All Yours: A Second Chance Romance

by Ellie Bradshaw

  “What the fuck, Cam,” she hisses, her teeth clenched. “What the fuck are you doing here. What the fuck have you done?” Her voice breaks a little on the last word, and I can see her eyes rimming with tears.

  I’ve never seen her this mad. Not so mad she cries.

  I point behind her. Back toward the bar.

  “That fucking guy&emdash;”

  “Fuck that guy.” Her voice raises in pitch and she takes a step toward me. “You think that’s the first time some asshole has acted like a dick to me?” She shakes her head and her auburn hair makes a quick fountain around her head. “This is a bar, Cam, and people,” and now she pokes me in the chest with a finger as hard as a stiletto, “act like assholes in bars. I don’t like it, but it’s my job.”

  I reach out, try to put my hand on her shoulder, but she pushes me back. The movement is sudden and I’m off balance again. “My job, Cam. I know you don’t know what that’s like, but some of us fucking need jobs.” Tears overflow the corners of her eyes and make shining tracks down her cheeks. “I need my job.”

  I try to be mad. I should be mad. I just saved her from that asshat that was putting his hands on her. Just took a pretty damn hard shot to the chin, to boot. Not to mention the thousand dollars I just tossed into the air. For her. Just for Aimee.

  So I should be mad.

  But I can’t be. Not when she’s looking at me, so overwhelmed with emotion that she’s shaking. Not when she’s crying like this and I don’t even completely understand why. Not when she’s…

  “Aimee.”

  She shakes her head.

  “Go away, Cam.”

  “I just&emdash;”

  But she holds up her hand and that’s all it takes to pluck the words right from my mouth. Then she turns and walks back into the bar.

  There are emotions I’m unaccustomed to, but feeling like an asshole is not one of them. I am often an asshole, and I own that. But chagrin, I am not used to. And the loathing, and the disappointment I felt from Aimee—as if I had just let her down in a big, huge, immeasurable way—that leaves me feeling something I never felt before.

  Like a failure.

  Like a loser.

  Like I’m no different than that shit-bird in the bar with his smirking mouth and grabby hands. Just a fucking douchebag.

  The gravel crunches under my shoes as I stalk around the building to the parking lot. Where before there had been nobody out here, it seems that now half the bar has boiled over into the parking lot. Party’s outside, everybody! Off to one side, out of the yellow light from the arc-sodium and, coincidentally, near my car, I see four guys in leathers facing off with two guys who appear, from this distance and lighting, to have beards. I walk toward my car, which means I am walking toward them.

  Clint sees me first. He motions to the others with his hand, then breaks away from the group.

  “Just the man I wanted to see,” he says, his voice slow and even. He does not extend his hand to shake.

  “Looks like you’re in luck then.”

  He jerks a head back over his shoulder. “Held up our end of the bargain.”

  “I see that.” I reach into my pocket and pull out cash. I count out a grand and hold it out to him.

  He doesn’t reach for it. “The deal was two thousand.”

  I feel impatient and reckless. “You can go back inside and pick the rest up off the floor.” He raises an eyebrow. Clint is as tall as I am. Not as wide, but he has a ranginess that suggests he possesses more strength than he seems to. But right now I just don’t care. “Besides, I owe that half to everybody else in the bar for being so willing to throw into a full-scale riot.”

  Clint shakes his head. “That wasn’t the deal.”

  “That deal’s out the window.”

  Now he smiles. It’s almost gentle, but there’s something underneath it that I don’t like. “Merle,” he says over his shoulder. One of the other bikers, a big gnarly-looking dude with an American flag bandanna on his head and leathers that didn’t quite seem to fit his shoulders, glances over. “Yuh?”

  “You want to come over here and show our pretty friend why it’s a good idea to pay his debts?”

  Merle shrugs. It doesn’t appear to matter much to him whom he menaces, as long as he gets to menace somebody. “Reckon.” I sigh and dig back into my money.

  “I don’t usually change my mind about things, but since you called me pretty…”

  Clint smiles.

  When we’re done, I go to the Mercedes. The driver’s side window is gone, smashed through with a brick that now lays in the passenger seat. The driver’s seat is covered with a million tiny cubes of shattered safety glass. My beauty needs a new window and a good cleaning. And a new paint job. Someone took their time with a key or a knife, carefully carving the words, “Keep the extra hunnerd, rich prick,” across the front fender, door, and rear fender.

  My faith in humanity takes a sharp down-turn. If you can’t trust a tweaker with neck tattoos, who can you trust?

  Later Last Summer (Around Eleven Months Earlier)

  Aimee’s Email

  Fri 7/27

  Aimee Strauss

  Re: Did I Win the Lottery?

  To: Cam

  Seriously, did I win the lottery? To get a letter from you seems like such a big deal! Did your hand cramp while you were writing it? Where did you find a pen? Did you wander the streets of Italy in search of a Walmart until you gave up in frustration and bought one in the Vatican gift shop for five hundred dollars?

  You borrowed the pen from Eric, didn’t you. I don’t think less of you.

