One and Only(7)

“I suppose that’s also on the list?”

“Hey,” he said, “I’m single, young, and back on Canadian soil.” He wasn’t going to apologize.

She said nothing, simply stood there staring at him. He turned on the TV. When, after he’d flipped channels for a minute or so she still didn’t move, merely kept standing there with her silent judgment, he said, “You’re dismissed, Jane.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Your babysitting services are no longer needed. You can go back to your cloudless cave.”

“I’m not babysitting you,” she said.

“So you keep saying.”

And eff him if she didn’t then turn around, and without a word, walk out of the condo.





“You just left him?”

Jane had to hold the phone away from her ear to buffer Elise’s shrieking. It was hard to explain. What could she say? That Cameron was like a little brother who knew how to push all her buttons, but also not a little brother because many of those buttons, it turned out, were sexual? She settled for, “He was an ass.”

“I know he’s an ass. That’s the whole point.”

“How did the tea sets turn out?” Jane asked weakly. It was way too late to ask the real tea-set-related question, which was what the hell are they for?

There was a beat of silence. “The tea sets are fine.”

“Elise, I’m sorry, I—”

“I gave you one job.” Elise’s voice had grown small. “I asked you to do this one thing for me.”

“The wedding isn’t until a week from Saturday, and it’s not even in the city. What can Cameron possibly do on a random Wednesday night 125 miles and a week and a half away from your wedding that will have an impact on it?” She wasn’t sure why she was arguing, because Elise’s basic point was undeniable. Jane had fallen down on the job. But she felt compelled to try to talk some sense into her friend. “He’s out by himself and doesn’t know anyone who knows you.” Unless he accidentally picks up one of Elise’s friends as he crosses items off his stupid list. Elise and Jay had a lot of friends in the building and in the neighborhood. And what if one of those friends hooked up with him and then they met again at the wedding?

Or what if Cameron hooked up with one of Jay and Elise’s married friends who was cheating on her husband, and then they met again at the wedding and the husband tried to kick Cameron’s ass and there was a massive brawl?

And what if, in the course of said massive brawl, they knocked over some candles and burned the wedding down? After all, Cameron was an arsonist, wasn’t he?

Jane would be the first to admit that she had an overactive imagination. It was a job hazard. But crap. She believed in the butterfly effect—a seemingly small action could have huge consequences down the line. And she wasn’t convinced that Cameron was capable of “small actions.” So, yeah, the more she thought about it, the less she could blame Elise’s demands about babysitting Cameron on her bridezilla-itis.

Elise was unmoved by Jane’s logic. “Jay’s mom called. Jay told her Cameron had arrived safely but had to make bullshit excuses as to why he wasn’t answering his phone,” Elise said. “She hasn’t seen him for five months, and he can’t pick up the phone when she calls?”

His poor mother. “She must be so proud of him,” Jane said, noting that she’d said the same thing to Cameron. Why did she care so much whether Cameron’s mother was proud of him? “You know, being the war hero and all.”

“I’m not sure hero is the right word,” Elise said. “There’s something funny about his discharge. He won’t talk about it. But no one was expecting him back this early.”

“Dishonorable discharge?” Jane had no idea what a person had to do to be dishonorably discharged from the armed forces, but whatever it took, she wouldn’t put it past Cameron.

“Apparently we know that phrase from American movies. They call it ‘released from service’ here. And there are all kinds of degrees of that. But the point is Jay is pretty sure he left under shady circumstances. There was some kind of…proceeding overseas, and all of a sudden he’s back and he’s not in the army anymore.”

Jane thought of Cameron playing the war hero card with the poodle waitress at lunch. What a complete cad.

“Anyway,” Elise went on, “the point is, this guy is a wild card and—”

She stopped abruptly, as if censoring herself, but Jane heard what had gone unsaid. You let him get away.

“I’ll take care of it,” Jane said, getting out of bed where she’d been writing on her laptop—her poor, doomed book clearly wasn’t going to see any action until this wedding was over—and heading for her closet. She stripped off her pj bottoms and grabbed a drapey silk shirt—one of her “dressy” tees.

