Chapter Thirty-One
Thirty-One
I’ll fly there from Chicago on Saturday morning, after we get home Friday.
I’m messaging Dexter as covertly as I can with Iris across the table from us.
Why not just go straight there with him Friday? he replies.
My skin heats just thinking about it. Because then everyone would find out
Dexter huffs beside me. We’re in the business center conference room, running through the edits we’ve made to meet Greg’s feedback. Iris hums as she scrolls through my revamped campaign write-up.
And? Dexter sends. The bubble appears at the top of my screen and I hunch forward, trying to hide it with my body even though there’s nothing but a wall behind me. By then our work here will be done and it won’t matter.
But it’ll be embarrassing????
I glare at Dexter, but he only starts typing again. Why? Because everyone will find out you have a crush on the most obnoxious man in advertising?
Exactly. I’m still typing when Iris says, “This is working really well.”
I yank my hands off the keyboard and smile at her over the table. “Yeah?”
“Definitely. You’ve really dialed up the emotional element, and I think Greg was right—it’s working better without the competitive callouts. Resting on our laurels was the way to go.”
“Queen,” Dexter says, nudging me with a bony elbow.
“Let’s get new language into those digital ad comps and review together by late tomorrow?” Iris looks between Dexter and me, and we nod in unison.
“This is in good shape.” She stands, smiling. “I feel good. I hope you feel good.”
I feel jittery and thinned-out with nerves.
With adrenaline. With some other feeling that floods every synapse inside me when my eyes drift through the glass conference room wall, to where the Slater Faust team sits at a round table in the business center.
Campbell’s in slacks and his horseshoe shirt.
I’m sorry, he told me this morning. Sliding his arms into the sleeves while I crossed the room toward him. I need to do laundry.
I’d buttoned it up for him. Kissed the corner of his mouth.
“We feel good,” Dexter says, now. I manage another nod. When Iris leaves, Dexter goes with her, fixing to call Krishna.
I stay in the conference room, watching Campbell through glass.
I pick, distractedly, at the odd jobs our team back in Chicago’s been sending me: social media captions, one-off headlines for billboards and press releases.
When Campbell stands up nearly an hour later, the movement sends an answering thrum down the line of my spine.
Nolan leaves first, his face settling into its customary frown as he disappears down the hallway. Soraya glances at me, then Campbell. When she leaves, she waves at me, and I heat straight through like I’ve been zapped in the microwave.
Campbell crosses to the door of the conference room, leaning into its frame with one shoulder. His laptop’s held flat across his stomach.
“Working hard?” he asks. Today the skin around his cut is a grave, tender purple.
“Hardly working,” I say. Campbell smiles.
“I don’t believe you even a little bit.”
I lift one shoulder. The air between us sways like a rope pulled taut, reverberating. “Believe what you want.”
Campbell rights himself in the doorframe and holds out a hand. “Come here, French.”
I glance to the edge of the conference room, the hallway that extends away from us toward the rest of the hotel.
“They’re all gone,” Campbell says.
“Anyone could show up.”
He looks down the hall again, and I watch the tendons move in his neck. “But they won’t.”
For a moment we just look at each other. Then Campbell says, “You expect me to believe you weren’t waiting for me in here?”
“I’m working.”
“Hardly,” he echoes. I close my laptop and stand.
“We can’t,” I say, sliding past him in the doorframe so our stomachs brush. I stop dead center and look up at him. “Not here.”
His hand skims over my elbow, down to my wrist—cool metal trail of his ring. “Phone booth,” he says. His eyes flit behind me, to the windowless cubby of a room lined in soundproofing panels and intended for work calls.
“Campbell.” I step past him into the hallway, and his hand slides off my arm. “We have work to do.”
“You’re at the top of my to-do list,” he says, and I cough out a laugh.
“Corny.”
He grins and fits one hand around the dip in my waist like it belongs there. “Is it working for you?”
“No,” I say, but when he starts to guide me toward the phone booth, I find I don’t have the resolve to fight him.
“Shame.” Campbell opens the door and puts his computer on the low desk inside. Takes mine out of my hands and does the same. Then he guides me backward, both hands framing my jaw, and says, “Let me try something else.”
My legs hit the desk and I sink onto it.
Campbell’s body arcs over mine, my chin tipped up by one thumb as he parts my lips and takes what he’s after—deep, slow drags of his tongue that leave me dizzy.
My hands are bracketed around his ribs, and I can feel him breathing, feel every line of his body shifting above me.
“Thank you for coming with me,” he says against my lips.
“To the phone booth?”