  Work is good! I’m learning a lot and I think I have a pretty good chance to come back here after graduation to work full time. I like basically everybody, and they seem to like me. Unfortunately, no need to take you up on your offer of murder. But this is a big town and a lot can happen, so I’m definitely not closing the door on the option.

  I’m glad to hear you guys are having a good time! I’ll bet Eric is getting all nerdy about the culture. Is he keeping you out of fights?

  As far as talking goes…Cam, you can always talk to me. About anything. Escapades, feelings, whatever. I’m always here for you.

  I guess that’s not true. I wasn’t there for you right at the end of the semester, right after…

  It was an unsteady time for me. You ever hear a band for the first time and you think, “Whoa, it’s like I’ve been waiting for this band my whole life.” And you get excited about it. And you think about their music a lot, and what it means to you. And then you start to worry, “What if their next album lets me down? What if I wait for it, but then I get it and it’s like none of the things that were important to them on the first album mean quite so much to them on the second one?”

  Things were kinda like that for me.

  Maybe they still are. I’m not sure. But I want to talk to you when you come back. Or now, if you want to call.

  No. Better in person. About anything.

  For instance: how have I known you all this time and have never seen this six-pack you mention? Tell me more.

  Love,

  Aimee

  P.S. The rose was beautiful. I love white roses. Thank you.

  P.P.S. Do I snore? How do you not know this already? Maybe you’ll find out. ;)

  P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. So…how are the girls in Italy, Spain, France, etc.? As friendly as I heard? (Your answer to this has a lot to do with whether you ever find out if I snore.)

  Laying It On A Little Thick

  Aimee

  My day in nine words: bad to worse to even worse, to totally hopeless.

  My mom is losing her caregiver. I’m broke. Cam feels now is the time to reinsert himself into my life, so he shows up at my job and starts a bar fight. And, of course, I got blamed for the bar fight (because the woman is obviously to blame when her ex-boyfriend does stupid shit, right?) and now I don’t have a job any longer and I’m even more broke than I was at the beginning of the after
noon.

  I hold back most of the tears while I drive home, but as soon as I get in the front door they just come gushing out of me. I break down for the second time of the day, but this time I don’t curl up on the bathroom floor. No, I sob and rage around the apartment, throwing dishes at the complete injustice that my life has become, feeling a fleeting satisfaction as they shatter against walls and countertops, then throwing some more. I kick a hole in the bathroom cabinet. Sweep everything off the top of the dresser and listen to things break.

  I want to drink, I want to destroy things. I want to punch Cam right in his beautiful smug face and say, “Thanks for fucking up my life!”

  A niggling voice in the back of my mind says, It’s not Cam that’s breaking up your apartment, but I tell that voice it can just shut right the fuck up.

  My downstairs neighbors bang on their ceiling. But they can just shut the fuck up, too. I’ve got a lot to get out of my system.

  It’s absolutely amazing no one calls the police on me. I sound like a domestic abuse case on methamphetamine. I am a shrieking tornado in my apartment, sweeping destruction. Nothing is safe from me.

  By the time I fall onto my bed, fully clothed and sweating, I am exhausted. Bone-deep, too-tired-to-cry-any-more exhausted. There isn’t even time to turn off the lamp (whose escape from my temper is nothing short of miraculous) before I plunge into unconsciousness.

  ***

  There is no end to the crying, it seems. When I wake up the sun is streaming through my bedroom window, a yellow ray of light that brightly proclaims, “Hey! It’s another day! Just like any other!”

  Except this isn’t like any other day. For one thing, why am I still in bed when the sun is up?

  I’m late. This is the first time I have been late to class since...well, since months ago, when Cam would sometimes talk me into sleeping late. Although “sleeping” had no real part in what we were doing. And he didn’t actually talk all that much.

  But that was then. This is…

  A goddamn disaster. I swing my feet off my bed and something crunches. I look down and see my floor is covered in broken glass. The only reason I’m not bleeding is that I never bothered to take off my shoes.

  A single bloodshot eye looks back at me from one of the larger shards.

  I glance at the dresser. The mirror above it is gone, as well as everything that had been sitting on top of it: a scarf my mom knitted for me when she was still okay, a mason jar half-full of change, the photo of Mortimer.

  The frame is on the floor next to the closet, launched halfway across the room. When I pick it up, it comes apart at the joints, the wood just pulling loose in my hand and the glass and picture falling to the floor.

  That might be the only thing Cam ever actually made himself.

  The thought makes me smile, just slightly, just for a moment, before it makes me start crying.

  The thing is, Cam isn’t much of a do-er. What he really does sit back and let the world come to him. Which it does, like a puppy that wants its ears rubbed.

  Except when it comes to me. He would go to the ends of the earth for me. I know that. In my head I know that. At least, I know that he would do that now. But later, a year from now, two years? When the new has worn off our relationship and his eye wanders and it’s just oh-so-easy for him to find something on the side?

  Do you even have the time or energy to think about this right now? Again?

