Chapter Thirty
Thirty
“Your face,” I say. It’s inadequate and inelegant. Dexter’s door falls shut behind me.
“Why,” Campbell says, lifting a hand to one of his flushed cheeks, “you hate it?”
I think of us, that night on his patio. My lilac swimsuit, his fingers hooking the fabric and leaving it abandoned on his shower floor.
“Hate it.” I don’t mean for the words to come out on a whisper, but they do.
Campbell lowers his hand and just looks at me. I look right back: his hair dried wild with ocean water, the sunburn along the bridge of his nose, the dark thread holding his broken skin together. And his eyes, the want in them.
“Mattie,” he says, quietly. “What happened in there?”
“What happened up here?” I ask, pointing to his forehead. Not touching him, not even close to touching him.
“Little bows,” Campbell tells me. He runs a fingertip over the stitches. “Wedding accessories.”
At the end of the hallway, someone in a Wicksteed uniform passes by holding a clipboard.
“Josie will love them,” I say, turning back to him. He stepped closer while I was looking away; he’s right in my space—heat and salt and his hand making a loose cuff around my wrist. His ring is cold against my skin.
“You can’t touch me in public,” I say, straight down at our arms.
“Then let’s go somewhere private.”
I look up at Campbell, our gazes catching and holding. There’s so much I want to tell him and so many reasons I shouldn’t say any of it at all. When I nod, he lets go of my wrist and leads me toward his room.
The hallway’s empty. He opens his door and I follow him inside.
“Soraya knows,” he says, turning to me in the entryway. “She won’t tell anyone. And I swear I didn’t tell her, but—”
“I know you didn’t.” With a door separating us from the rest of the world I feel like I can really look at him. Drink him in, my eyes wide and unblinking. He’s okay, he’s okay, he’s okay. “It’s my fault,” I say. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Campbell takes a step toward me. His hand lifts to the small of my back, and he eases me closer. “You were worried about me,” he says. There’s a smile in his voice, something triumphant threatening right at the edges of his lips.
“No, I wasn’t.”
Campbell’s nose nudges at the underside of my ear. His lips stamp a soft line along my neck. “Yes, you were.”
I close my eyes. Maybe so I can’t see myself slide both hands up the back of his shirt and press my palms along his bare spine. “No.”
“Yes.” Campbell’s mouth lands on mine. When I open my eyes, he pulls back just far enough to see me. “You were.”
“I was,” I say, quietly. Campbell kisses me again—something new this time, and gentle, and so dangerous. “You can’t do things like that.”
“Why not?” he asks, his fingers working the tie of my dress. It’s stiff with blood and sand and salt water. It falls open to reveal the lilac swimsuit underneath.
“Because,” I say. “Because—” I press my eyes shut again. I’m thinking of the mess I’ve made of this day, the way I showed my entire hand running down that beach toward him. His bloody face between my fingers and the way he said my name: shocked and so, so unforgivably soft.
The way I fucked up with Dexter, the way Ava can’t tell me the truth. The truth. The way I can’t make myself say it to Campbell, now, either.
“I’m a disaster,” I tell Campbell, finally. My eyes open and he’s right there, looking at me the way he always has: like he knows me best, like he knows how to best me, like I’m about to hear that I’m wrong.
“Mattie.” There’s hunger in the rasp of his voice. “You’re disastrous in all the ways I like.”
I make a sound as Campbell pulls me into him—relieved, defeated. His arm wraps possessively around my waist.
You win, I think as our mouths open against each other. You win, as my dress floats to my feet.
You win, Campbell. It feels okay—for once, for now, if it means I get to have him.
“I always want you looking at me that way,” he says, his mouth moving hot and wet down my throat. He’s walking me across the room toward the bed, his hands stamped like brands at my back.
“What way?” I breathe, dragging up the hem of his T-shirt. We stop at the foot of the bed and I say, “Campbell, wait.”
He stills, and I ease the shirt over his head. Carefully, avoiding his stitches. When his face reappears his hair’s a mess and his eyes are caught on mine. “Like that,” he says, quietly. “Like I matter to you.”
I’m too terrified to admit it. You do. I drop his shirt and press my body against his, the mirror image of our battering hearts. You do matter to me.
Instead, I run my thumb over his bottom lip. “Mine?” I whisper. His mouth opens on a soft inhale. I know we’re both thinking about this morning, that hallway off the lobby, the shattering way Campbell murmured, Okay, but I’m yours.
“Yes,” he says, now. Perfectly still in front of me, like he’s scared with any movement this thing between us might break. I’m scared, too.
