Chapter Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Seven
December
“Campbell Porter will be the death of me.” Ava appears in my doorway, holding out her phone. “What are these outfits?”
I step toward her from where I’d been zipping my suitcase. She has her text thread with Campbell pulled up: it’s a stream of photographs he’s sent her—a green button-down embroidered with engagement rings, a tie with a champagne flute printed on it, dress shoes with bridal lace appliqués.
“Please help him, Mattie.” She turns the phone back toward herself, like she needs to see the pictures again to believe them. “I’ll feel evil if I have to keep telling him no.”
“He’s fucking with you, Ava.” I wait for her to meet my gaze, then lift my eyebrows. “You’re making it easy for him.”
She groans, head falling back so her hair cascades past her waist. She’s in the white denim jumpsuit we found on clearance; it’s subtly bridal and perfectly Ava. “I can’t always tell when he’s joking.”
“Would I ever allow him within a mile of your wedding in one of those abominations?” I point to her phone and duck back into the room to grab my suitcase. “Come on.”
“You’re right,” she concedes, glancing worriedly at her phone and back up at me. “Okay, right. You’re right.”
I stop, facing her in the doorway, and put both hands on her shoulders.
Last week, Ava and Lev invited Campbell to their wedding; he’s so excited that he’s spilling over with it.
And for Campbell, sometimes, the overflow looks like this: jokes about embroidered shirts, when we both know we’ll go shopping together to find him something that complements my maid of honor dress.
“Breathe,” I tell Ava, now. She sucks in air like it’s coming through a straw. “How are we feeling?”
“Excited,” she says. Our flight to Miami leaves in three hours. Lev left yesterday for his bachelor trip to Lake Tahoe. “A little overwhelmed. Mostly excited.”
I squeeze her shoulders and let go. “I’ll allow overwhelmed with excitement. But if you start leaning overwhelmed-only, I need you to say something.”
She nods sharply. “Ten-four, Captain.”
A jaunty knock ricochets through the apartment, and Ava says, “That’ll be Campbell.”
It still zips through me, a month in—the anticipation of him.
Ava goes to answer the door while I gather up the last of my things. My scarf, my lip balm. My headphones, which sit on the desk beside a sole black fountain pen in a jar.
Our front door clicks open and Campbell shouts, “The woman of the hour!”
Their voices float to me down the hallway.
Ava’s laugh. I realize I’ve gone still, just looking at the floor and listening to them.
I could stay in this moment: Pancake watching me from the bed, my fingers curled around my suitcase handle, my two favorite people in the world waiting for me just around the corner.
I’d bottle it, the sound of them together.
“Mattie?” Ava calls. “You ready?”
I step into the hall and Pancake follows me, light on her paws. I can see a slice of our living room from here: Kneecap the skeleton in his Santa suit, clutching a menorah.
When I turn the corner into the living room, Campbell grins. His cheeks are pink from the cold, and he’s got keys and sunglasses in one hand. Jeans, a parka unzipped over his hoodie, faint line of that scar at his hairline almost faded now.
“There she is,” he says. Softer.
“Thank you again for doing this,” Ava says, hiking a duffel bag onto her shoulder. She looks down as Pancake circles her ankles. “And for checking in on Pancake while we’re gone.”
Campbell bows deeply. When he rights himself, he’s looking at me. “At your service.”
Ava steps around him into the outer hallway and Campbell reaches for me, his free hand settling into its place at the dip of my waist.
“Hey, baby,” he says as his eyes lower to my mouth.
I lean close to kiss him. Against my lips, Campbell whispers, “Take me with you.”
“Can’t,” I say, quietly. I want you with me all the time. “Besides—” I point behind us, to where Pancake’s rubbing against one leg of the entryway table. “Pancake needs you.”
Campbell presses his face to my neck and lets out a resigned sound, a muffled exhale that tickles my throat and makes me laugh.
“Fine,” he says, then stands up and raises his voice. “Ma’am—” He turns to address Pancake, who startles and meets his eyes. “I’ll be back for you shortly.” Then he takes my suitcase out of my hand and rolls it into the hallway. Looks at Ava, then me. “Your chariot awaits.”
We pick up Jade on Southport before getting on the highway toward O’Hare. Campbell’s car is toasty in the December chill and smells like him—his linen cologne and salt air, somehow, this far from North Carolina.
“Morning,” Jade says as she slides into the back seat beside Ava. Jade relented, eventually, on the party bus and the colorful wigs. She squeezes Ava’s knee before looking at Campbell. “Thanks for picking me up. I’m Jade.”
“Hey—Campbell.” He glances at her in the rearview and takes a right onto Fullerton, where the street is wet and piled with snow at the curbs. “Mattie’s worse half.”
I roll my eyes and he smiles over at me, dropping a hand onto my leg and tucking his fingers under my thigh.
“What do you do, Campbell?” Jade asks.
“I work at a restaurant,” he tells her. Craning over one shoulder to check his blind spot as he merges into traffic. It’s such a nonanswer to such a big question: What does Campbell do?
Everything, to me.