“How? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to find that mofo and have him microchipped.”

“But how are you going to find him?” Elise wailed. “He could be anywhere.”

“Don’t worry about a thing, sweetie.” Jane slipped into a pair of hot pink flats. “I messed up, but I am on it now. On. It.”

Time to do a little rewriting of this whole Cameron story. Time to do a little rewriting of this whole Cameron character, in fact.





She found him four blocks from Jay’s building. After he wasn’t in the Fox and the Fiddle, the Raving Lunatic (though that would have been poetic justice), Bar Benjamin, or Zelda’s Big Gay Bar (she knew he wouldn’t be there, but she was nothing if not systematic, and since she’d decided to go into every bar she passed, she wasn’t going to skip it), she started to fear that he had gone downtown to an actual club. She wasn’t dressed for that, and she was too old for nightclubs. Hell, she’d been born too old for nightclubs. But bar number five, which, ironically, was called Bar Nine, was the jackpot. Or the booby prize, depending on your perspective.

He was sitting at the bar, leaning in toward a woman with long blond hair. Their heads nearly touched, like they were looking at something on the bar.

All right, children, Mary Poppins has arrived. Game on.

Except…She was unaccountably nervous. Clammy-hands, dry-mouth nervous. Which was stupid. She’d never gotten nervous when she’d been a teenager babysitting actual children. Maybe she needed a drink first. After her dad’s accident, she mostly avoided alcohol, but damned if this wedding wasn’t about to drive her to drink for the second time in two days. Though probably whatever she ordered here would be better than Earl Grey with whiskey.

She squeezed herself into a tiny corner table as far from the bar as it was possible to be and hid behind a menu—see, all those years of Nancy Drew came in handy sometimes. It wasn’t like Cameron and his prey were paying attention to anything outside their little circle of two, but it was better to be sure. She needed privacy to woman up for her mission. When a waiter arrived, she said, “I need a shot. Something strong but not disgusting. Basically, I don’t want my liquor to taste like liquor.”

“How about a B-52? It’s amaretto, Kahlua, and Cointreau.”

“Sold. Bring me a B-52.” She looked over to the bar. The blond was nuzzling Cameron’s neck. “Actually, make it two.”





The blond was reading Cam’s palm. No, Sherry was reading his palm. He kept having to reach for her name. It wasn’t sticking for some reason. He hadn’t had his palm read since he was in junior high and Mrs. Compton, one of their neighbors in the trailer park, bought a book and decided to try to make some cash on the side. He didn’t believe in it now, just like he hadn’t believed in it then, but he had believed in the unlimited stash of Oreos Mrs. Compton let him eat while she practiced on him.

He hadn’t tried to pick up a woman since before Christie. Between Alicia, his high school flame, and Christie, the only other girlfriend he’d ever had, there had been a period that Christie had jokingly called his “man-whore phase.” She hadn’t been wrong, and he was looking forward to a return to form—clearly, he wasn’t cut out for relationships.

But he was good at seduction. His current companion was all over him. He was gratified to know that even though he was out of practice, he still had the goods.

“Hmmm.” She kept leaning closer to better see the lines on his hand in the dim bar, and it had the effect of lining up her neck with his nose. She was wearing a lot of perfume, and it was really…perfumey perfume.

He wondered if there was any chance he could convince her to shower first. Or, hey, maybe shower during. But they’d have to go to her place because he obviously wasn’t taking her to Jay’s. He almost laughed, thinking about how well that would go over. He’d bolted on the big reunion  , leaving Jay’s place before five, and had been ignoring his brother’s texts all evening. All of a sudden, as much as he’d wanted to see Jay, he just…couldn’t. He’d kept thinking about how Jane didn’t even know he existed. About how his brother hadn’t bothered to mention him once to his fiancée’s close friend. Not even a single, “Darn, my brother isn’t going to be able to make it back from Iraq for the wedding.”