Chapter Thirty #3
“It was right around then.” Absently, Campbell turns the ring on my finger. “The same time it got nominated for the Lion, we had to move him to Plover House.” His eyes lift to mine. “I went home, like, three days before France to help my mom do it.”
He’d looked so tired, that night at the awards ceremony. Thinner and drawn out, nearly hollow in his suit. And I’d made fun of him.
“It was the best and worst time of my life, all at once,” Campbell says. “The whole thing felt like motion sickness.”
“I was so rude to you,” I say. “If I’d known—”
“I was rude to you first. Seeing you that night, in that dress—” He shakes his head. “Teasing you, the way you snapped back at me, it was the most normal I’d felt in weeks. Everyone at work knew and they were treating me like some precious china teacup. It was fucking awful.”
I want to make fun of him for remembering my dress, but I remember what he was wearing, too. I remember everything about him.
“And then you won,” I say, faintly.
Campbell smiles, no teeth. “Motion sickness.”
I think of him on the stage, that night. The way he’d searched for me in the audience, and how sorry he’d looked. How sad.
“Do you visit often?” I ask. “At Plover House?”
Campbell wraps an arm around my bent knees, holding me closer.
“Every day, when I’m home. But it’s hard seeing him, without seeing him.
” He weighs his words, then adds, “We do this honking thing? Me and my sisters. Whenever we drive by Plover House, just whaling on the horn—like we’re screaming at him, I don’t know.
Hey! We miss you! Things we can’t say to his face anymore, because it only confuses him. ”
I lift one hand and run my thumb over Campbell’s sunburned cheekbone. His dad’s ring slides to my knuckle. “What was he like?”
“We were really close,” Campbell says, quietly. “He was so funny, and we had all these inside jokes. The two of us in a house full of girls.”
“ ‘The birds,’ ” I say, and he smiles.
“That’s right. We were always just catching the wake of Vivian and Josie and my mom.
I came last, and my dad always made it feel like he’d been waiting for me, you know?
We were this team. He taught me all these things, I mean—” Campbell swallows.
When he looks at me, his eyes have gone tight.
Like he’s scared to say this out loud, maybe as scared as I was to tell him about my mother.
“He has my whole childhood, I guess. My whole history. He knows me in all these ways no one else does and sometimes it just feels like—if he doesn’t remember who I am, am I real anymore? ”
It hangs between us, defenseless. A private, tucked-away worry Campbell’s carried all these years and handed to me just here, on a perfect October night with the ocean breathing across the street.
I reach for him and draw his mouth down to mine. Meet his dark eyes and hold him steady between my hands. “You’re real, Campbell.”
His eyelashes web together. He draws a breath in the space between our lips. “Your fears about marriage,” he says. “I have them, too. I’ve never seen love last that long—not a whole lifetime.”
Love is more painful than it’s worth, I think. All those years ago, picking up coffee when we were interns, the furious blush on Campbell’s face like he’d only said it out loud by accident. And all these years later, how much I don’t want him to believe that.
I don’t know what makes me say it, exactly. Maybe the relief of handing him my hurt and watching him hold it. Maybe the wild courage of knowing this feeling, finally, for the first time in my life.
“Maybe it can,” I say. Campbell’s eyes open to find mine. “Maybe even if it doesn’t, it’s worth it just to feel this way for as long as you get to.”
He kisses me, then. A soft, open-mouthed thing that lingers—pure and intangible as memory.
“Come to the wedding with me.”
I blink, pulling back to get him in focus. “What?”
Campbell’s gaze moves over mine. “Come with me, to North Carolina.”
“Campbell.” My voice is small, careful. “That would be crazy.”
He only looks at me, long and slow, his hands firm points of heat holding me against him. “Would it?” he asks.
The breeze moves in, sending my hair across my face. I tuck it behind one ear and then light my fingertips over his forehead, where his skin’s just starting to bruise around the line of his stitches. “You’re concussed.”
“No,” he says. Plain and sincere. When I drop my hand, he catches it and presses his lips to my wrist. The same place where I bit myself, four days and a near lifetime ago, in the linen closet. “Come with me, Mattie.”
“Why?” I whisper.
“Because I want you,” Campbell says. “Because I want you with me all the time.”
It’s only ten days, I think. Only five, now.
But maybe there is no only, anymore, here with him on the patio. Maybe it’s like Ava said: love isn’t something I’m incapable of just because it scares me. Maybe that yours Campbell keeps handing to me is something true enough to believe in.
When we stand up, Campbell takes my hand. His father’s ring slots between our interlaced fingers as we go inside to book my flights.