One and Only(18)

When they reached the edge, he propped his elbows on the rail, but he didn’t drop her hand. It had the effect of tucking her close to his side. He stared at the falls with the same intense concentration as before. The water was louder here, more forceful, and it demanded one’s attention.

After a few minutes, he said, “My shrink used to make me do this meditation exercise. I was supposed to visualize a waterfall. It was supposed to wash away pent-up…shit.”

It had seemed initially like he was going to say something more specific than “shit,” but she didn’t press him, asking instead, “Did it work?”

“Nope.” He dipped his head at the falls. “But, hell, I’m thinking now that maybe I was imagining the wrong kind of waterfall. I was thinking more Snow-White-cavorts-in-the-woods-and-stumbles-across-a-gentle-woodland-waterfall kind of scenario.”

“But this isn’t that,” Jane said, nodding her understanding even though he wasn’t looking at her. “This is pure, unstoppable power.” It was easy to get distracted by the hordes of tourists, by the cheesy haunted houses and other schlock in town, but truly, the raw force of the falls was something to behold.

It was his turn to nod. “Exactly.”

“Maybe you haven’t been doing it long enough?” Probably nothing she could say would be helpful, but she found herself wanting to try. “You’ve only been back, what? A week?”

His attention was back on the falls. “Nah, the, ah…PTSD is from my first tour—from Afghanistan. So I’ve been doing this visualization shit for almost two years now.”

“Oh. I see.” She didn’t miss that he had trouble even saying “PTSD.”

“I don’t have it so bad, really. Not as bad as some guys. No nightmares or flashbacks.”

“So what…happens?”

“I have trouble when I’m in settings that remind me of the…incident.”

She wanted more than anything to ask about “the incident,” but she was counting herself lucky that he was saying as much as he was. She had a feeling he didn’t do that, and he hardly knew her.

“But usually the landscapes have to be the same,” he went on. “Wide open spaces, sunshine—something that mimics the desert. So I didn’t even think. I mean, that was a dark, enclosed space. I was fine until…” He swiveled his head to look at her. “Until something snatched you away from me.”

She started to apologize but stopped, knowing that he’d wave it away, say it wasn’t her fault. He’d be right, technically. But she felt terrible anyway.

He shook his head. “Anyway, I thought I was over it. I haven’t really had a triggering event for the better part of a year, even on my second tour.”

“Well, that’s…good I guess?”

“Of course, they say that some of the other symptoms are difficulty maintaining relationships, reckless behavior, and numbness.” He huffed a bitter laugh. “I told them, hell, that’s not PTSD; that’s just me.”

She squeezed his hand. He must have forgotten he was still holding it, because he looked down as if he were startled. But then a slow smile blossomed on his face, as if the surprise were a pleasant one.

“I gotta say, Jane, as babysitters go, you’re not half bad.”

“I’m not babysitting you!” she said, even though she knew he didn’t believe her. The strange thing was, for the first time, she did. Sure, she was here because Elise had deemed supervising Cameron necessary, but she was having…well, fun was too insufficient a word.

Something had started loosening in her chest since she’d met Cameron. It was as if there was an icebreaker in there, churning up big solid masses she hadn’t even realized were there. And, God, it was so much easier to breathe once there wasn’t an iceberg in your chest anymore.

But there was no way to put that into words, so she tugged on the hand that still held hers and said, “Come on. There’s lots more to see.”

They dropped hands as they made their way into the network of tunnels that ran behind the falls. There was no danger of falling and so no reason to keep up the contact. It made Jane realize that she hadn’t held hands with anyone since Felix. It wasn’t something she missed. Or it hadn’t been until now.

She busied herself reading the signs on the walls of the tunnel. There were a lot of them, but she hated going past interpretive signs without stopping. She liked to know what was happening, and she didn’t care if it made her a nerd.

Cameron would hover nearby, listening to her read sections, and then he’d wander off, poking down another tunnel or into another lookout nook. But he always circled back to her.

