Chapter 28
‘So, plan for today: how are we becoming best friends with Victor and Amber?’ Cam said, smearing a mountain of butter onto his toast. An automatic reaction kicked in, and I reached over and passed him the strawberry jam, something I’d done a lot at breakfast at college. He took it and looked at me curiously.
‘Huh. You remembered.’ He twisted the lid off with one strong hand and I had to force myself not to stare as his muscles flexed, running all the way down into his long, perfect fingers.
God, why did he have to be so unfairly sexy?
And I knew I wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
I’d seen the effect he had on other women; I wasn’t blind to it.
Wherever he went, they seemed to buzz around him like moths round a flame, and they didn’t mind getting burned.
I cleared my throat and looked away quickly. ‘Well, it’s hard to forget. I’ve never met anyone who eats only strawberry jam for breakfast. For two solid years.’
‘I take getting my five a day very seriously.’
‘I’m not sure strawberry jam counts as a fruit.’
As I eyed the mountain of sticky red stuff piled onto the poor piece of toast, Cam did something new and I wasn’t sure how I felt about it.
He slathered a chunk of butter on top and then dragged his knife through it and began mixing it into the jam, smearing the concoction back and forth, making it into a speckled, congealed Frankenstein mess.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I asked.
‘It’s my new technique,’ he said with absolute seriousness. ‘You combine the butter and jam.’
He continued desecrating the toast while I sipped my coffee and watched. ‘Well . . . each to their own. Anyway. Back to the plan.’
‘Right. What are you thinking?’
I scrolled through the notes on my iPad, which gave me an excellent overview of just who Victor was.
‘Well, aside from sticking his dick into his masseuse, Victor’s interests include golf, big-game hunting, expensive cigars, collecting rare watches, art and vintage cars, et cetera, et cetera – basically just your normal rich-dude stuff. ’
‘Lucky I’m good at golf then.’
‘You play golf? You?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
‘Yup.’
‘Doesn’t golf take patience and, I don’t know, some level of restraint?’ I couldn’t imagine Cam playing golf. Rugby, yes. I’d seen him run straight into a scrum, like a bull. I’d seen him on a squash court hitting balls like he was trying to break down the walls.
‘I’m not the impetuous young man I used to be,’ he said.
‘Impetuous?’ I asked, raising my eyebrows.
‘I’m also quite fond of reading now too.’
‘Books?’ I asked, shocked.
‘And I do Wordle every day.’
‘Well I never.’ I stared in disbelief at this new version of Cam.
But as he began to nibble his toast like a beaver going to work on a log, making his way round the perimeter then moving inward until he’d created a perfect circle, I realised that while some things had apparently changed, others had stayed very much the same.
‘And what do we know about Amber?’ he asked.
I pulled out my phone and opened Instagram. I’d set up an account in the name of Lily Swanson, since I wasn’t on social media. I pulled up Amber’s page and passed the phone to Cam.
‘Luckily for us, Amber basically lives her entire life on here,’ I said.
He started flipping through the pictures.
‘So basically just your usual,’ I said. ‘Designer fashion, expensive spa treatments, elaborate skincare routines that require ten products with names that all sound like diseases . . . nicyanide or something—’
‘Niacinamide.’
I did a double-take. ‘Sorry . . . what?’
‘And don’t forget the retinol,’ he added with a smile.
‘Oh, I forgot, you also have a ten-step skincare routine,’ I teased.
He peered up at me, blue eyes boring into mine, and I quickly tried to act normal. I was chilled, nonchalant, not someone who’d just had the wind knocked out of them because a man with blue eyes had looked at them across a breakfast table.
‘Told you, I’m a changed man.’ He looked back down at my phone. ‘Smoothie bowls, inspirational quotes – health is wealth – and look . . .’ He held the phone up for me to see. ‘The I-just-woke-up-looking-like-this selfie.’
I leaned in and looked closely at a picture of Amber in bed looking like a million bucks, make-up done, gloss glossing and lashes flapping.
‘No one looks like that when they wake up,’ I said, stabbing sausage and mushroom with my fork and vigorously ploughing the concoction through the runny egg yolk that had just exploded across my plate.
‘I don’t know about that,’ Cam said thoughtfully, almost as if he was talking to himself. ‘I know someone who wakes up looking gorgeous without even trying.’
‘Who?’ I managed through a mouth full of food – too full, obviously, which was evident when a crumb shot out and landed on Cam’s shirt.
He glanced down at it, flicked it off and then looked back up at me and smiled. Slow and meaningful, almost as if . . .
‘Huh?’ I stopped chewing and stared at him. His smile seemed to be growing exponentially. ‘Me?’ I pointed at myself with a finger smeared with tomato sauce.
His smile widened even further.
I rolled my eyes and shook my head. ‘Remember what I said about compliments getting you nowhere.’ I bit into my toast, dismissing his previous nonsense. ‘So basically, everything we need to know about Amber is on social media. She seems to broadcast constantly.’
‘Post,’ Cam said. ‘You post on social media.’ He shot me a teasing smile.
‘Post, broadcast, beam . . . whatever,’ I said, my mouth still full of toast.
Cam burst out laughing, a little too loudly, and I looked around the restaurant. We were supposed to be blending in, not standing out with raucous laughter.
‘Always with Star Trek on the brain,’ he said.
‘Oh please, I don’t always have Star Trek on the brain.’
‘I don’t blame you. I loved Voyager.’
