Thinking of You

by Rachel Kane

Something had changed between us. Something had deepened.

  And I wanted it to go even further.

  17

  Cam

  “Should I worry about you?” asked Eli. He looked around my living room. The laptop had been closed, unplugged, put on a shelf, leaving a blank spot on my desk. In its place was a stack of notebook paper and a pen, with the first faint notes of a new book scribbled down.

  I wasn’t dancing. I wasn’t redecorating, or singing, or anything that might give away how I felt.

  But I guess your best friend always knows anyway.

  “No, you shouldn’t. In fact, this is the least worried you should ever be about me.”

  “Oh, I don’t know if I like the sound of that,” he told me. “If I can’t worry about you, Cam, who can I worry about?”

  “Life has taken an unexpectedly positive turn,” I said.

  I’d spent the night with Alex. After untying him, I’d had to confess that I’d never done that before, that it had only just come to me with him, maybe out of fear, or out of some need—

  He’d shushed me. It didn’t matter why I needed to tie him down. It had happened, and it had given me joy, and that’s all that mattered.

  What a strange wonderful man he was. I’d slept so soundly, cradled in his arms. It was the best night of sleep I’d had since all this began.

  The only disappointment was when morning came, and he needed to go. More meetings, more plans in the great dismantling of my professional life. He’d offered to bring me back to Micah’s office, but I’d refused this time. My need to control things would just get in the way, I knew. The experts needed to talk.

  So as much as it had pained me to put my fate back into their hands, I accepted it.

  I’d come home and… Well, I cleaned the house, which was great, but not before jumping in the shower to jack off a couple of times, thinking about Alex. But then I’d cleaned the house, and unplugged the computer, and removed the app from my phone. Let someone else get those notifications. I was going to start a new life, right now, one without the ever-present doom of social media hanging over my head. I was a Beloved Author, and that meant I needed to write books, not screw around all day watching people attack me online.

  Still, I welcomed the break when Eli had called and asked if he should come over.

  Except I wasn’t ready to talk about Alex. I’m not the type who kisses and tells.

  I mean, I am, but it’s usually more like kiss and write a mystery about it. I knew I’d end up telling Eli eventually…just not yet. Right now, it was nice to have a secret all to myself.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear there are positive developments in the case,” he said. “That sounds so grown-up, doesn’t it? The case. We should start calling everything that happens in our lives a case.”

  “The Case of Running Out of Salad Dressing.”

  “The Case of Getting a Paper-Cut and There Were No Band-Aids in the House.”

  Eli laughed. “The Case of—”

  “I slept with Alex.”

  “—you what?”

  He was sitting there with his mouth open, raising his hand as though he were about to point at me, like he was about to come to the most important part of a speech. I pictured Miss Katie using the same gesture while talking to a suspect.

  The only problem is, now I was the suspect.

  “I’m sorry, I wasn’t going to say anything, but Eli, oh my god, you should have been there—no, wait, you shouldn’t, that’s not what I mean, but it was—”

  He shook his head. “The Case of the Missing Common Sense. The Case of Cam Losing His Goddamn Mind. What were you thinking?”

  I suppose if I’d planned ahead, and thought through his possible reactions, it would have occurred to me that this revelation might be met with less than perfect joy. But of course I hadn’t planned, I’d blurted.

  “Wait,” I said, “this is the part where you’re supposed to be happy for me.”

  The truth was, I wasn’t sure how this was supposed to work. I didn’t get into relationships. Entanglements like that were something I tried to avoid. Don’t get too close. But wasn’t it traditional that when you got into something, you told your best friends?

  I mean, I don’t even know that we were in a relationship. That was moving a little fast, wasn’t it? We’d slept together, it wasn’t like we were signing each others’ living wills or something.

  But I missed Alex, I couldn’t stop thinking about him (even with the house-cleaning), and now I didn’t understand Eli’s reaction.