Until, all of a sudden, he didn’t. She looked up from a plaque about some of the thrill seekers who’d gone over the falls in barrels or other assorted containers, to find herself surrounded by people. A huge group of them, in fact, and they were all speaking Japanese. She let herself be swept along with them, keeping her eyes peeled for Cameron.

Ah! There he was! The tunnels were interrupted from time to time by cutaways that opened onto the back of the falls. The crowd shuffled along the tunnels and then jostled to try to squeeze into the small nooks where there were views to be had.

Cameron hadn’t put up his hood. She supposed he didn’t have enough hair to worry about it getting wet. So his almost-black hair stood out among the crowd of yellow-hooded tourists. Once again, he was leaning on the railing and staring at the rushing water. There must have been water flowing in what had been the frozen sea of her chest, too, because all of a sudden she was suffused with emotion toward him. It felt like…respect? She considered what she knew about Cameron from Elise’s warnings: he was reckless, impulsive, dangerous. Then she thought about what she knew about him from direct experience: he was reckless, impulsive, dangerous.

Well, yes, but that wasn’t all he was. She remembered him holding car doors for her, taking her hand on the slippery pavement. Not abandoning her when she was drunk at Bar Nine and she’d ruined his evening. Knowing who Xena: Warrior Princess was. Carrying her through the haunted house. Staring at the waterfall as if his life depended on it.

And, most of all, she thought of that tattooed arm. Slung over her body as she slept at Jay’s.

The crowd changed direction, moving on to the next thing, and, jarred from her reverie, Jane had to plant her feet not to be swept along with them.

“Cameron!” she called, laughing because she was like a salmon swimming against the current.

He turned, though she was amazed he’d heard her over the rushing of the water and the chattering of the selfie-taking tourists. Once he realized what was happening, he laughed, too, and tried to make his way to her, but he was as stymied as she was.

She waved as she was carried away by the receding tide of tourists. He flashed that Listerine grin at her and followed as best he could, but the distance between them was maintained, kept consistent by the wall of bodies between them. She had a feeling that he could part the crowd if he really wanted to, but it was like he was a giant surrounded by peasants that he good-naturedly tolerated. He was content for them to float along, though she knew somehow that he wouldn’t let her out of his sight.

As they shuffled along in slow motion, keeping eye contact, it occurred to her that what was happening was actually kind of sexy. If you went for that sort of thing. Which she normally didn’t, but…the way he just calmly kept his eyes on her. He was laughing, but he was also insistent. He wasn’t going to let her go. They couldn’t reach each other, but it was like they were connected by an invisible thread he wasn’t going to allow to snap.

They had drifted to the next cutout in the tunnels, and it was on his side. He turned, and, seeing that there was another lookout that would afford them a view of the falls, he beckoned. His face changed—the smile disappeared. But it wasn’t as if he was angry, more like the giant had decided to stop tolerating the mortals.

He was bracketed by the opening, almost like he was standing inside a picture frame, except the background, instead of being a flat, generic blue or a fake library, was a living, breathing curtain of falling water. The water he was supposed to imagine had the power to wash away his fears.

The water that could wash away hers?

There was a question she’d been asking herself a lot in recent weeks: What would the bride do? She asked herself a more relevant one now: What would Xena do?

He was backing up into the nook, into the picture frame, seemingly into the waterfall itself. Was there such a thing as a male siren? Because suddenly, she started pushing back against the crowd. It was very unlike her, to shove and elbow people out of the way. She didn’t even say “excuse me,” allowed no Canadian “sorrys” to pass her lips.

The closer she got to the waterfall—the closer she got to Cameron—the more deafening the rush of water became.

It made it easier to block things out: the crowd, her pounding heart.

Her fear.

It made it easier to do what she wanted, which was to walk up and kiss him.





Despite his reputation, Cam hadn’t kissed anyone for five months. And he hadn’t kissed anyone but Christie for years. His last kiss had been as he set out for his most recent tour, when she kissed him good-bye at the airport in Thunder Bay.