‘Don’t lie.’ I stopped chewing and glared at him. When Cam had found out I ran a Star Trek fan club, I hadn’t heard the end of it. It was one of his favourite things to tease me about. He’d caught me wearing my Star Trek T-shirt once and I’d never lived it down.
‘I get why you like it so much now . . . maintaining moral integrity, standing by your principles. Ethics, right and wrong. The Prime Directive.’
I eyed him suspiciously; he was clearly employing a new tactic now.
A chameleon strategy, the same strategy we were about to adopt with Amber and Victor.
Mimic someone’s interests or moral values and it made them lower their guard.
Pretend to be on their wavelength to make you more attractive to them. Well, I was going to put an end to it.
‘Returning to our original conversation,’ I said pointedly. ‘Like I said, the woman posts everything.’ I emphasised the correct terminology.
‘You sound . . . judgemental.’
‘I’m just saying that Amber’s the kind of person who would probably do a Facebook Live at her own funeral if she could.’
‘No one uses Facebook any more, haven’t you heard?’
‘Apparently not.’ I stabbed some more sausage and put it in my mouth.
‘You still eat exactly the same,’ Cam said, and went back to his strange nibbling.
‘So do you,’ I pointed out. He smiled at me over the edge of his toast, a slow, leisurely smile that reached all the way to his gorgeous eyes and made them .
. . No, no, no, Lizzy! Unwittingly my lips began to twitch.
What the hell? I looked down at my plate again, trying to shield my traitorous mouth.
I cleared my throat and stabbed some more food.
‘As I said, everything we need to know about Amber is on social media, which means all our work has been done for us.’
‘So finally social media is good for something,’ Cam said, and popped the last piece of round toast into his mouth.
‘What do you mean, finally?’ I asked, after he seemed to infuse that word with a lot of meaning and emphasis.
He hesitated for half a second. ‘I mean . . . I may or may not have tried to find your social media. Only to realise that Lizzy Brown is clearly way too cool for social media.’
‘You stalked me?’
‘Stalked has such negative connotations. More like I took a curious look.’
I snorted, slicing into the next yolk and dragging my toast through it. ‘So you curious-looked me on social media?’
‘Only once . . . well, maybe twice. Worst-case scenario four times.’
‘Four times?’
‘Max! Max!’ he said defensively.
‘Why?’
‘Wanted to know what you were up to, see if you were okay.’
‘Why would you want to do that?’
Cam paused, coffee cup hovering mere centimetres from his mouth.
It looked like he’d suddenly turned into a Parisian mime artist. But then, as quickly as he’d paused, he unpaused himself and took a sip.
‘Feelings don’t just fade, Lizzy. We were so much a part of each other’s lives that it was hard to let go of you. Of us.’
‘There was no us, Cam. We were college rivals for two years who happened to have sex one night. That’s it.’ But as I said the words, I knew they weren’t true.
‘You don’t really believe that.’
‘I do,’ I said as dismissively as possible.
‘No you don’t.’
‘Cam!’ I waved my fork angrily. ‘Don’t tell me what I do and don’t mean.’
He eyed me for a while, his features unreadable.
His expression made me nervous. It held the promise of something, I just didn’t know what.
Something was coming. I could feel it. It was in the way he was looking at me, the way he was circling the rim of his cup with his finger, and the way the air around us seemed to be crackling.
‘Come on, Lizzy, we both know we weren’t talking about grappling that night. Your bridge-and-roll has always been perfect, and my ground game is nearly as good as yours, and that’s saying something.’
His words punched me in the gut. The shock of them made me freeze with my fork halfway to my mouth. My brain scrambled for a way out of this, a witty comeback, a retort, something . . . But there was nothing.
I needed to stay calm, in control, despite the fact that that sentence had knocked the wind out of me.
The fork slipped out of my hand and hit the floor with a loud metallic clang.
‘Shit!’ I quickly ducked under the table to grab it – too fast – bashing my head on the underside as I came up.
I rubbed it hard to get rid of the throbbing, stinging sensation radiating outwards from the impact site.
‘You okay?’
‘I’m great,’ I said, shooting to my feet. ‘I have to go anyway. I have a thing . . . spa thing, with Amber now, in the spa.’
My composure was slipping with each syllable. I felt like I was being sucked through some emotional wormhole and pulled backwards in time. It was suddenly six years ago, and I was lying in his arms desperately wanting him to tell me he loved me so I could say it right back to him.
‘I’m going,’ I said. It was terrifying how intensely I could still feel it all, even after so many years.
The feelings had not been dulled by time; they were just as bright as they’d ever been.
Or maybe, like in some episode of Star Trek, I’d never actually left that moment.
Some version of myself had always been living in it in a parallel universe.
I turned sharply and started walking for the door, but halfway there, I realised I was still clutching the fork.
I made to go back to the table, but when I saw the look on Cam’s face – he was watching me intently, elbows on table, face in hands, stupid smile plastered across his features – I knew I wasn’t going near it.
‘Here, you dropped this,’ I said, dumping the fork on someone else’s table before power-marching out of the restaurant as if my life depended on it.
It kind of did.
A chink in her armour. The way her composure slipped.
I hadn’t seen her this rattled in years. She never let people see her like this. I’d only glimpsed it once before, when she thought no one was looking. When she went to the bathroom after she’d broken my finger.
She didn’t know I’d seen her. I would never tell her either.
And yet here she was, rattled again. And if she was rattled, that meant I was getting to her . . . which meant maybe I still had a chance.