Chapter Thirty-One #2
Campbell leans his forehead to mine again. “I kept wearing weird shit to see if you’d comment on it. And you did. And it just sort of…”
“Became your brand?”
Campbell shrugs, straightening with a light press of his lips to my forehead. “You’ve always been in charge of me.”
I want to frame every one of his horrible shirts. I want him to tell me that story again and again. Maybe even convince him to let me record it.
For now, I just say, “You can give up the shirts.”
His eyebrows lift. I scratch my fingers over his back.
“I’m already convinced,” I tell him. “I’m already looking at you all the time.”
“Are you?” he says, quietly. When I nod, he angles my chin with one hand and kisses me—gentle, and long, and heady.
“What should I wear to the wedding?” I ask when we finally pull apart. “I didn’t bring much.”
Campbell doesn’t hesitate. “That dress from dinner in Aspen. I almost choked on my own throat when I saw you in it.”
A hot blush floods my cheeks, and Campbell traces it with both thumbs.
“I can’t wear black to a wedding.”
“You can,” he says. Then he kisses me. “You should. Please.”
“Well, since you’re begging—”
Campbell cuts me off with his mouth on mine, his lips parting as one hand swipes a soft line down the outside of my thigh. My eyes are falling shut, his palm cupping my knee, when the door clatters open.
Campbell’s hand stutters over my tights. Then he turns to look over his shoulder, and jerks away from me entirely.
“Nolan,” he says. “You—”
I snap my legs together and scramble off the desk. I’m standing directly behind Campbell, practically pressed to his back, one of his hands held out at his side as if to keep me there. Not touching me. All five fingers spread.
“You can’t be serious,” Nolan says. He’s stock-still in the doorframe, his entire face like a closed door. I think of him, five summers ago, talking over me in that conference room suspended above Chicago. How much he hated me then, and how clearly he hates me now. “The two of you—”
“It’s my fault,” Campbell says. I edge out from behind him, my heart a clenched fist in my chest. I need to be out of this room.
“What if it’d been a client?” Nolan asks. His voice is unbelievably quiet to sound so threatening. “What if it was Lucia, instead of me?”
In that moment, I wish it had been. Anyone but Nolan, whose frigid eyes track me as I step around Campbell.
“I know,” Campbell says. He sounds flat and placating.
“It’s four days, Campbell,” Nolan says. It’s like I’m not even here. But then he gestures right at me. “She couldn’t keep her legs together for four more days?”
“Hey,” Campbell snaps. It’s so quick and so sharp that I flinch beside him. “Nolan, what the fuck? You can’t talk to her like that.”
Something goes stiff at the corners of Nolan’s jaw. My heart’s clambering so furiously against the wall of my ribs that it’s all I can hear, thrashing in my ears. She couldn’t keep her legs together for four more days?
“I thought you were smarter than this,” Nolan says. Still to Campbell, but then he looks at me. I drop my gaze immediately. “I thought both of you were taking this more seriously.”
“We are taking it seriously,” Campbell says. “This is separate.” He keeps talking, but I can’t hear him anymore. My brain is blurring out, a lettered haze of words: She couldn’t keep her legs together? I thought you were taking this more seriously. I thought you were smarter.
I push out of the room while Campbell’s still talking.
Past Nolan, my elbow angled at my side to force my way around him through the doorframe.
Down the hallway, even as Campbell shouts after me.
Across the stone and beechwood lobby, the ocean heaving across the street.
Into my room, where the door slams shut with sickening finality.
I hurry to the patio and pull the articulating door closed. Draw the curtains. Realize I left my computer in the phone booth and make a wrecked, high-pitched sound in my throat. Keep her legs together. It chafes at me like sand, a million broken things. Taking this more seriously.
Nolan’s a monster, but he’s right. I haven’t been dedicated to the pitch.
Not in days, not really since Aspen. Maybe not even before—not since Campbell in his red suit at the airport and his eyes on me in that coffee line.
The way he remembered my latte order, the way he stole my notebook and got rid of that man in the cowboy hat at the bar.
How could I be dedicated to this work, when I’ve hardly been sleeping? Splitting my nights between Campbell’s patio and his bed and the warm seat of his lap. I’ve been surviving on naps at three o’clock in the morning. I’ve hardly even been eating.
I had one goal, this trip. Such a clear one, the simplest thing in the world: win. And what the hell have I gone and done instead?
Knuckles rap at my door, and I jump.
“Mattie.” Campbell’s voice is low. “Let me in.”
I stand in the middle of my palatial, perfect room.
