One and Only(39)

She appreciated that Cameron didn’t say anything. He simply sat there next to her, listening without judgment. She held on to his hand like he was a life raft and let the next sentence rush out of her mouth before she could swallow it back. “I heard him leave. I heard him close the front door and start the car. I did nothing. He drove off and crashed into a giant tree and died.”

“Oh, sweetheart.”

She could tell there was more coming, and she didn’t want it. She turned to him for the first time since she’d started her sad tale, and, yes, there was sympathy in his eyes. Pity even. Not acceptable. So she tugged her hand from his grasp and held it up to him, palm open. “Don’t try to tell me it’s not my fault. If I had done my usual caretaking thing, my dad would still be alive today.”

To his credit, Cameron didn’t say what she expected, which was some variation on “it’s not your fault.” Or “he was the addict.” He merely nodded, not like he was agreeing with her necessarily, but like he was hearing her and wasn’t going to contradict her.

So she took a deep breath and confessed the rest. “The worst part is that my big decision to stop enabling him was selfish. I wasn’t doing it because I wanted him to get better, to stop drinking. It was entirely self-interested. I simply didn’t want to deal with him anymore.”

She took a shaky breath. It was out. It was kind of anticlimactic, but it was still a huge relief. She had considered confessing, but to whom? It would have destroyed her mother. Her brother was too busy keeping them together. And later, with some distance from the situation, she’d thought about telling the girls. But they would have tried to talk her out of feeling the way she felt, and the way she felt was part of her. It had shaped everything that had come afterward.

But as relieved as she felt to have told someone, now she needed a way to figure out how to get things back to normal with Cameron. Because she didn’t want to talk anymore. Later, she’d have to examine what it meant that she’d told her deepest secret. Later.

“You haven’t asked about the sleeve,” Cameron said.

“Huh?” What was he talking about?

He laid his tattooed arm on the counter between them. “You asked about the others, but not the sleeve.”

Jane’s breath caught a little. God bless him; he was giving her exactly what she had been silently wishing for—a return to normalcy. He knew somehow, and he was turning the conversation back to him, trying to draw her pain onto him.

She smiled, overwhelmed with emotion because at that moment, it felt like the nicest thing anyone had ever done for her. It took a few seconds for her to find her voice. “Right, so, Cameron, what’s the deal with the sleeve?”

He rotated his arm back and forth, showing off the swirling mixture of trees and flowers and stylized waves and stars. “It doesn’t mean anything.” He grinned. “It’s just generalized badassery.” Then he shoved the rest of his grilled cheese into his mouth.

“I don’t know,” she said, picking up her own abandoned sandwich even as she took the cue he was so generously handing her. “I don’t know how badass flowers are. You should have gotten a Terminator arm or, like, naked ladies and AK-47s.”

He put his hands on his hips in mock outrage. “Are you impugning my manhood?”

She shook her head. “Oh, no. I would never do that. I’ve seen your manhood.”

He swatted her butt playfully. “Yeah, well, finish your sandwich, because you’re about to do more than see it.”





Chapter Seventeen

TUESDAY—FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING



Some guys had a thing about sleeping with a woman after sex. If it was just a hookup, they wanted out as soon as the main event was over. Cam never saw the big deal. After sex, he was tired. And if he was in a warm bed with a soft woman, the path of least resistance was to stay there. So he had done his share of sleepovers, in the era between Alicia and Christie. Guys were always like, “But, dude, you gotta manage her expectations. You gotta get out of there.”

Cam’s take was that he was going to get out of there—the next morning. You could communicate a lot with the way you left a situation, so what did it matter if you left in the middle of the night or waited until the sun came up? Women weren’t stupid—at least not any stupider than men—and when you left before breakfast, issuing a vague “I’ll text you,” everyone knew what it meant.