  “Happy for you?” He still looked shocked. “Good god, you know this is a bad idea, don’t you? He’s your…well, not your lawyer, but your something. And you’re going through trauma! You can’t make decisions right now!”

  I waved away his objections. “No, no, look, you’ve got it all wrong. Yes, I’m going through a lot right now. Of course I am. But don’t I deserve a break from it? Don’t I deserve something happy?”

  He looked over at the blank spot on my desk where the laptop used to be. “Of course you deserve something happy, Cam. That’s not the issue. But the last time I saw you, you were broken, emotionally. At your wit’s end. That’s not the point where you want to be falling into bed with someone. Especially not the guy who is supposed to be saving you.”

  Now, I wasn’t going to mention this, but there was some irony here, and Eli knew it. It wasn’t that long ago that Eli and Jake had met in some pretty stressful circumstances, where Jake had to save Eli, and they fell for each other awfully quickly. It might not have been love at first sight, but definitely by the second or third sight. And I’d given Eli hell about it…

  …which meant, I guess, I deserved his speech right now.

  It didn’t mean he was right. This was different. Alex was… Alex was deep. His story about his time with David Black had been strange and painful, and I felt his sense of loss so much.

  It had almost—almost—led me to tell him the truth about me.

  Almost. Not quite. Because there was a block there, a mental block, an emotional one. Whenever I get close to that truth, I just shut down.

  Even Eli didn’t know the whole story. Nobody did.

  It just sat there, sitting in my head, sitting in my hard drive, like that black hole they say lives in the middle of our galaxy, slowly swirling, pulling in stars and planets, never to be seen again. Eventually, my secret would consume everything in my life…but not yet. Not yet.

  Secret Reader had made me think the moment was imminent, that the black hole was going to grow, was going to swallow up my entire world.

  But Alex had made her back down. Aside from her sniffly complaint that I’d sent my thugs after her, there had been nothing but silence from her corner.

  Micah might’ve been angry about it, but you couldn’t deny that Alex’s strategy had worked.

  Which meant… Hm.

  “The thing is,” I said to Eli, “my big scandal can’t last forever. Eventually it’s going to die down, and I’m going to have to get on with life. But then what?”

  He shrugged. “Then you write another book. You go to the bar with me and Jake to snark at people. You take up knitting. I don’t know, you do anything but hopping into bed with a stranger!”

  “But is he a stranger?” I asked. “Really? Because from another perspective, this chapter of my life has been the ultimate boyfriend interview process.”

  “Oh god, you’re insane.”

  “No, no, hear me out! Look, it’s perfect. Alex is protective, he looks out for me—”

  “Because that’s his job! You’re paying him! You’re saying that you’ve basically hired a boyfriend!”

  “I prefer to think of it as a paid internship.”

  “Cam, this is unbelievable. Look, promise me you’ll think this through before taking it any further.”

  “I’m thinking it through right now.”

  “I don’t mean sit there and bask in the afterglow. I mean really think. What do you kno
w about this guy? You’ve only known him, what, a week?”

  That’s just it. I felt like I knew so much about Alex. I knew he liked gardening…and that he used his garden as a fortress of solitude, a wall against the chaos and pain of his history. I knew he was capable of hurting so deeply that he had to leave his old life behind.

  We were a lot alike in that regard.

  I knew he hated being out of control in bed…but I couldn’t think about that right this second, because those kind of thoughts would just make this whole conversation uncomfortable.

  “I promise I’ll think about it,” I told Eli, to calm him down.

  “Do you need me to talk to him? Is he pressuring you? Do I need to—”

  “Oh god, Eli, please don’t! Don’t say a word to him! If he knew that I’d told you all this, I’d die.”

  Eli nodded and stood up. “Okay, but I’m going to hold you to this. You’re going to give this serious thought. I’m going to ask you about it again tomorrow, to see where you are. I worry about you, Cam.”

