ll pick back up in the morning?”
“Yeah.” I stand, squeezing his shoulder before gathering my things. “Call Krish and then take a bath in that ridiculous marble tub.” I tuck my blue pen into my bag and wave toward his bathroom door. “Try not to think about work again until tomorrow.”
“Right.” Dexter rises to walk me out. “You, too.”
“I’m going to lie down in a dark room until I become one with the night.”
He snorts. “Okay, Morticia.”
I step into the hall, and Dexter regards me wearily. “We’ve got this,” I insist again. I’m not letting him—or me—down.
“I know,” he says. Unconvincing. “Night, Mattie.”
I pad away from him down the empty hallway; everything is quiet except for the click as Dexter’s door falls shut behind me. I’m reaching into my bag for my own room key when Campbell’s door inches open.
“Hi,” he says, smiling out at me. Same T-shirt with the hole in its collar from the first time I slept in his room. Gray sweatpants. Then he really looks at me, and his expression stutters. “Whoa, hey. What happened?”
My head throbs so sharply I have to close my eyes. “Headache,” I manage. “I need to lie down.”
I push open my door at the same time Campbell starts to say, “Do you—”
He glances into the hall, both directions, and then hurries to follow me inside. Under any other circumstances, I wouldn’t allow it. Sneaking into my room through the patio is one thing; brazenly coming in through the front door feels like a new level of foolish.
I drop my tote bag and sink down into bed, flat-backed with my arms at my sides. I shut my eyes and listen to the door fall closed. Feel the bed shift as Campbell sits down beside me.
“Long day?” he asks.
My fighting parts rear upward. Half: Don’t admit it and give him ammunition to beat you. Half: Let him support you in all the ways you’re craving.
I land in the middle, with a noncommittal grunt.
“Come here,” Campbell says, his hand sliding under my spine.
“Can’t move,” I mumble.
“It’ll be worth it.” I feel him moving around me, then both of his hands at my sides. “I promise.”
Suddenly, Campbell pulls me up the mattress into the V of his legs. He’s propped against the headboard in my neatly made bed, my back flush to his front, my head on his chest. Gently, he slides out the elastic that’s been holding my ponytail all day and rolls it onto my wrist.
“What are you—”
But then his fingers sink into my hair, and the words dissolve in my throat.
Campbell’s thumbs dip into the muscle at the base of my skull, where my neck is tense and rigid.
His fingertips spread across my scalp. The pressure is extraordinary; when he starts to draw slow circles across my head, my entire body goes limp.
“That’s it,” he says, quietly. “You okay?”
My eyes are still closed. I almost can’t talk; his hands feel so good that every part of my body wants to focus on them entirely. “Where did you learn to do this?”
He runs a path up to my hairline, thumbing careful tracks above my forehead. “My sisters,” he says. “They’d always do this when someone was stressed, growing up. We traded head massages like currency, honestly.”
“I would pay for this,” I say, and feel Campbell laugh over the top of my head.
“You get headaches this bad a lot?”
“Not really.” His fingers slip down on either side of my ears and draw back up. I rest my hands on his knees. “Just when I’m stressed.”
“What’s got you stressed?”
When I don’t respond, he presses the pad of his thumb into a tight spot on my neck. “French?”
“Work,” I say. “I don’t know. I don’t know how to talk to you about this.”
Campbell’s hands go still, and I whine in protest. He starts moving again. Then he says, slowly, “You can talk to me about anything, if you want to.”
I let out a long breath. Then I prop myself upward into a seat, Campbell’s hands slipping out of my hair. I turn to face him, kneeling between his legs. “Can I?”
He regards me steadily. “I’d like to think so.”