Chapter Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Eight
“Isn’t Campbell from a beach town?” Dexter squints out at the ocean, then turns to Soraya. “He’s really never surfed before?”
Soraya doesn’t look up from her laptop. The three of us are side by side beneath a pop-up cabana on the Wicksteed beach, working in the late-afternoon shade while Campbell takes a private surf lesson.
“Of course he’s surfed before,” she says, manicured fingers dancing across her track pad. “But you know Campbell.”
Soraya glances at Dexter, then me. I have the childish urge to shout, No, I don’t!
“He’s not satisfied knowing how to do something,” she says, looking back at her computer. “He’s got to be great at it.”
I try not to think about the other things Campbell’s great at—the image of him kneeling in front of me at the foot of his bed, or settling me against his chest and running his fingertips over my scalp. How dangerously close I feel to him after talking about his dad.
Or the way that, just this morning, he pressed me into a quiet alcove off the lobby as we waited for Dexter and Soraya. How he pulled at the sash of the black wrap dress I’d put on over my swimsuit and said, “My little vampire bat.”
“I’m not little,” I’d told him. Our eyes exactly level, and much too close to maintain my heart rate. “Or yours.”
“Mmm.” His eyes had tracked over mine, considering this.
Then he kissed me—long and slow, the kind of kiss that takes its time and makes a world of itself.
Certainly not the kind I should’ve allowed just out of public sight, when our coworkers could’ve turned up any minute.
By the time Campbell spoke again, after biting down gently on my bottom lip, I was drowning in him entirely.
“Okay,” he’d said. The low rumble of his voice, right against my ear. “But I’m yours.”
It was a calamitous thing to say. Knowing this was only five days now, that Campbell didn’t want or believe in love, that—plainly—it couldn’t be true.
Over the last week Campbell has pulled me apart at every seam, reshaped me into someone I hardly recognize but love being so ruinously much that the fast-dwindling clock of this trip feels like an impending death.
The promise of something terrible, of a life I’ll return to without any of the color he’s dyed into it.
I can hardly sleep for dread of the morning.
For five becoming four, then three, then two.
For Friday, when he’ll go to North Carolina for Josie’s wedding.
I’m yours.
I watch him, now—straddling a surfboard in the gray, foamy sea—and his voice brushes over me. Sand, soft lips at my ear. I’m yours, I’m yours.
A lie. Such a simple one, to be so devastating.
“He’s clever, to ask for it,” Soraya says. She’s in a candy apple red one-piece and a straw sun hat, cross-legged on her lounge chair. “If I’d known we were cleared to make requests I’d have been on horseback the whole time we were in Aspen.”
Dexter laughs. “Mattie was thinking the same.”
I gust out a sigh and wrench my gaze, finally, from Campbell. “Nantucket would hate to see me coming.”
“You were scared of him.” Soraya arches an eyebrow at me. “He could tell.”
“I wouldn’t say I was scared of him.”
“No?” Her gaze moves across me. “You’re used to being tallest, I think. Horses are big animals.”
I splutter, waving at Dexter. “Dexter’s taller than me.”
“And he was scared, too,” Soraya says. She turns back to her computer and starts tapping at the keys. “I rest my case.”
“I wasn’t scared,” Dexter protests.
I level him with a look. “You jumped a vertical mile when that horse sniffed you.”
“His nostrils were the size of nectarines!”
I laugh as my phone buzzes once in my tote bag, then twice more in quick succession. Dexter, grumbling, turns back to his design file as I dig it out.
LEV: Hey Mattie, don’t want to bother you at work but a bit worried about Ava. Think the Miami trip is really stressing her?
She’s feeling guilty about a lot of things. Know you don’t mean for her to.
But you know how she gets. Worrying about everyone. Just thought maybe you could talk to her. Know she wouldn’t say anything about it to you.
There’s nearly a full minute’s pause before he sends one more message.
With all the work you’ve put into this for her.
I blink at my phone. Know she wouldn’t say anything about it to you rattles inside me like a fevered shiver—something ill working its way through.
I know Ava has a life with Lev I’m not part of, that they talk about things she doesn’t with me.
