One and Only(20)

She shook her head through another yawn. “I will not abandon you,” she declared with a vehemence that was awfully cute as she opened her eyes comically wide. “You should stop and get yourself some coffee.”

“I will if I need to.” He didn’t tell her that thinking about their kiss was having a…wakeful effect on him—or at least on certain parts of him.

She cracked her window. “Do you mind? I think it will help keep me awake.”

“Not at all,” he said, appreciating the cool air as she let loose yet another enormous yawn. He smiled. He was pretty sure nothing was keeping Jane awake, despite her noble intentions.

As predicted, it wasn’t five minutes before she was fast asleep, her head lolling back and against the passenger-side window, which drew his attention to her long, graceful neck. He’d never thought of necks as particularly sexy before, but apparently there was a first time for everything.

Alicia used to fall asleep in his car sometimes, too, back in Thunder Bay. When he’d turned sixteen and gotten his license and scraped together enough to buy a beat-up Chevy, the freedom had been intoxicating. They would hit McDonald’s and then drive and drive through the night, talking about everything, until they’d pull over behind Our Lady of Charity school, which abutted a big park, and lose themselves in each other. Later, on their way home, Alicia would fall asleep.

To his mind, sleeping in the presence of someone who was awake was to make yourself vulnerable. And to do it when the other person was driving, shepherding your unconscious body through space at high speeds, struck him as the ultimate act of trust. When Alicia fell asleep in his car, he always had to remind himself to watch the road and not her. It had been so intoxicating, the idea that she was his. That someone had chosen to give herself to him, the loser kid from the trailer park who was perpetually on the verge of flunking out of school.

Of course she hadn’t really. Or at least not exclusively to him. What an idiot he had been. He’d thought it was true love. And when she’d announced she was pregnant, after he’d gotten over the initial panic, he’d dropped out of school, tripled his shifts at the hardware store, and bought her a shitty cubic zirconia engagement ring, promising to exchange it for a real diamond later when they were in a better financial position.

When he thought about what happened next, the familiar shame rose in his chest. It never went away. It’s not yours, she’d said, tears streaking down her face. I wish it was.

The stupid thing was, he’d kind of loved that baby anyway. Which was impossible because not only was it not a baby yet but a mere mass of cells, it apparently wasn’t even his mass of cells. He could see now that she’d done him a favor by not taking him up on his offer to claim the baby regardless of its parentage. That by letting her parents hustle her out of town, he’d dodged a bullet.

But all that logic didn’t matter, not really, because the shame and heartbreak that had come rushing in to fill the void after Alicia left had turned him into a fucking idiot bent on living down to the expectations everyone had of him. What kind of guy knocks up his sixteen-year-old girlfriend and doesn’t do the right thing by her? He was simultaneously so heartbroken and so angry at himself for trusting her in the first place that he hadn’t even bothered correcting the record when the rumors started swirling. Even if they weren’t right about that particular situation, they were right in general, weren’t they? So he’d resisted his mother’s attempts to get him to go back to high school, moved out of her trailer and into his own, and became the person everyone thought he was.

He sighed, dragging himself out of the past. Despite the sour memories, when he thought back to Alicia sleeping in his car, it made him happy. It was the best part of those nights.

Christie, on the other hand, had been a night owl, so there had been no sleeping in cars for her.

And anyway, he was pretty sure Christie hadn’t trusted him. He had been faithful to her on both tours, but again, his reputation had not worked in his favor. And he had been using her, in a way. Her and the army. Their whirlwind romance had begun a month before his first deployment. When he’d asked her to write to him, he hadn’t been totally honest with her. He hadn’t told her that she was going to help save him. That there was the old Cam and the new Cam and that he, having finally decided to man the fuck up and make something of his life, was in transition between them. He had drawn a line in the sand. On one side of it was the delinquent high school dropout. On the other was a man with an honorable job and—he hoped—a steady girlfriend.

