One and Only(31)

“Hey.”

This “hey” came from someone else. It was Wendy, coming up the sidewalk and, thankfully, saving him from having to account for his ill-considered home improvement frenzy.

Jane squealed in delight and blew her friend a kiss as she approached, which Wendy mimed plucking out of the air and pressing to her heart. “What are you doing here?”

Wendy’s eyes darted between Jane and him, then narrowed. “You weren’t answering my texts, so I thought I’d be all impulsive and just pop by, see how Comicon went.”

“Yeah,” Jane said. “My phone ran out of juice. I was trying to record so much of the conference that it died.”

Wendy held up a white box. “I bought pastries.”

Jane grinned. “Come in—both of you.”

“I should go,” Cam said. This was good. Wendy’s appearance had given him the perfect opportunity to retreat. To recalibrate. He should have just gotten up and left this morning. But okay, no harm done. Probably. He just needed to step back and play it cool. Cooler than becoming her own personal manservant, anyway. Maybe there was a way he and Jane could continue to get it on, but it would have to be because she initiated it with a full understanding of the circumstances—not because he was going all in with the domestic shit. So from now on, he was taking his cues from her.

“Oh, okay,” Jane said.

He was a bit disappointed that she didn’t try to object. That she didn’t seem even a little bit sad to say good-bye.

Which was a problem.

He cleared his throat. “All right, then. I’ll see you two soon, I’m sure.” He thought about telling Jane that she shouldn’t use her bathtub until the next day on account of the still-drying caulk, but Wendy was looking at him strangely, so he decided to save it for a text.

Xena waved at him, then went inside to eat pastries with Wendy instead of eggs Benedict with him.

It was for the best.





“What was Cameron doing here?” Wendy asked as she sat at Jane’s table and opened the bakery box.

“He was doing some yard work for me.”

That was true. Apparently.

She had no idea why it was true, but he had clearly beaten her tiny slice of overgrown paradise into submission—something she’d been meaning to get around to for ages.

“Cameron likes to be useful,” she tried to explain, the thought striking her as absolutely true the moment she put it to words. “He likes to—”

“Let’s play a game,” Wendy interrupted. “Let’s see how long we can go without talking about the wedding.”

“Oh, okay,” Jane said. “I—”

“Or its obnoxious guests.”

“All right,” Jane said, forcing herself not to give into her impulse to defend Cameron. It wasn’t like she was dating him. Her reputation and his weren’t intertwined.

She stuck her phone in the charger-stereo she had set up on a kitchen counter and futzed with it for a minute, scanning through playlists to give herself a second to adjust to the loss of Cameron. He’d left so…suddenly.

“Where’s your next trip gonna be?” Jane asked, reaching for a topic Wendy would warm to. Her friend was a devoted traveler, often jetting off to exotic places on short notice. Jane admired that. She didn’t have the independent spirit Wendy did.

“That’s why I’m here.” She dumped a bunch of brochures out of her purse. “I think we need a recovery trip.”

“A recovery trip?” Jane echoed.

“From the wedding, which I am heretofore officially calling ‘the w-word.’ It’ll be just you and me. Somewhere far away. Somewhere with no job list.”

Jane grinned and joined her friend at the table. That sounded awesome. “Sign me up.”

Wendy picked up Jane’s phone and silenced it as she shot Jane a look of disgust. She and Wendy had wildly divergent taste in music.

“Hey! Josh Groban is a genius.”

“So,” said Wendy, ignoring Jane’s defense of her beloved baritone. “I know you don’t really do adventure-type stuff, so I was thinking your basic beach resort—”

“I do adventure,” Jane protested.

Wendy looked up from the pile of pastries and papers, confused. “Not in real life.”

“What?”

“You do adventure in your books, and at your conventions, but not in reality.” She held up a hand to stop Jane’s further protest. “That came out wrong. I only meant that you’re cautious. Smart.” Jane opened her mouth, and another hand came up. “Look, it’s not an insult. It’s why we met, right? We’re the overly serious outsiders. The Lost Girls.”