  “There’s no need to worry,” I assured him. “I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  That may have been the biggest lie of all, but it was one that I wanted to believe.

  18

  Alex

  Micah handed me the letter. “It’s just a draft at the moment,” he said.

  My eyes flicked down to the phrase, wherein demand is made upon you to cease and desist your defamatory internet postings about, and tortious interference with the business relationships of, our client…

  “She’s crazy,” I said. “You really think a letter is going to stop her?”

  He grimaced at me. “Blame yourself for that. Honestly, I’d been thinking about approaching her with an offer.”

  I shrugged. “She doesn’t strike me as in it for the money.”

  “Too late for that, in any case. You showed our hand. She knows Cam has a legal team, she knows you’re involved…she could make things ugly for all of us, if we’re not careful. So now we have to move forward.”

  I set the letter on the table. “I’ll let Cam know.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m his attorney. I’ll be letting him know. I just wanted you to see it first.”

  There was a tension in the office. I knew what it was about, but I didn’t want to be the first person who mentioned it. The weight of yesterday’s conversation was heavy on my shoulders.

  After a moment, Micah said, “You look better today. Color in your cheeks. Your hair is brushed. Clean clothes. I hope this is a sign that you thought things over.”

  Ah, there it is. He’s going to talk about it.

  I looked down at my shirt and flicked off an imaginary speck of dust. “I do clean up occasionally.”

  When I glanced back up, I realized Micah looked nervous. He really didn’t want to talk about this. Knew he was on dangerous ground.

  He said, “I told you to take 24 hours to think about Cam. About what’s happening here. Your professional boundaries.”

  “Yes.”

  “And…did you think about it?”

  I looked him steadily in the eye. “I thought quite a bit about my professional boundaries, yes.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. Did you come to the right decision? Are you staying on the case?”

  Micah and I had known each other for years now. We were friends. He didn’t know the particulars of my history, he had never pried, but he knew that things had taken a toll on me. He was one of the few people who really cared.

  I couldn’t lie to him. But nor could I listen to him try to cover up his own worry with these calm words, as though he weren’t a seething mass of anxiety underneath that suit, worried that I was going to destroy his case…and possibly my own life.

  “I’m staying on the case as long as you’ll let me,” I said.

  He let out a long breath. “Thank goodness. All right. That’s a relief. After yesterday, I was a wreck. I’ll be honest with you, Alex, that boy sets off all the warning signals.”

  I bristled, but I couldn’t let him see that. Keeping my voice as neutral as possible, I said, “Warning signals?”

  “Oh, you know. The perpetual victim.”

  Keep calm, I told myself. Micah doesn’t know Cam the way you do.

  “I guess I don’t know what you mean,” I said. Was there an edge in my words? I hoped not. I didn’t want to fight with Micah…but nor did I want him to badmouth Cam.

  Micah furrowed his brow, as though searching for the right way to say something. He sat in his desk chair and put his feet up on his desk.

  “We see these guys sometimes,” he said. “They come in, something horrible has happened to them. Always something horrible and dramatic. Unforeseen, something they didn’t deserve. Except inevitably we find out they’re a little bit guilty. They’ve got dirty hands. And the minute you point that out, they get pissed. They’re heavily invested in a picture of themselves as innocent victims, and anything contrary to that picture starts a riot.”

  I felt so betrayed at that moment. You’re my friend, you’re supposed to know better than this. My gut was twisted into a knot. He was so casual about it. Calling Cam a liar, calling him, what, dirty, when he didn’t know anything about it at all.

  I was the one who had seen how hard Cam was taking things. I was the one who had first heard his confession. He wasn’t trying to hide anything, but had had his whole life torn apart.

  Don’t start a fight. Whatever you do, please don’t start a fight.

  “I think you’re wrong about him,” I said. “I think he would’ve been really happy for the entire world to ignore him, except for his readers. He likes drama on the page, not in real life.”