But to see it so plainly raises my temperature, even with his clear attempt to soothe me: With all the work you’ve put into this.
I squint over the water, and it hits me that Lev loves Ava. I knew it; it’s impossible not to know. Waffle Monday, and his gentleness with her, and the fact that he moved into our place so she could stay close to me. The way he looks at Ava like she’s the one magic thing in a mundane world.
But I really feel it, now: as I watch Campbell pop to his feet on the surfboard, as Dexter grouses beside me, as I hold all the evidence of it in an open text thread in my hand. A bit worried about Ava.
He knows her so well. Loves her so well, to reach out to me like this.
I’ll call her, I tell him. Thanks, Lev.
“I’ll be right back,” I say, unfolding from the chair. I dial Ava and head down the beach, away from Dexter and Soraya and especially away from Campbell, who’s become a sort of filter on my whole life that I can’t see through.
“Matilda,” Ava says on a singsong. “Hi. Good morning.”
“Morning.”
“You working today?”
“Yeah,” I say down at my feet. I watch my toenails disappear into the sand with each step, black-lacquered like beetles. “Greg sort of blew up our whole pitch the other day so we’re in a panic to get it ready for Friday. Dexter, especially.”
“Dexter, panicked?” Ava sends a high-pitched hum through the line. “Can’t picture it.”
I huff a laugh, then glance out at the water. “Hey, are you okay?”
For a beat too long, she’s quiet. “What do you mean?”
I won’t throw Lev under the bus, not when he’s trying so hard to do right by her. So I just squint into the sun and say, “You’ve been a bit evasive about bachelorette planning since I’ve been gone.”
Ava’s silent for a while. She hates to be called out, hates confrontation of any kind. Even something so benign as this: her best friend trying to throw her a party.
“I’m sorry,” she says, finally. Her voice has gone small.
“I’m not looking for an apology,” I tell her. “I’m not mad. I just want to know if you’re doing okay, or if there’s something going on.”
This time, Ava’s silence doesn’t linger quite so long. Her voice snaps across the line between us like a eureka! The sound of someone who’s put the pieces together. “Did Lev tattle on me?”
I laugh, spluttering. “Well first of all, he didn’t tattle because you didn’t do anything wrong—”
“So he did. God, I’m going to kill him. Mattie—”
“Don’t kill him. He loves you.”
“That doesn’t give him license to meddle!”
“Ava, since when do we keep things from each other?”
It hangs between us and I try not to shrink from the dishonesty of it. Everything I’ve kept from Ava: my breakdown the night she got engaged, the divide I feel growing between our futures, my bone-deep fear of losing her.
“Since never,” she says, defiantly. “Of course since never. I haven’t been keeping things from you. I’ve just been feeling a little overwhelmed about the whole…thing.”
Nearly out of sight from Dexter and Soraya, I stop walking and turn toward the ocean. I plant my feet just at the waterline and stare out across the Pacific. “Which thing specifically?”
“Like, the money of it all?” Ava pauses, then starts rambling.
“Jade called me because she wants to book a party bus the Friday night in Miami and I was like—well, what will that cost?—and she was like—nothing, for you!—and I just, you know, I’m not comfortable with it.
Everyone spending money on me like I did something to deserve it, when really I haven’t done anything at all. ”
“Of course you have: you got engaged.”
“It’s not an accomplishment, Mattie. It’s just what happened. It’ll happen to Jade, and you, and everyone—and I don’t see any reason at all to be going to these lengths. It’s giving me hives, to be honest.”
I consider this. It’ll happen to Jade, and you, and everyone. The way Ava’s life has conformed to a default template; the way even she expects I’ll wind up in the same place one day. And the way it grates, how much I don’t feel like pointing this out to her.
“No hives for the bride,” I say, instead. Keeping my voice light—light enough to rise above the ocean wind, light enough to float over everything I’m not telling her. “Do you want me to talk to Jade? We can rein this whole thing in, Ava. It’s your party. Not Jade’s, or mine, or anyone’s.”
