Chapter Twenty-Nine
Twenty-Nine
“Dexter.” I press my forehead against his door. “Please let me in.”
I can hear him inside: the shuffle of his footsteps, a chair scraping over the floor.
Soraya took Campbell in a cab to get stitches; I only stopped in the lobby bathroom to wash his blood off my hands before looking for Dexter.
He didn’t answer my text—Where did you go?
—and now I’m here. Now I’ve been here, outside his room, for a solid and silent thirty minutes.
“I won’t leave,” I say. It’s nearly five o’clock, but we’d already told Iris we were planning to work through dinner. No one’s going to come looking for me. “I’ll grovel out here until I die of dehydration.”
“That’ll take days,” Dexter calls, finally, from inside. I jerk upward at the sound of his voice.
“Correct,” I say. “I’ll wait here for days. Weeks, even.”
The door yanks open. Dexter stares at me, his expression flat and impatient.
“I can explain,” I blurt.
Tersely, he says, “I’m listening.”
I glance down the hallway, which is empty for now. “Can I come in?”
His arms cross. “I don’t know.”
“Dexter, please.”
He regards me in silence for a few beats, punishing me, before stepping backward into his room. I rush in and the door falls shut behind me.
“Look,” I say. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“This?” Dexter says. “Having some secret relationship with Campbell, or lying to me about it, or getting caught?”
Some secret relationship. It sounds damning and also not quite right: some secret relationship isn’t big enough for what this has felt like.
Those three words are far too simple to describe what Campbell has become to me.
I told Dexter I could explain, but in this moment—as he glares at me, as my body floods with the shame of his disappointment—I know that I can’t. I have no idea how to explain.
“Dexter,” I say. It sounds like I’m begging him for something, though even I don’t know what. “I didn’t plan it.”
“Which it, Mattie?” he presses, leaning toward me. “If you came in here to explain yourself, you aren’t doing a very good job.”
“I know.” I grind the heels of my palms into my eyes. Drop my hands to look at him. “I’m sorry. I don’t—I mean, I didn’t mean to—”
I break off, and Dexter hikes his eyebrows expectantly.
“I’ve been sleeping with him,” I say. It’s the simplest version of the truth and, still, it feels like a lie.
If only that’s all this was. If only this was about the plain fact of Campbell’s body.
It isn’t—not after our conversation that first day on the beach, not after holding his bloodied face between my palms, not after all these years that have ached and twisted between us.
There’s so much more to it, so much I don’t know how to—or am too scared to—tell Dexter.
“I know you’re mad at me for that. You deserve to be. ”
“No,” Dexter says. He’s crossed his arms again, his lean frame rigid with anger. “I’m not mad at you for sleeping with him. I’m confused about that. I’d like to understand it. But I’m mad at you for lying to me.”
I swallow. “He’s our competition,” I say, lamely. “I didn’t want you to think I was jeopardizing our work.”
“Fuck work,” Dexter says. I’ve seen so much of his ire in the years we’ve been partners—directed at our clients, at our deadlines, at our managers.
But never directed so pointedly at me. “We’re friends, Mattie.
I spend more time with you than anyone else in my life.
And still, you feel like you couldn’t tell me this?
After I asked in Aspen?” He waves a hand toward his patio, the ocean beyond it.
“Even Soraya knew. She put it together on her own. It’s humiliating, being the only one in the dark. I feel stupid.”
“You aren’t stupid,” I say. Even Soraya knew. Fear claws up my throat, burning like acid. “I didn’t know she knew. Did she tell Nolan?”
“Of course not!” Dexter cries, throwing his arms up. “Just like I’d never tell Iris. Are you kidding? Soraya and Campbell trust each other. I thought we did, too.”
“We do, we do—” My voice is going squeaky and obscure. “Dexter, I’m a moron.” I’m twisting my fingers together, trying to keep a hold of myself even as I’m slipping entirely away. “I’m scared. This is all—I don’t—”
I run out of words, breaking off. Dexter’s eyes sweep over my face.
“Oh,” he says, simply. He shifts his weight, the tension in his shoulders loosening just a little. “You really like him.”
I want to refute it. I want to dismiss it out of hand, to push back, to obliterate the idea the moment Dexter puts it in this room with us.