Jane couldn’t help but smile at that. Jane and Wendy had become close, as kids, because both their dads had died. They called themselves the Lost Girls. Everyone knew the Wendy character from the Peter Pan books, but most people didn’t realize that, in one of the Disney films, Wendy had gone on to have a daughter named Jane, who had her own adventures with Peter. Jane and Wendy read the books and watched the movies with the single-minded devotion that only pre-teen girls are capable of, lionizing the stories’ qualities of adventurousness and fearlessness. In fact, it was a few tween Peter Pan–themed Halloweens that had ignited Jane’s interest in cosplay.

“The Dead Dads Club,” Jane said with a sad smile, referencing another phrase they’d come up with to describe their relationship back in the day.

“Right,” said Wendy with her characteristic lack of sentimentality. “Your dead dad made you cautious. Mine made me all carpe diem-ey.”

It was sort of true, though it stung to hear it stated so baldly. After the car accident that killed Jane’s father—after the car accident that she could have prevented—Jane had made a conscious decision never to rock the boat, to make life as easy as possible for her mom and brother by getting good grades, being helpful, and never getting into trouble. She hadn’t thought that necessarily translated into a cautious life devoid of adventure, but maybe Wendy had a point.

Of course, Wendy didn’t know that in the last three days Jane had hung off the CN Tower, gone through a haunted house, made out by a waterfall, and had meaningless sex—all with the “obnoxious wedding guest” whose name they weren’t supposed to mention.

And she wasn’t going to know about it, either. It felt weird, not telling Wendy something, but since her thing with Cameron wasn’t an actual relationship, why set herself up for the interrogation that would follow if she confessed? “Okay, so beach. When?” She went back to her phone and opened the calendar app.

“The week of June twentieth,” Wendy said.

“I can’t,” Jane said, smiling at the entry in her calendar. “My brother is coming that weekend.” God, she missed him. He’d raised her, basically, because after their dad died their mom had been pretty much useless. And all that boat-not-rocking she’d done in her youth had made the siblings extra close. He was like her father, her brother, and her non-Wendy best friend all rolled into one.

“Your brother is coming later this month?” Wendy said, looking slightly alarmed.

Jane cocked her head, trying to figure out what that was about. “Yeah. He’s winding up a trial, so he booked off some time to come see Mom and me. So can we do the beach trip the next week?”

“No,” Wendy said quickly. “I can only go away that week.”

“Well, you’re going to have to count me out, then. I haven’t seen Noah since Christmas. I’m planning to work on him some more to try to get him to move home.”

Her brother was a prosecutor in New York and was always saying that he needed to stay there because the Big Apple was “the pinnacle of both law and urban life,” whatever that meant. He definitely did okay. Jane knew because he kept trying to send her money. She’d taken to e-mailing him her royalty statements to prove that she was fine, financially. “There’s got to be prosecution jobs in Toronto, though, no?” Jane said, thinking out loud. “How different can it be? His degrees are from the U.S., but there must be some way to qualify to practice here.”

“You should leave him alone,” Wendy said. “Let him do his New York thing. He’s obviously happy there.”

“I knew you were both going to become lawyers,” Jane said, reaching for a pastry. “You’re so similar in some ways. It’s too bad you’ll miss him if you’re away while he’s here.”

“Yeah,” Wendy said. “Bummer.”

“Damn!” Jane dropped her croissant. “I can’t eat this.” She spread her hands and looked at the ceiling as if maybe there was a deity up there she could appeal to for the quick loss of ten pounds. “I’m never going to fit into my—”

“Don’t say it!” Wendy shouted. “Throw the pastries in the trash for all I care, but no w-word talk!”

Jane grinned. For some reason she thought of Cameron saying, “Jane, you are as sexy as they come, so shut the hell up.”

She ate the croissant.





Chapter Fourteen

MONDAY—FIVE DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING



Cam texted Jane the next morning. They were moving to the rural wedding site on Wednesday, so he had two empty days ahead of him. He had done everything on his list except smoke a joint, and, really, he’d added that item because he could. Pot wasn’t really his style. At least as an adult—he’d smoked enough of it as a kid to last a lifetime.