Chapter Thirty-Six #2
I stare at him. All of it falls through me: I couldn’t watch you like that, another book, this industry that I love without Campbell in it at all.
I want to ask him about it—I want to know what the book is about, and how much he’s written, and how it feels this time around. I want to know if he misses our job.
But I know, too, that this is the person who left me at my motel in North Carolina and hasn’t spoken to me in all the weeks since. Every part of me feels like a bruise.
“Are you seeing anyone?” Campbell says, so softly.
It brings heat to my cheeks. “That’s what you want to know?”
“Yeah.” It’s a tragedy of a word, thoroughly busted.
“Jesus, Campbell.” I feel a split second from screaming at him, a split even shorter from crying. Do you even care? I imagine myself yelling. How dare you ask me that?
But when I look at him he only eyes me, a muscle working in his jaw, and he looks like a dog that’s been kicked.
“No,” I say, finally, throwing my arms up. When my hands fall back and hit my thighs, the smack reverberates through the apartment.
He lets out a rush of breath. “Okay,” he says. “Okay, because that’s really my worst-case scenario.”
“Me being with someone?”
“You being with someone who’s not me.” He’s suddenly so flushed: his throat, the crests of his cheekbones. “You—falling in love with someone who’s not me.”
“Well, unluckily for me, I don’t actually know how to do that without you.”
I didn’t mean to say it, but it hangs there between us, true. I’ve never been in love, not even close. Not until him.
Campbell’s lips part. In the pale light of the hallway he looks hollowed out and overcome. When he finally speaks, his voice is grave. “Don’t know how to do what, Mattie?”
“Don’t make me say it.” I glare at him and he doesn’t even blink. The way he’s looking at me—I’m ruined. I came here to wrest back control, and instead I’ve laid all my cards out like an absolute fool.
“Well?” I demand. Something is thrumming, rising and panicked, in my chest. “What about you, then?”
He takes one hesitant step closer. The entryway is narrow: there’s maybe six inches of space on either side of us. A foot between our bodies. “What about me?”
I force myself to stay still, not regain the distance he’s closed. “Are you seeing anyone?”
Campbell doesn’t move, doesn’t pull his gaze from mine even a fraction. “Of course not. If not you—” He breaks off. “At this point, Mattie, for me? It’s you or nothing.”
It wrings through me. Tightening my throat, forcing my eyes shut. My voice comes quietly. “You don’t believe in soulmates, Campbell.”
“No,” he says. “Please look at me.”
I open my eyes, and Campbell’s right there. Close enough to touch me and very carefully not doing it.
“I believe in choosing,” he says. “I think that’s bigger. I think it might kill me, actually, but I can’t let you go. There isn’t anything fated about it, or anything compelling me into it. I just want to choose you. I’m trying to, if you’ll let me.”
“Then why did you do this?” My voice sways right on the uncertain edge of tears.
I’m so infuriated by him, so confused; he’s always evaded me and we’re still here, like this, with me being made to feel like I’ve missed something.
“Not talk to me for a whole month, and then this—this email from some recruiter at Slater?”
“You made this grand gesture, coming to the wedding.” He starts talking faster, like he can’t explain himself quickly enough.
“And I was too fucked-up to get it right. I woke up that next morning and you’d already rebooked your flight home and I felt like the stupidest person alive, knowing you were gone. That I’d let you go. I thought—”
“So instead of saying something immediately, you waited a month?” My voice rises. His face is still so pink.
“You’re telling me if I turned up at your place right away, you’d have been happy to see me?
” His eyes sear across mine. “After you showed up for me so entirely, and you got me through that whole night with my family, and I sent you off to that hotel alone? It was fucking unforgivable, Mattie, I knew that. You knew that.”
He’s right: I flew home stoking my anger like it was a fire that could keep me alive. Fury would protect me, I thought. I wrapped myself in it, a barrier between my heart and the truer feeling I didn’t want to look at: how staggeringly much I missed him.