But he is right: I’ve spent the majority of the past five years with Dexter.
Working with him, yes, but mostly just living alongside him.
Getting coffee with him, talking with him about Krishna, venting to him about rent hikes or my parents or whatever else.
Walking together down Michigan Avenue on perfect summer days.
Dexter’s the other half of my creative life, but before that, he’s my friend.
And I want to give him the truth—even if saying it sets my hands shaking.
“Yes,” I whisper. We stare at each other as it hangs there between us. “I’m a fool.”
“For lying to me,” Dexter clarifies. “Not for having a feeling.”
I hide my eyes with one hand. “For both. I’m so sorry. You deserve a better partner than me.”
“I don’t want a better partner than you,” Dexter says. I feel his fingers close around my wrist, and he pulls it away from my face. “You’re my partner, Mattie. I hate when you shut me out.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again, quietly. “I’ve really fucked everything up.”
“Let’s not be dramatic,” Dexter says, as if he didn’t leave me pounding on his door in the hallway for half an hour. He pulls me into a hug, sharp and quick. “Not everything.”
“Several things,” I mumble as he lets me go.
Dexter holds my gaze. “Have you told him?”
“Told him what?”
“How you feel.”
I stare at Dexter. My chest feels like it’s full of carbonated water. “I think he probably knows.”
Dexter squints at me. “And you want to leave that to chance?”
I turn away from him, pacing across the room. I can’t look at him while we talk about this—I can hardly stand to be in my own body. “I mean, what’s the alternative?”
“Using your words, dumbass.” I spin on my heel, but Dexter’s smiling, now. “Usually, you’re good at that.”
“This is different,” I say. This is unlike anything in the history of my life. In the history of the world, maybe.
“Of course it’s different,” Dexter says. “But you and Campbell have had such a contentious history. What if he doesn’t get it?”
He looks at me, but I can’t muster a reply. Because what if he’s right? Campbell and I do have such a contentious history. What if all that’s truer than this? What if this trip hasn’t changed things for him the way it’s changed things for me?
“You can’t assume people know what they mean to you,” Dexter says when I still haven’t spoken. “Krishna taught me that. It’s his only rule, really—every time I feel like I love him, I have to tell him. Even if I think he already knows.”
“But you always love him.”
Dexter smiles, softer this time. “Correct.”
“Dexter.” I drop my head into my hands again. “Campbell doesn’t want this to be a big thing. It’s only for this trip, for a few days. It’s not supposed to be more.”
“It’s not supposed to be?” Dexter echoes. When I peek at him between my fingers, his eyebrows are lifted. “Did he say that?”
“Yes,” I cry, my voice rising. It’s not quite true; he didn’t say it, not in so many words. But it’s been there between the lines the entire time we’ve known each other. “So I can’t tell him.”
Dexter shakes his head. “You can, Mattie. And I think you should.”
I have a flash of Campbell in his wet suit, blood pouring down his face. I shut my eyes against it. “Because life is short?”
“Because he’s here, now.” I open my eyes, and Dexter holds my gaze. “Because it’s worthwhile, saying what you mean.”
I draw a long, shuddering breath. “I’m scared.”
Dexter shrugs. “So do it scared.”
I throw up my hands and let them drop. “Okay, no problem. Easy peasy.”
“It’s not supposed to be easy,” Dexter says on a laugh. “Not when your skin’s in it.”
And that’s it, isn’t it?
Campbell’s not just under my skin—he’s everywhere. In my head, all these years, every time I sat down to write. In the dark when I close my eyes: the soft echoes of his mouth, his hands. In the frantic cavity of my chest. The pinging of my heart beneath my ribs.
“If it goes south, we kill him,” Dexter says, lightly. “But at least you’ll know you tried.”
I look at him pitifully, and he just nods. Then he walks me toward his door.
When Dexter opens it, Campbell’s sitting on the floor in the hallway. He scrambles to his feet at the sight of us.
“I heard yelling,” he says. He’s in shorts and a T-shirt, a streak of black stitches knotted at his hairline. “I wanted to make sure—”
Campbell’s eyes track across my face. His arms twitch upward at his sides, like he’s started to reach for me before catching himself.
Something expands, staggering and sure, in my chest.
Dexter puts one hand on my back and pushes me into the hallway.