Its gauzy white curtains, its heavy wooden table.
Its polished floor, solid beneath my feet.
The wall it shares with Campbell’s room.
Everything that’s happened in these hidden, adjoining spaces—everything that shouldn’t have, and that can’t again.
“Let me in,” Campbell repeats. I can picture him in the hallway: his head bent, his hands pressed to my door. Where is Nolan? What did he tell him? I’ve hardly been in here for a full minute. “Mattie.”
“No,” I say. My voice is too quiet—he can’t hear me. I swallow with so much effort that it hurts. This time, the word comes out nearly a shout. “No.”
There’s a pause. Then, just as loudly, he says, “Yes.”
I cross my room toward the door and glare at it, like he could see me.
“Mattie, let me in.”
“I told you we couldn’t do that,” I say. I want so badly for this to be his fault, to shove off the shame of Nolan’s words. Keep her legs together. Thought you were smarter. “I’m so mad at you, Campbell.”
“I know,” he says. “I know, fuck. Please be mad at me to my face.”
But this isn’t right. I shouldn’t see him; I should put distance between us. I should’ve kept distance between us all along. I knew better, and I let myself fall into this anyways.
When I don’t respond, Campbell says, “Mattie, I swear to god, if you don’t explicitly tell me to fuck off, I’m coming in right now.”
“Fuck off,” I say.
From the hallway, Campbell growls. A rumbling, frustrated sound that I feel through to my fingertips. “Do you mean that?”
My eyes burn. Fuck. I blink up at the ceiling, forcefully trying to gulp back my tears. It’s unbearable, the way he always knows. That I can say fuck off and Campbell hears every embarrassing, unsaid thing beneath it: I want you, I’m scared, I’m panicking in here.
He’s quiet, from the hallway. I know my silence is speaking for itself, but I can’t muster an argument through the vise of my throat.
And then my patio door accordions open—maybe because I forgot to lock it, or maybe because I didn’t want to—and Campbell pitches the curtains aside to come into my room.
I try to wipe at my eyes. “Campbell—”
“Are you okay?” He’s a little out of breath, his cheeks flushed. He’s holding both of our computers, and the ocean air follows him inside, billowing the curtains around his body.
The whole room stretches between us. I’m in the entryway, biting my lip hard enough to hurt. He’s all the way across the bedroom, the wardrobe, the sitting room. When I shake my head, he closes the entire distance in what feels like two long strides.
“That was so out of line, what he said to you.” Campbell puts the laptops down and takes my face in both hands, inspecting me like he’s looking for damage. “That should never have happened.”
I ease myself out of his hands, taking a step backward. I feel the ghosts of his fingers on my cheeks, and all of it’s just so damning: how good it feels to be touched by him, how wrong I feel to want that now. “He’s right,” I say.
“What?” Campbell says, so harshly that I wince. Softer, he repeats himself. “What?”
“I’ve been distracted,” I say. Right down at my feet. “Not taking this seriously.”
“That’s not true. You’re always working, you and Dexter—”
“I’m not always working.” I look up at him, clamping my teeth together like it might help hold me still. “I spend half my time with you.”
“At night,” Campbell says. It’s so plain on his face, how confused he is. How this was the very last thing he expected me to say. “When you wouldn’t be working, anyway.”
“I would. Back in Chicago, in any other situation—to win a client this big, I would.”
“Okay,” he says, slowly. “Maybe that’s good. To take a break.”
I exhale a laugh. It punches out of me like something angry, maybe even something mean.
“Maybe for you,” I say. I can feel my systems overloading—shame, and fear, and sadness.
Anger, now, that it isn’t as clear to him as it is to me how massively I’ve screwed this up for myself.
“Maybe that’s good for you, Campbell.” When I look up at him, his eyes are moving so quickly between my own, trying to catch up.
“But I’m never going to prove myself if I don’t work twice as hard, or twice as long. If I don’t keep my legs together.”
My voice breaks on it, giving me away. But when Campbell takes a step toward me, I hold up my hand.
“We have to stop.”
“No,” he says. And it hurts: the sound of Campbell Porter in abject disagreement.
All those familiar ways his voice moves when he’s fighting with me.
“Mattie. I wanted this as badly as you did. Worse. So much fucking worse.” He’s ducking his head, trying to get me to look at him, but I can’t.
“Nolan’s an asshole. If there was any fault in this, and I don’t think there is, it wouldn’t be yours. ”
I’m completely still, staring down at my shoes. So much fucking worse, I think. All of this is so much fucking worse, now that I know what it feels like to be close to him.
“God, Mattie, look at me.”