Campbell smiles. “To North Carolina.”
I brush my thumbs across his sides. “Thanks for buying my tickets.”
I’ll meet him in Wilmington on Saturday morning, after Friday’s rehearsal dinner. Then we’ll fly home to Chicago, together, on Monday.
“It’s going to be so much better,” he says, “having you there. Not doing it alone.”
Campbell’s hips are between my legs. My skirt’s ridden up so the seams of his pants press to the sheer fabric of my tights.
“Alone?” I ask, tucking a hand around his neck. “What about your family?”
Campbell traces my eyebrow with the pad of one thumb. I can tell he’s reaching for the right words, and it’s still new, seeing him work to articulate something. All the time I’ve known him, Campbell’s words have been lightning.
“It’s hard, being there.” He says it quietly. “The three of them—my mom and my sisters. Sometimes it feels like they’re this unit. And they’re all on the same page, and I’m the only one who can’t accept this. It’s like I have to relearn it every time I go home.”
“Your dad,” I say, and Campbell swallows on a nod.
“I know it’s hard for them, too.” His hands settle at my sides, and I run my fingertips into the hair at the nape of his neck. “Of course it is. But—”
He breaks off, and his eyes come to mine. Searching, like I might have the words he doesn’t.
“But you were a team,” I say. “You and your dad.”
Campbell’s lips turn up at the edges. Something that wants to be a smile. “Yeah. And he would have been so happy about Jo getting married.”
I use my hand on the back of his neck to draw his face to mine. When I kiss him, he exhales and softens against me, the tension easing from his body.
“I’ll be your team,” I tell him. Campbell touches his forehead to mine. “You don’t need to do this alone.”
He smiles. Something small and secret, just for me. When he squeezes my sides, the ten-point press of his fingertips, I ask, “What are you wearing to the wedding?”
“A tux.” Then he stamps a kiss to my forehead and straightens. “You’ll like it—it’s black.”
I laugh and run a fingertip over the horseshoe on his chest. “I’ll hardly recognize you. I mean, where do these come from?” I’ve never met anyone with such an eclectic wardrobe: the colored suits and sport coats, the strange and specific patterns. “Why do you always dress like this?”
Campbell lifts a hand to settle it over mine on his chest. “I dress like this around you.”
“Right,” I laugh, dismissive. “Because I love it so much.”
“No,” he says, and then he looks at me. Steadily, like he’s waiting for me to put this together. And even before he speaks again, it starts sliding into place: flashes of memory coaxed by his gaze on mine.
Campbell under the heat lamp on the L platform in January, his black pea coat and his gray knit hat. Even the white dress shirt in his headshot for Adweek. The navy suit in his LinkedIn profile. All these things he wore when he didn’t expect to see me.
“Because,” Campbell says, slowly, “of the first time you ever really looked at me.”
“What?” My voice is faint.
Campbell smiles. Not his usual smirk, or that soft tug of his lips just now—small and sad. This is something different, something shy. I always want you looking at me.
“I was wearing that stupid shirt,” Campbell says, “our first day at Slater.” He winds the ends of my hair between his fingers and watches the movement instead of looking at me.
My heart is trilling in my chest, remembering the two of us in Joaquin’s office five summers ago.
“I’d lost this bet to my roommates. Our apartment back then was a piece of shit, but it had this decrepit tennis court.
” Campbell glances up at me, then quickly away when he sees I’m already biting my lip to keep from beaming.
He’s adorable like this; I don’t think I’ve seen him embarrassed before.
I didn’t know he was capable of feeling embarrassed.
“We played so much tennis that summer, and we had this tournament—it doesn’t matter; the point is I lost, and the deal was whoever came in last had to wear that shirt to the first day of their job.
” He looks back at me, his cheeks pink. “Do you remember it?”
Campbell, twenty-three years old, sitting next to me at Joaquin’s desk with that tennis racket embroidered on his collar. The cockiest person I’d ever met. The way he smirked at me that day, called me by my full name right from the jump.
“The shirt was a dare,” I say slowly, each word drenched with my smile.
“The shirt was a bet I lost,” he clarifies. “But you said—”
“ ‘Nice shirt.’ ”
Campbell puffs out a breath. When he smiles, I tug him into me and pepper his face with kisses. He starts to laugh, his eyes crinkling. I’m addicted to his joy—to the sound of it, to how it takes shape on his face.
“You were obsessed with me,” I say.
“Fuck,” Campbell mutters. But he’s grinning, and all the wider when I press my lips to his. “Guilty,” he says against my mouth.
“So guilty.”