Chapter Thirty-Five #3
“Now if we could have Gen’s dad, Stew, and Josie’s brother, Campbell, join us on the dance floor…
” The MC’s voice fades into the opening notes of “Moon River,” and I watch breathlessly as Campbell steps up to Josie.
He’s easily half a foot taller than her, and she loops both arms around his neck as she grins up at him.
He says something, ducking to speak into her ear, and she laughs loudly enough that I hear it from our table.
“This was our wedding song,” Campbell’s mom tells me. When I turn to her, she’s watching her children. “Cam and me.”
“I know,” I say.
She looks at me, surprised.
“Campbell told me.”
She glances at him, dancing with his sister, then back at me. “Did he?”
I nod. It’s one of so many little things about Campbell that I misjudged, over the years. This song, his ringtone. Something I’d written off as an irritating idiosyncrasy, when it’s one of so many ways he’s been this thoughtful, sentimental person all along.
Campbell and Josie talk for the entire dance. His back is to me and I can’t see his face, but Josie’s expressions swing from laughter to exasperation and back faster than I can track them. Across from us, Vivian’s crying. Gabriel puts one big hand on the back of her neck and squeezes.
As one song bleeds into the next, Josie and Gen drift back together. Gen’s mom joins her dad on the dance floor, and couples start to rise from their tables to step under the lights. Campbell slides his hands into his pockets and watches Josie.
I feel cool fingers on my arm. Campbell’s mom lets go as soon as I look at her. “That’s your cue, honey.”
I falter, my gaze flickering from Campbell to his mother and back again. There’s something in how she’s looking at me, like she knows everything—though that’s impossible. “Go on,” she says.
I put my folded napkin on the table and jerk out of my seat. I took my heels off again during the salad course, and when I walk toward Campbell through the grass it’s cool under my toes. The sun’s well and truly down, the heat of the day finally burning off into something gentler.
When I put my hand in the middle of his back, Campbell turns to look at me over his shoulder. I hate what happens on his face when he sees me. The way his eyes go tight, his guard drawing up.
“Dance with me?” I ask, quietly.
His eyes cast over mine, like he’s weighing this.
He turns and draws me into him without saying anything at all, one hand landing on my lower back and the other sliding down my arm to capture my fingers.
When I put my palm over his heart it feels hard to breathe.
Like if I take up too much space, if I don’t draw air short and shallow, I might scare him away.
“Josie seems happy,” I say, my lips right next to his ear. There’s an inch between our cheeks, close enough to kiss him.
Campbell makes a small noise in his throat. Mm.
“About your dad.” I know I’m pressing, but I’d give nearly anything to hear his voice. To know how he’s feeling—not just about me, but about everything.
“Yeah,” he says.
“You’re not?”
Campbell moves me in time with the music. Slow, and fluid, and sure. His thumb and forefinger are on the bare skin of my back.
“It’s like she’s okay with whatever he can give, now,” he says, finally.
The words are chapped, everything about his voice roughed-up and hurting.
“Whatever his best looks like. And I just can’t get it out of my head that I wish he was here like he used to be, to see all this.
” He pauses, then says, “Which isn’t fair to him. ”
“But it’s how you feel,” I say. I smooth my hand up his chest, his shoulder. Curl my fingers around the back of his neck. I can feel the tendons there, how everything about him is pulled tight and worried.
When I brush my thumb back and forth over his skin, Campbell says, softly, “Yeah.”
“I think that’s allowed,” I say. The same permission he gave me on the beach back in California, when I needed it so badly.
I feel him exhale over my shoulder. When he doesn’t speak, I ask, “Have you told them about the book?”
“Not yet,” he says. “But I will.”
Time hitches between us, heavy and slow. Campbell’s hand rises, ever so slightly, on my back. His voice is a stilted whisper when he says, “I’m glad you’re here.”