So, yeah, he was fine with the sleepover in theory. This particular sleepover, though, was giving him some trouble. Namely, he wasn’t actually sleeping. Usually he fell into a sated sleep after sex. The military shrink he’d seen after his first deployment had been forever asking him about nightmares, trouble sleeping, racing thoughts at night. No, no, and no. He’d always figured he was lucky that way. He was definitely fucked up from watching his brothers blown to bits, but it didn’t invade his daily life too much. It manifested itself only in particular surroundings—usually in wide-open spaces where he felt like the enemy could come from anywhere.

But tonight. Jane. With her gentle questioning, it was like she had opened a box that had been hidden deep inside his chest, one he had gotten so used to it had become like furniture, something to be walked around but not, fundamentally, of any concern. Mostly, he avoided talking about his tattoos. Or, when people pushed him, he gave some kind of bullshit answer. It was easy. People expected him to have tattoos. He was that kind of guy. They didn’t expect him to have a big emotional story behind them.

God. The idea that Mrs. Compton had planted all those years ago. That he was more than what he’d done. That maybe his fucked-up-ness could be temporary. That he could get back into heaven. He hadn’t done anything with it then. Had continued doing his thing—working just enough to not get fired, sleeping around, partying.

But then Jay had come back for a visit, a few years after Alicia’s family had left town and Cam had quit school, and suggested Cam consider the military. Cam hadn’t done anything with the advice just then—except reject it—but underneath Cam’s defensive dismissals that day, the idea lurked. The image of himself in another place, somewhere halfway around the world where nobody knew him. Where they might be able to teach him how to do something important. He owed Jay a lot. It had taken balls to come home and initiate “the chat.” Cam had been so angry then, so utterly unable to see beyond his own misery. “What are you waiting for?” Jay had asked, his tone not angry but also not kind. “Are you waiting for your father to come back?” When Cam had scoffed—perhaps a little too hard—at that, he’d followed with, “Are you waiting to die? Because that’s about all I can see that’s going on here.”

No, Cam had said, and he’d meant it. He wasn’t suicidal. But Jay’s words had staying power. They rattled around inside him over the next few years. They made him wonder about the difference between being actively suicidal and just sitting around taking up space, passing the time until death arrived.

What was he waiting for?

On his twenty-second birthday, while blowing out the candle on a cupcake his mom had brought over to his trailer—his trailer that had been such a falling-down disaster that it had embarrassed even him—the answer had come into his brain fully formed, and it had shocked the hell out of him. He wasn’t waiting to die; he was waiting for everyone to give up. His mom and Jay, specifically. Because they were the only ones who hadn’t. They were the only ones left who loved him—hell, who tolerated him at all. Even Mrs. Compton had died by then, and her kids had come over and cleaned out her trailer and sold it.

Once Jay and Mom stopped tolerating him—as he knew in his heart they would one day—he would be alone. So he was practicing. Or trying to encourage them to get on with it, like pulling off a Band-Aid quickly rather than drawing it out.

But what if Mrs. Compton, and later, Jay, had been right? What if he could reverse direction? Stop the free fall?

And so it had begun. His Hail Mary pass. And for a while, it seemed like it was working. Basic training kicked his ass, but he stuck it out. His first tour had been a success. Yes, it came with PTSD as a door prize, but he’d actually been good at being a soldier. Not that he had any particular skills, but he flattered himself that he was strong and loyal. A good grunt.

And Christie. The unlikely girl he’d met a little before that first deployment. She’d written to him. He came to depend on those letters, to live for them. He loved being a soldier, but he also loved fantasizing about being normal. At home. What if I wrote her back? He thought to himself, amazed, after her first letter arrived, even though he had been the one who’d suggested they correspond. And then when he did and the second one came, he thought, what if I wrote her back again?

The army and Christie saved him. The army made his body and mind strong, and the deployment gave him space. A do-over.

A life where he could get back into heaven, or at least some reasonable facsimile of it.

But no. He’d done nothing but fall again, and landed squarely on his ass, embarrassed as hell that he’d ever been so naive as to think he could escape his destiny.