Chapter Thirty-Six #3
“But I don’t know what I want.” It’s not true—there’s one thing I want so frantically I feel sick with it, and he’s standing right in front of me. “I still don’t know about marriage, and the rug, and the dry cleaning. I really still don’t know about kids.”
“Me, neither,” Campbell says. “But I’ve been thinking about what my mom said, at the wedding—how around these big moments, being with someone’s really about the small ones.
Grocery shopping and walking on the beach.
” His eyes cast over mine. “I know you heard her. Heard all of that. I think that’s the other side of your rug, and your dry cleaning: boring things you get to do with someone.
” His fingertips press in along my spine.
“I don’t know much. But I know I want to go grocery shopping with you, Mattie. ”
I want it, too. Campbell under the fluorescents in the cereal aisle, Campbell anywhere at all.
“But then what?” It paralyzes me: the vastness of a future with someone else, when I’ve only ever imagined myself there alone. “What about all the rest of it?”
“We’ll figure it out,” he says, simply. “I think that’s all it is, being with someone. It’s just figuring it out together forever.”
Forever fractals through me, warming every single part of my body. My voice breaks when I ask, “What if it’s more painful than it’s worth?”
Campbell’s eyes soften. His palm levels out across the center of my back. “You’re worth anything to me, Mattie. I’d rather be hurt by you than do anything else, ever, with anyone else.”
My throat constricts. I think of us in North Carolina, the unbearable sadness in his eyes outside my motel room. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
“I know.” Campbell lifts his free hand to my face, brushing the pad of his thumb over my cheekbone. “I’m all in on this with you. Full send. I’m so—” He breaks off, his eyes moving between mine. “Just, I mean, fatally in love with you. I’ll die with this.”
“Not from it?”
“Not if you love me back.”
He doesn’t pose it like a question, but it is. His voice is even, but I know his tells: the quick way he’s blinking, the tension in the set of his mouth. He’s scared.
I drop my shoulder and let my bag slide down to the floor. Campbell lowers his hands and watches every shift of my body as I reach up and take his face in both of mine.
“Of course I love you,” I say. It doesn’t catch even a little on the way out: it’s the easiest thing in the world. “If you ever disappear like that again, you will die from this.”
His laugh is a relieved rush. He binds both arms around my waist and slots me in against his body, pressing his face to my neck. “I love you,” he says, his lips brushing my skin so I feel the shape of every word. “I’m sorry.”
I kiss the curve of his shoulder where it arcs out of his T-shirt. Campbell straightens and eases his hands up my sides. His gaze has gone stark and starved, and when I tip my chin he doesn’t hesitate, just cups the back of my head in one big palm and kisses me.
There’s an entire, aching month behind it. An entire wedding night spent dizzy with desire. His mouth opens and mine follows in response, and when he starts walking us backward through the apartment my body floats with his.
“I still have a bed,” he says as it hits the backs of my knees, as he eases me onto it. “It’s about all I’ve got left.”
The room around us is colorless—nothing on the walls, boxes in one corner, window with the shade rolled up so sunlight streams in.
“I’d have done this on the floor,” I tell him. His fingers are working the buttons on my jeans; as I lift my hips, he slides both hands down my legs and tugs them off.
“I’d have done this standing in the hallway,” he says. I pull at the hem of his T-shirt and he drags it over his head with one hand, coming back to me wild-haired and bare.
“I’d have done this on a work trip,” I say. He kisses my throat and draws my shirt up my ribs and over my shoulders. “I’d have done this surrounded by our coworkers.”
Campbell laughs into my mouth, his fingers ghosting down my stomach to the line of my underwear. When he slips his hand inside and cups me, heated and heavy, I make a relieved, broken sound so transparent I bend an arm over my mouth.
“Don’t do that,” he says, hoarse. His fingers start to move and he nudges my arm out of the way with his face.
Drops an uncontrolled, open-mouthed kiss to my lips.
“Your sounds are my favorite sounds. Your body is my favorite body.” He’s everywhere: moving inside of me, his devastating mouth, his perfect, singular voice lighting across my skin. “I missed you so much.”
I wrap an arm around the broad stretch of his shoulders and hold him close to me. Think, I love you, and then say it out loud. Think, I want you with me all the time, and then say that, too.
Later, when we’re both breathing hard and our clothes are scattered like constellations around Campbell’s empty bedroom, he cradles my head in one hand and tilts me to look at him.
“Mine?” he whispers.
It’s obvious. As true to me as gravity.
“Yours.”