I close my eyes. It feels so much easier to talk to him when we can’t see each other, when we’re pressed this close but looking over each other’s shoulders. “I’m glad, too,” I say.
“I could hear you crying in your room, after it happened.” He eases me closer, his palm wide and warm on my skin. “That whole night. It was torture.”
I feel like I might cry now. His body pressed in along mine, his head in my hand and the white-hot memory of that conversation, every horrible thing I said to him.
“Campbell.” My voice is tight; he tries to pull back to look at me but I hold him in place. I don’t know if I can get through this any other way. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean what I said, about what you meant to me. What you mean.”
I can feel him holding his breath. His body has slowed, barely moving us now at all.
“All of it was real to me,” I say. “I panicked, but you deserved better. I should have done better. I should have done better by you this whole time—even when we were interns. Even when you knew and I didn’t.”
He swallows. I feel it, our cheeks close enough to touch.
“I didn’t deserve you, then,” he says. The song changes and we stay exactly where we are. “I wasn’t ready.”
My chest is pressed to his. I can feel his heart hammering, or mine, or both of them together. “Are you ready now?”
“I don’t know.” It falls through my body like the floor giving way. “You make me want to try so fucking hard.”
He does pull back from me, then. I blink to clear my eyes and his gaze roves over me, dark and wrecked. “I need time, Mattie.”
When he disappears into the house I stay there on the dance floor, swaying. Not sure I’d be steady enough to step away if I wanted to.
It’s near midnight by the time everyone clears out. Josie and Gen take a white convertible to their hotel down the beach. The guests move along Campbell’s street in a scattered cloud of laughter and dress shoes on pavement. Gabriel took Lola to their hotel hours ago.
I’m in the house’s one bathroom, running my hands under the freezing tap water. When I meet my eyes in the mirror I look tired and blurred out—my hair gone frizzy in the humidity, my eyeliner smudged. There’s a mosquito bite blooming right at my collarbone.
I mean to find Campbell and leave, but when I step out of the bathroom I can hear Elaine’s voice from the dining room.
“It was a big gesture,” she says. I inch further down the hallway, stopping in the shadows. When I peek around the corner, Campbell’s sitting at the dining table across from Vivian. Their mother stands behind her, holding Josie’s bouquet. “But you know it’s not the grand gestures, sweetheart.”
She pauses. I fold my arms over my fluttering chest and listen.
“It’s the grocery shopping, and walking on the beach in the morning, and all the little things that make a life.
Is she who you want beside you when you’re doing that?
” Elaine lets the question linger. “Don’t picture it this way—you in a tuxedo, her in that beautiful dress—in a moment like this that comes around once in a lifetime.
Don’t look for her in the big moments. Do you see her with you in the small ones? ”
I lean into the wall, not trusting myself to stay vertical. I shouldn’t be listening to this, but I’m desperate to hear his answer. I already know mine: I want Campbell in the tuxedo, and I want him bleeding in the wet suit, and I want him every single other way. I want him with me all the time.
Campbell’s quiet for so long that I think he might not say anything at all. When his voice finally comes, it’s rough and aching. “What if it ends?” he says. His accent’s stronger, here, like being home brings it out of him. “What if it ends like—”
I hear a chair pull out. His mother’s voice. “Like me and Dad?”
My eyes burn. In the dim hallway, lined in photographs of Campbell and his siblings, I let them fall shut.
“Then it’s love.” Elaine sounds tired but certain. “Then it won’t have ended at all.”
There’s a heavy silence. When Campbell speaks, his voice is strangled. “Mom—”
It’s the only word he gets out. In the dark behind my eyelids, I picture him in California. His anguished face in that hotel room by the sea. It’s been hell. Love is more painful than it’s worth.
“It’s all love, Campbell,” Elaine says. “Worrying about him, missing him. Every bit of it is love, and I’d do it all again. You know that, right?”
I open my eyes, listening for him. Maybe it’s worth it. But there’s only the rustle of somebody moving.