“Mine?” I ask again, reaching for the button on his shorts. When he’s silent, I still my hands and look up at him. Campbell nods, swallowing. I undo the button and sink my thumbs into his boxers. Send all of it to the floor at our feet.
I slide down my swimsuit bottoms and pull the top over my head. Rest my hands on Campbell’s bare shoulders and lower him to a seat at the edge of the bed. When I climb into his lap, his hands rise to steady me, and his thumbs fit into the creases of my hips where I’m spread above him.
“Mine,” I repeat, my face hovering a breath above his own. It doesn’t sound like a question, now, and Campbell’s eyes flutter shut as I say it. I can feel him, hard, beneath me.
“Yours,” he says. The rich texture of his voice—that sound, so distinctly Campbell, that’s haunted me for years. The ghost of something I could never quite let go of.
I rock against him and he tips his face up to mine, kissing me open-mouthed as his hands guide me over his lap.
“Mine,” I say, and his hips stutter in response. I cradle his head in my hands, don’t open my eyes for fear this will rend apart if he’s not right here with me—his tongue on mine, his fingertips digging into my sides. I suddenly want so badly for us to belong to each other. “Campbell.”
“Yours,” he says. Strained and close. “Mattie, yours.”
I open my eyes to rise onto my knees and pull open the drawer of his nightstand. The fifty-dollar condoms are right where we left them.
I line us up, then slide down in one, slow movement that wrenches a raw sound from Campbell’s throat. I bracket his face in my hands and for a moment we’re still. He looks at me like there’s nothing else in the room. Nothing else, maybe, in the entire world.
“Mine,” I say, brave enough with him inside of me to hold his gaze.
“Baby, yes.” Campbell’s voice is wrecked. His fingers bear into my hips like he’s desperate to keep me where I am. “Always been. If you wanted.”
It’s enough to tug a whimper from my chest, and when I start to move, Campbell’s lips part so I can see the wet pink of his tongue.
“Mine,” I whisper.
“Yours,” he answers.
Every time I say it, every time he replies, it feels like I’m casting a spell. Freezing the ice around us as I walk across it. Creating some fragile thing we’re liable to fall through into what’s waiting—painful and paralyzing—beneath the thin conjuring of our words.
“Soraya said you were on the phone, when it happened.” Campbell’s voice rumbles through my back. I’m leaned against him on the couch facing the ocean, the sun lowering over his patio. He pulls the blanket up to my shoulders and dips his head to kiss my neck. “Everything okay? Pancake?”
Pancake’s okay. My whole body feels loose and wrung-out: the adrenaline of this afternoon, the ache where Campbell moved beneath me. I’m sitting, now, in the V of his legs—one of his knees propped up to keep me there.
Under the blanket, his thumb tracks a line over my wrist. “You okay?”
I close my eyes. I feel horrifically close to him. I feel like I want to tell him everything that’s ever happened to me.
“Mattie,” Campbell urges, quietly.
“I don’t know.” Across the street, the bowl of the ocean catches every dripping sunset color: orange and yellow, a gradient line of vibrant pink.
“It was Ava. She’s stressed about her bachelorette trip.
She hates to be at the center of anything, she always has, and I think the money’s getting to her. ”
“It’s expensive?” he asks.
I lean my head against his collarbone. Feel it in my hair when he exhales.
“Not egregiously. But she gets skittish with people spending money on her, even though that’s not really what it is.
We’re all going because we want to, and because we love her, and because we want her to have fun.
But she said this thing—” I break off. Campbell doesn’t speak, just breathes steadily beneath me, waiting.
“She said getting engaged wasn’t an accomplishment.
That it’ll happen to all of us, eventually, including me. ”
I glance up at him. We’re so close that it’s hard to make out his face, but even still—there’s a clatter of emotions there, fighting for control. Confusion, surprise. Embarrassment, maybe.
“And you don’t—” Campbell starts, stops. “You don’t think that’s true?”
“I think it shouldn’t be the default,” I say, turning back to the ocean.
“I think it’s scary when she talks like that and it feels like we have this sort of seismically different worldview, where she thinks my life’s going to orient itself around a marriage, and children, and all the rest of it. And I know it isn’t.”
“Did she say that?” Campbell asks. “ ‘Marriage,’ ‘children’?”
“I mean, no. Just the engagement thing, but the rest always feels implied.”
Campbell’s quiet for a moment. Then, slowly, he says, “What is it, for you, about marriage?”
Under the blanket, his fingertips have stilled on my wrist. I thread my fingers through his and curl his hand around mine.
“How inevitable the world makes it seem,” I say. “Like I’m supposed to give everything up for someone at some point, and that’ll be normal and okay and expected of me.”