Chapter Thirty-One #3
But I’m having trouble—the gold flicker of Campbell’s eyes, the freckles along the line of his nose. It’s so hard to look at him, now that I know he can’t be mine for the keeping.
Campbell takes my hand. So careful, like I might spook. “Baby,” he says. The scrape of his voice over that word forces my eyes shut. “Please.”
“We can’t,” I whisper. His thumb rubs the center of my palm.
“Why not?”
“Because we need to focus. I need to—” I break off, finally looking up at him as I untangle our fingers. “I need to salvage this, if I haven’t completely destroyed it already. We aren’t on the same side.”
He blinks. His hand’s still stretched into the space between us. Baby, I think.
“I’m always going to be on your side,” he says.
“That’s literally untrue, Campbell.”
“I don’t mean work. Jesus, Mattie, it’s just work.”
But it’s different for him. Campbell Porter, who’s always been better at this than me. Who has other dreams that matter more to him than this one.
For me, this is it. This is the work I’ve spent my life building toward, the creativity my mother taught me to prioritize above all else or risk losing myself in the trade.
It’s the one thing I’m good at. The one thing I can order my life around, once Ava’s gone.
“It can’t be just work,” I say, softly, “to me. You’ve already proven yourself, but I still need to.”
“What does that mean?” The sleeves of his horseshoe shirt are pushed nearly to his elbows, but he shoves them up even further. “You don’t need to prove anything to anyone. Especially not fucking Nolan.”
“It’s not Nolan,” I say, sharply. It’s a little bit Nolan—a little bit about the words still whistling through me.
About how different this is, how different everything is, because I’m a woman and Campbell’s not.
“It’s that you’re always beating me, and you’ll do it again if I don’t get my shit together. ”
Campbell blinks. “You’re worried about the pitch?”
I scrub my hands over my face. “Of course I’m worried about the pitch, Campbell, and the fact that you aren’t just proves my point.
You’ve already secured your place in this career.
” I laugh, and it sounds nearly hysterical.
“Not that you even want it. But I haven’t.
I need a win, and I need more money, and I need to prove—”
“This is your place,” Campbell says. “Here, on this trip, for one of the most coveted clients in North America.” He waves an arm toward the hallway. “Iris respects you. Dexter looks to you first on everything. You’ve proven everything you need to, Mattie. Earned everything you need to.”
“It’s so easy for you to say that!” I cry. I don’t want him to try to make this better; I want him to understand. That losing the Slater Faust job made me feel so small. That every time he beats me it’s like pressing on a fundamental bruise I built my entire career on top of.
I want Campbell to know that I’ve gotten so much of it wrong. That I’ve misplaced so many feelings and misunderstood him in so many ways. I want him to understand how badly it hurts, to care about him the way I do—to know everything I’ve ruined, and everything I’ll ruin now.
But it’s too big, and I’m too wretched, and what I say is, “Campbell, you took that job from me.” My voice is tight and twisting.
“Nolan knows it, Iris knows it, everyone here knows it. Then you won that Lion over me in front of all of them. You don’t know what this feels like.
You have If Not You. Even if you never did anything again, everyone would worship you. ”
Campbell’s gone very still. A muscle tenses in his temple.
“You’re always going to beat me,” I say. “Just like you beat me that summer, just like you beat me in France with that campaign I’ll never outdo. I’ll never be good enough if—”
“Mattie, that campaign wouldn’t even exist without you.”
I stare at him. It’s so abrupt, and for a moment neither of us says anything. There’s just the breeze moving in from the patio, the way it nudges Campbell’s hair along the bruised line of his stitches. And the unsettling way he’s looking at me, like he knows something serious that I don’t.
“What?” I ask, finally.
“ ‘If not you’?” His eyebrows rise. It isn’t the first time I’ve heard him say those words himself, but this time it feels like vertigo.
This campaign I’ve built up so much in my mind, articulated to me now by the one voice I hear in my head as much as my own.
“You said it to me, that summer at Slater. We were arguing. You spat it at me like an insult, and you left the room, and you don’t even remember. ”
The room feels very still, like even the dust motes filtering through the afternoon light have frozen to watch us.
I ask, “But you did?”
“I remember everything you’ve ever said to me,” Campbell says, strained.
“And three years later, we’d gone through four rounds on this thing for Lachausse and nothing was hitting, so I threw it out there.
And the way everyone’s eyes lit up, Mattie, I mean—that’s you.
” He’s tilted into my space, his gaze heavy on mine.
“That’s the Mattie effect: everyone lights up.
I spent that whole intern summer assuming they’d give the job to you.
You’ve always been the magic of this for me. ”
My fingers feel staticky. My body’s going numb from the edges.
“Don’t do that,” I say, quietly. “Don’t flatter me now.”
“Jesus, don’t you know by now I’m never flattering you?” Campbell’s voice rises to something angry and unsteady. “I mean this. Mattie, my best idea came from you. You pushing me, you challenging me—” He breaks off. His eyes rake over mine. “It’s you.”
I’m thinking: I said something in passing and Campbell shaped it into a campaign that won awards. I’m thinking: he’s so much better at this, he even finds merit in my words that I can’t see.
I close my eyes. “I need you to leave.”
Campbell is silent. When I finally look at him, I wish I hadn’t. His eyebrows are drawn together, his eyes tight and anguished on mine. He looks exactly as he did that first day on the Wicksteed beach: entirely defeated.
“It was only supposed to be ten days,” I hear myself say. Something has taken over to autopilot my body through this. “You said it yourself.”
Campbell doesn’t move. “That’s not what I meant.”
“Well, it’s what I meant.” A lie, one that lands so disastrously between us I flinch back from it myself.
“That’s all this was to you?”
Campbell’s voice has taken on the flat, unaffected quality that he used on Nolan in the phone booth. And I realize that’s what we’ll be to each other, now: professional and removed.
None of Campbell’s words rumbling through my back as I rest against his chest. None, even, of the contentious and teasing ways he’s orbited me all these years.
There will be none of his pain, and none of mine—none of the things we handed to each other for safekeeping. We’ll have none of it at all.
“Yes.” I have to draw up the word like fishing line. Something deep and trapped that doesn’t want to be dislodged.
Campbell stares at me. I want to hide from him.
I want this to stop—so I don’t have to see him for one more moment, the excruciating fact of his beautiful face, and the divot of his collarbone, and the ring on his finger I’ll never feel graze against me again.
This perfect room is too beautiful a place for this ghastly conversation.
“Yesterday,” he says, quietly, “you said this was worth it.”
I close my eyes against the memory of us on his patio. It’s scalding as the sun, and just as impossible to look at.
Campbell takes a step toward me; I hear his shoes, feel the temperature rise in the air between us. “And it’s feeling like it really fucking wasn’t, if now I just have to—what—be without you again?”
I don’t have anything to say. When I open my eyes and hold his gaze, I feel the very worst kind of visible: like he sees everything. All the ways I’m lying, and all the ways I’m a coward, and all the ways I’ve fallen short.
He leaves without touching me. Without saying a single other thing.
When the door falls shut behind him, I call Ava and I sob.