“You being there meant so much to me,” he says, quieter.
It soothes something sore and enormous at the center of my chest. I hadn’t known if it was the right thing to do, not with how it ended.
“You showing up. Knowing you were there, down the beach—that you’d come there for me.
Just having you nearby, Mattie. All of it made me brave enough to talk to them.
” His eyes light on mine and that word settles through me: brave.
I knew Campbell was scared, that night, listening to his wavering voice as he sat with his mom at the table.
But it’s a bigger thing, to hear him say it.
“About you, about my dad. About the book.”
He draws a long, shaking breath. “I felt like I needed to do something, too, to show I’m in this with you.
And I haven’t been able to stop thinking about all those things you said in California, about needing to prove yourself—and how you’re so wrong.
You’re so wrong. You’re so good at what you do, and I need you to see it like I see it. ”
“I just got promoted to senior writer,” I tell him. From the kitchen, ice clunks into his freezer. The sound startles me: I’ve forgotten where we are, or that we’re anywhere at all. It feels like this conversation with him is the only thing that exists. “I’m not ready for creative directing.”
“Oh, come on,” Campbell says, his eyes lifting to the ceiling. There’s a spiked edge to his voice—that version of him I’ve known so long, ready to fight with me at the drop of a hat. “You can do better than that, French.”
I make a sound in protest, spluttering, and he doubles down. “You should’ve made senior writer years ago.” His eyebrows yank up as he looks at me. “The Art Room’s been sitting on their hands like idiots. You’ve been ready for this. Don’t ever sell yourself short to me.”
“So, what, I get to come be ACD under Nolan?” Just saying his name squeezes my throat. Campbell hears it, too—his whole body tenses at the catch in my voice. “A flagrant misogynist who thinks I’m some kind of depraved trollop?”
“Nolan’s gone,” Campbell says. I stare at him. “I told HR what he said to you in California.”
“You—” My voice has gone small. “Then you must—I mean, you must’ve told them what we did, too?”
He holds my gaze. Careful and assessing before, finally, he nods. “It wasn’t a crime, Mattie. They didn’t like it, but we didn’t hurt anyone.” His eyes cast over me. “He did.”
It settles through me, all Campbell’s been doing since I last saw him: Nolan, and leaving Slater Faust, and starting his book. Packing up this apartment and working at a restaurant and maybe, sometimes, missing me.
“Can I touch you?” he asks. We’re so close in the hallway but he’s holding himself deliberate and still in front of me, a lean inch of space between us.
“If you have to,” I whisper.
Campbell smiles. I missed it so much, those freckles at the edges of his lips. “I have to.”
His hand comes to my waist and I exhale at the contact, the relieving heat of him through my thin T-shirt. His signet ring on my bare skin beneath the hem.
“I can’t believe you gave it up,” I say, looking at him. His face is tipped to mine.
“You were the fun in this for me.” Campbell’s voice is stretched thin.
“You were all the good parts. Chasing you, challenging you, watching you work. I never stopped trying to see every assignment the way you would.” His thumb brushes the lowest line of my rib cage.
“There’s no point for me, without you on the other end of it.
After everything that happened, how badly I fucked it up—” He breaks off.
Lifts one shoulder, then drops it. “This ACD job—it’s my gesture.
I don’t know if it’s good enough. Please tell me it is. ”
“God.” My voice comes out thick. “You’re such a writer. There doesn’t need to be a gesture, Campbell. It doesn’t—” I break off, swallowing hard. “It doesn’t need to be a good story. It just needs to be me and you.”
His expression turns so earnest it edges on painful. “Me and you’s a good story, Mattie. Best one I know.”
Tearfully, I say, “But what about all those things in your pitch? The dry cleaning and the rug and the Popsicle hands. You don’t want them.”
“You don’t want them.” His hand slides around to my back, easing me closer. “I want anything you want.”
“You can’t mean that,” I whisper.
He watches me steadily. “I mean that.”