He takes me grocery shopping on Sunday afternoons, juggling yogurt containers and adding Pringles to my lists and making me double over with laughter in the dish soap aisle.
He books an early flight home from Christmas in North Carolina so he’ll be waiting in my apartment when I get back from visiting the Zimmermans.
He makes sure we’ll be together at New Year’s, when Ava will leave to spend the rest of her break with Lev’s family.
He sits beside me when I talk to my parents on the phone—those rare, stilted conversations.
He agrees to meet them for coffee when they come to town for Ava’s wedding in March, an invitation my dad extended to all three of us: Campbell, Mom, me.
He tells me it’s all right to be scared and hopeful at the same time.
He peels the loneliness from my life with steady, gentle hands.
He stays up late with me when I’m stuck on work. Whispering in my bedroom after Ava and Lev have gone to sleep, propped against my headboard with his glasses on. Pushing me like he always has. Lighting up when I say something, finally, and we both know it’s right.
As for Slater Faust: I took the interview, but not the job.
Campbell was there for that decision, too.
Slater represented something to me that had ballooned into an idea bigger than itself—it was the life I’d imagined, once, and the first place in the city I love to ever let me down.
It was where I met Campbell. But now that I had him, what need did I have for it?
I didn’t want to work on Wicksteed with Soraya, wonderful as she was.
I wanted to be at the Art Room with Dexter, my place all along.
Are you disappointed? I’d asked Campbell, across the kitchen table from him at his new apartment in Uptown. He’d stood up and brought me with him, both hands bracketing my face.
Nothing about you, he said, could ever disappoint me.
Now, I watch him in the glazed winter light. “He’s a novelist,” I tell Jade.
She lets out a surprised hum from the back seat. Campbell glances over at me, smiling in the shy sort of way he only ever gets about his writing. His fingers tighten around my leg.
“Sloane just texted me her flight’s delayed,” Ava says. “But that’ll get her in closer to when Liz lands, so maybe better for carpooling to the hotel anyway.”
“Perfect,” Jade says. “God, I’m excited.”
I angle between the front seats and smile at them. Ava looks practically relaxed, or as close as she ever comes. When she smiles back at me, I see all of it: the girls we’ve been together, and the lives that stretch ahead of us now—parallel, and intersecting, and anything we choose for them to be.
The Departures bay at O’Hare is packed and chaotic, a Tetris grid of cars coming and going. Campbell slots us into the curb and turns the car off as Jade and Ava climb out of the back. We look at each other over the center console, his hand still on my leg, and he smiles.
When all of our bags are piled on the sidewalk and Jade’s showing Ava a tour of Miami murals on her phone, Campbell closes the trunk. I’m looking at myself reflected in his sunglasses, and push them up into his hair so I can see his eyes.
“Thank you,” I say. He slides his hands through the unzipped line of my coat and tips me back against the car.
“I’ll be here to pick you up on Sunday.”
“Obsessed with me,” I murmur, and Campbell grins.
His cold fingers slip under the hem of my sweater to frame my bare waist, making me shiver in the sharp December air. “Guilty,” he says, quietly, and drops a kiss to my cheek.
“Pancake prefers fresh water twice daily,” I tell him. “And ear scratches only on the right side.”
“I know,” Campbell says as his hands rise slowly up my sides. “I’ve got her, Mattie.”
I curl my fist into the front of his sweatshirt, drawing him closer. “I know. I’m just reminding you what she likes.”
“Well, I like you in one piece.” His thumb feathers over my skin. “So be careful, okay? No surfboards to the face. No persistent men in cowboy hats at bars.”
“What if they’re wearing a really ugly shirt?”
Campbell widens his eyes seriously. “Then stay back at least twenty feet. I know the effect a horrible shirt has on you.”
“Repulsive?” I ask.
“Seductive,” he corrects.
I tug on the drawstring of his sweatshirt. “That rule only applies to you.”
His fingertips snug into my sides, pulling me closer. “Special treatment,” he says, and my hand rises again to hold his face.
Ava’s laughter bursts, bright and sudden, from the sidewalk. I look over—her joy making clouds in the cold air, Jade grinning as she talks—and then back up at Campbell. It’s time to go.
“I love you,” I tell him, and he makes a satisfied sound.
“I love you, too.” Then he dips close and kisses me. “Enormously.”
“Endlessly,” I counter. A scary word, once, but something I’ll risk believing in now.
The hitch of Campbell’s lips tugs an echo in my heart. We can’t know what’s coming, but he loves to hear me dream it.
“Consumingly,” he tells me.
“Mmm,” I hum, and his eyebrows tick at the praise. “Good word.”
Campbell shrugs. “Writer.”
“Best one I know.”
“Only second to you.”
I shake my head, and Campbell laughs. I hear every version of him in it: my adversary at Slater, my rival at Cannes, my fraught competition at Wicksteed. And here, now: just mine.
“All right, Mattie French.” Campbell’s hands on my skin have turned warm, changed—like so much else—by the heat between us. He’s smiling through every word. “Let’s call it a draw.”