“But I want you all to have fun, too,” Ava says. “That’s the problem. I’m scared everyone will have a horrible time if we do things my way. Am I a boring old crone?”
I smile, then. “No, Ava. You’re my favorite person.”
She lets out a long, buffering sigh. “You’re my favorite person, too.”
“I’ll fix this,” I tell her.
I can’t align our lives like dots on a map. I can’t keep her with me forever. I can’t make sense of Campbell, or the way he makes me feel even from this far down the beach. But I can do this one thing.
“You don’t have to,” Ava says.
“I want to.” I glance back to the cabana, where Dexter and Soraya are little specks in the shade. “And I want you to be honest with me from now on.”
Ava sighs. “Promise. Okay, promise. Now update me on what’s happening with Campbell?”
I’m opening my mouth to answer when he emerges from the ocean.
Too far away to see him clearly, but close enough to know something’s wrong—the instructor has Campbell’s arm over his shoulders to support him as they lurch out of the water.
One of Campbell’s hands is pressed to his face.
As I watch in paralyzed silence, the lifeguard hops off her glorified high-chair and starts running toward them.
With a stream of incoherent words, I hang up on Ava and start running, too.
Campbell’s sitting in the sand when I reach him.
The hand he has pressed to his forehead is covered in blood.
It’s in the wet line of his water-dyed hair; it’s rushing over his freckled knuckles; it’s speckling the sand beneath his bent knees.
His chest heaves through his wet suit and I think he’s hyperventilating—sobbing, maybe.
When I drop to my own knees and reach for him I nearly have to shove the lifeguard out of the way to do it.
She’s digging through her first aid kit, too slow, like Campbell Porter drenched in blood isn’t the type of emergency that might kill us both.
“What happened?” I snap, taking his face in my hands.
His own hand falls away and he isn’t crying—not even breathing hard.
He’s laughing. He freezes in the frame of my fingers, so shocked to see me that he doesn’t even blink in time to keep the blood from running into his eye.
He winces against it, but his gaze stays heavy on mine.
The entire beach has narrowed to just this: Campbell’s freckled face, his eyelashes soaked into dark spikes, the aftershock of a laugh falling from his mouth.
“Mattie,” he says, so softly. An impossibly gentle contrast to the stark rush of blood across his skin. “Hey, I’m okay.”
“Ma’am,” the lifeguard says, sternly. I don’t care that she’s annoyed at me.
My dumb animal heart is hammering the wall of my body and nothing feels bigger than my fear—not the way she’s trying to get around me with a bandage, not the surf instructor watching from above us so we’re cast in the shadow of his body.
There’s only how Campbell’s looking at me, and the steadying way he lifts a wet, sand-flecked hand to cover my fingers with his own.
“I’m okay,” he says again. “My surfboard hit me in the face.”
There’s so much blood: soaking his eyebrow, rivered over his closed eye. Racing over my hand on his cheek and his hand on top of that.
“Heads bleed a lot,” the lifeguard says. “So if you’ll let me just—”
She angles between us in a way that leaves me no choice but to drop my hands. They fall into my lap and smear blood across my dress. Campbell watches me as she inspects the gash at his hairline: short and deep and pooling blood.
“Stupid mistake,” Campbell says. Without moving under the lifeguard’s attention, he reaches his unbloodied hand into the space between us and tucks one finger behind my bent knee.
It knocks me back into my body and I’m suddenly much too hot—my cheeks flushed, my head ringing.
The lifeguard pulls a butterfly bandage out of her kit and my gaze skitters across the beach: Campbell’s water-slick hair catching in the sun, the small group of people craning their necks to watch us.
And then, worst of all: Dexter. He’s standing next to Soraya at the edge of the cabana, hands loose at his sides. The second our eyes meet the shock on his face morphs into something else—something angrier, something like betrayal.
What’s going on with you and Campbell? he’d asked me in the back of that airport van in Aspen.
Nothing, I’d promised.
Nothing.
A lie, even then. An unforgivably obvious one, now—with Campbell’s hand on my knee, his blood on my fingers.
Dexter turns from me and reaches for his laptop. He snaps it shut and leaves the beach before I even have time to call his name.