Neither of which, it turned out, he’d been able to hold on to. You couldn’t escape your destiny, apparently. No matter how hard he’d tried to get away from Old Cam, that bastard just kept coming back.

Jane must have sensed the shift in the car’s rhythm as he pulled off the highway, because she opened her eyes and stretched. Then she really woke up and sat up straight, only to find herself restrained by her seat belt. “Oh my God, I did fall asleep. I’m sorry.”

He laughed. It reminded him of when she ate something and only belatedly remembered her campaign to lose weight. In some ways, Jane seemed to be at war with herself, subsuming her real desires beneath a set of behaviors she prescribed for herself. The juxtaposition was amusing.

“No worries.” He pulled up in front of her house. She lived in a neighborhood that was mostly home to three-story Victorians, but her house was a tiny one-story cottage with a peaked gable. It looked like the runt of the litter. It was cute and tidy and homey—the opposite of Jay’s imposing luxury high-rise. A wall of exhaustion hit him at the prospect of going back to his brother’s downtown. It was only eleven. He might have to kill some time to make sure he didn’t cross paths with Jay. Cam wasn’t sure he had it in him tonight to deal with his brother.

“God, you must be so tired,” Jane said.

Oh shit. He hadn’t even realized that he’d let his head fall forward onto the top of the steering wheel. He sat up straight and shook it, as if he could shake some sense into himself. “I’m okay. It’s not that late.”

“No,” said Jane, tilting her head. It was too dark to see her eyes properly, but he could imagine them narrowing as she contemplated him. “I mean, you must be, like, existentially tired. You’ve been at war, for heaven’s sake. And now you’re thrust back into this family wedding where the bride—and God bless her, I adore her—is becoming a little unhinged and, well…” She trailed off.

Probably he should say something, assure her that he was fine. But the sudden display of what seemed like genuine sympathy—sympathy that wasn’t tinged with pity—had robbed him of his ability to speak.

She shook her head and unbuckled her seat belt. “I don’t know what I’m talking about. Ignore me.”

“Yes,” he said, finding his voice, because suddenly he didn’t want her to get out of the car. Not yet. “I hadn’t really thought of it like that, but you’re right. I’m pretty fucking wrecked. Like, elementally. And I just…” He trailed off. It was one thing to agree with her, another to turn her into his shrink.

“You just what?” she prodded.

His head found its way back to the steering wheel. He simply could not keep it upright anymore. “I don’t want to go home and deal with my brother. I probably owe him an apology. But it’s all so goddamned exhausting.”

“Then don’t go home. I have a guest bed in my office. You can crash here.”

His head popped back up. He was turning into a fucking marionette. Which was an uncomfortable thought, because if he was the puppet, who was pulling the strings here? But that question faded in favor of a more astonishing one: Was she propositioning him? Because that was generally what was going on when you spent a day with someone that included a wicked make-out session and delivered them home only to be invited in. But she’d said, “guest bed.” And Jane wasn’t like everyone else. Maybe she truly was worried about his existential exhaustion. She was a good enough person that he wouldn’t discount the possibility. Unsure how to respond, he fell back on his usual methods. “I know what’s going on here,” he said, teasing, but kind of not. “This works in your favor doesn’t it? If I’m underfoot, it helps with the babysitting mission.”

“I’m not babysitting you,” she said, and he mouthed the words along with her, which made her purse her lips in annoyance. But then she cracked a smile and said, “Suit yourself,” and got out of the car.

He got out of the car, too.





“You don’t need to remake the bed,” Cameron said as Jane threw back the covers on the daybed in her office.

She tossed the cushions that sofa-fied the bed by day onto the floor, and said, “Yes, I do. I nap here a lot when I’m working.”

“So? You don’t have cooties, do you?”

Ignoring him, she stripped the sheets. Not furnishing a guest with fresh linens offended her sense of order. Jane was surprised that Cameron had taken her up on her invitation to stay. She was surprised at herself, too, for offering. It was just that she felt…sorry for him wasn’t really the right phrase. Cameron was not the sort of man who invited pity.