  Micah brushed away my objection. “Trust me, I’ve met a million guys like him. You scratch the surface, you’re going to find other things like this. Other moments where he was victimized, where he was quote-unquote absolutely innocent…until you press him on it, and you find out he brought it on himself.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, “but blaming the victim is a pretty ugly trend in our society. You’re saying he was asking for it. The same thing people say about assault victims. Oh, they were wearing revealing clothes, or they were in a place they knew they shouldn’t be, or—”

  “Christ’s sake, Alex, I’m not talking about that. Cam didn’t get assaulted, he got called out for being a plagiarist by some crazy. And not that we have the time and resources for it, but I’d be willing to bet that if you looked back far enough, you’d see there’s a connection between the two of them. He pissed her off, sometime in the past. And now he wants to play innocent—”

  “He’s not playing innocent!”

  Micah’s feet dropped off the desk, and he sat up.

  The room was quiet, except for the pounding of my heart, so loud in my ears that it was all I could hear.

  He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me.

  “Micah, if there’s one thing I know, it’s that Cam isn’t some professional victim. Now, I see you’re about to say something, but hold on. Don’t answer like an attorney. Don’t be like, we already caught him in one lie, about copying those passages from a book. That’s attorney talk. Cam is hurting from all this. Badly. He’s not making that up. He didn’t deserve any of this. You’re forgetting that this isn’t the first time Secret Reader has gone up against an author. What, have they all hurt her in the past? You need to understand—”

  Micah sighed and rolled his chair away from his desk. He stood up and went to his window. “Dear god, Alex, what did you do?”

  “What do you mean? I’m just saying—”

  “I told you to take 24 hours away from Cam. Told you to think about your professional responsibilities. But…you didn’t stay away from him, did you?”

  “I mean, I—”

  “How long did you wait to see him, after our meeting yesterday?”

  I looked away.

  “How long, Alex? Sixteen hours? Eight?”
r />   “A few minutes,” I whispered.

  “Say that again.”

  “A few minutes, okay? I went straight from meeting you, to seeing him. Because you’re wrong about him, and he deserves our help, and—”

  Micah raised a hand to silence me. “Just tell me this, Alex. How deeply involved are you? How far has this gone?”

  It wasn’t a question I could answer. But I didn’t have to. A look of dawning realization swept over his face, followed by a hardening of his features.

  “You are kidding me. You are fucking kidding me,” he said. “You slept with him.”

  “I—”

  “Don’t lie to me, Alex.”

  “Yes! Okay? I did. I slept with him, and I don’t regret it at all.”

  “I should have known. You told me you weren’t ready to work a case. You told me, but I didn’t listen. See, I knew it was all an act. All that tough-guy talk back in your garden. Acting like you were done with the world. I thought what you needed was to be yanked back into reality, but I was wrong. You’re not ready.”

  “You’re over-reacting, Micah.”

  “Really? Do you realize what this does to the case? Do you realize what this does to my office? What a fucking breach of the rules this is? I could be disbarred. They could shut me down, thanks to you. All that has to happen is that this fucking Secret Reader find out about your relationship, and blab about it to her online followers. Do you realize what danger you’ve put us in? Not just Cam, not just you, but me?”

  “Is that all you care about?” I said, standing up. “Your fucking practice? You’ve got an innocent client being torn apart, the best you can manage is a fucking cease and desist letter, you—”

  “Forget the letter,” he said. He snatched the paper off the desk and ripped in two. “There is no letter. There is no case. I can’t represent a client under these circumstances. And I sure as hell can’t keep you as a paid member of the team. You’re done, Alex. You’re just done. Go home to your garden, where you wanted to be in the first place.”

  The thing is, I didn’t want to lose my friendship over this. I honestly didn’t. I wanted Micah to see my point of view, not fire me, not drop Cam as a client. If he would just try to understand that Cam really was an innocent victim…