  No, I don’t. And besides, I’m still pissed that he showed up at my job and made a scene.

  Not a scene. A fucking apocalypse.

  And of course then I remember that he cost me my job.

  Beautiful, do-anything-for-me Cam.

  The fucker. I feel myself heating up again, the fury I felt at Cam, and at life, threatening to boil out of me the way it did last night. I glance at the destruction around my room. I go into the living room and see only more. The sight makes me want to throw dishes again, but those are all gone, scattered in sharp pieces across three rooms. One of the doors under the kitchen sink hangs askew. My television lays on its front on the living room carpet. I don’t pick it up to see whether it’s broken. I just don’t want to know right now.

  Well, the bad news is you don’t have anything left to break. The good news is you don’t have to break anything else.

  I take a cold shower.

  When I get out, my head is a little more clear. I dress and decide to see what kind of day it is outside. I open my front door and it almost feels like springtime. It’s sunny and the temperature is light jacket weather. Perfect Oklahoma October weather. As if it’s paying everybody back for being a miserable rainy bastard yesterday. Or lulling me into letting my guard down.

  You’re not fooling me, Oklahoma. I see right through your clever ruse.

  Sitting on the front threshold, where it had fallen when I opened the door, is an envelope. From my vantage staring down at it, my name is visible, upside down, scrawled in blue pen across the front. Of course the handwriting is Cam’s.

  A white rose lays next to the envelope.

  I pluck them both from the floor and take them into my destroyed kitchen, laying the rose on my circular dining room table and opening the envelope. Inside is a classic Hallmark card that reads, “To My Friend,” on the front. I open it and find the generalized platitudes that you would expect. And two words, written in big letters in black magic marker.

  “I’m Sorry.”

  Words that, in all the years I’d known him, I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard Cam say.

  Ever.

  I look at the card, then at my phone on the counter. Before I know what’s happening, the phone is in my hand.

  Don’t think.

  He picks up on the first ring.

  Mid-August, Around Ten and a Half Months Ago Part I

  Aimee

  He picked up on the first ring. “I think it’s important that you know I look really attractive right now.” The sound of his voice sent a tingle through me that I tried to ignore.

  “Is that so?” I decided to keep it light. I could keep it light. Don’t get too excited. He might be home, but home is still in Oklahoma, and you are still in Chicago. You are only calling to make sure their flight got them home safely.

  “Totally. I just checked myself out in the mirror at the airport. Smokin’. Whoever dresses me really knows what they’re doing.”

  I laughed, and it felt good to laugh with Cam. It felt like the summer, for all its successes and possibilities on the job front, was finally drawing to an end and my life could go back to normal.

  Or…something like normal. It seemed like a lot hinged on this conversation. I looked out the window of my apartment and down onto the dark street. Part of me loved it here: the action, the noise, the hustle. And part of me missed home.

  “So you made it back safely, then.” It seemed like a good lead. Safe.

  “Indeed! I’m right as rain.”

  “And Eric?”

  “As usual. A moralistic pain in my ass. Can you believe he did pushups every day we were on vacation?”

  “I can, actually.”

  “Seriously, what a tool.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  Cam went silent for a moment. “Um. I can’t right now.”

  “Is it his turn to check himself out in the restroom?”

  Another pause. “Something like that.” He mumbled something. “Fuckin’ door.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.” He sounded irritated. “Just nothing works out easy.”

  “I’m…sorry to hear that you have encountered a challenge. Will charm not work?”

  I could hear the smile return to his voice. “I guess that’s up to you,” he said. “So I saw there’s this Thai place half a block down from your apartment. Is it any good?”

  Weird. “Are you stalking me on Google maps?”

  “Kinda. Are you hungry?”

  “Um. Sure?”

  “Well then come downstairs
and let me in. Security in your apartment building is fucking insane.”

  ***

  I wanted to rush down, to take the stairs two at a time. But it wouldn’t do to run out of the stairwell like a crazy-woman, panting and sweaty (although who knew, Cam might like that). So I forced myself to get on the elevator and push the lobby button like a sensible person. Besides, it was nothing to get excited about. I was going to see Cam. I spent my entire life going to hang out with Cam for one reason or another. Sure, I was happy to be seeing my best friend, who was paying me a surprise visit in Chicago. That was to be expected.

  That didn’t explain the little tickle in my solar plexus.

  The elevator door opened and I crossed the lobby. Was I walking a little faster than normal? Certainly not.

  Hank, the security guard behind the desk, said, “Where you heading in such a hurry, Miss Strauss?”

  “Hmm?” I said, distracted.

  And then I could see him through the glass pane of the door. Cam, big and bright as day, his back nonchalantly to the door, holding something in his hand.

  When I opened the door he turned. I had to catch my breath. Not from my brisk walk across the lobby. The thing was, I’d seen Cam thousands of times in my life, most days since childhood. Of course I knew he was handsome, in the same way a woman knows her cousin is handsome. But something had changed over the last several months. Maybe it was the time away from him. Or the (slightly) suggestive communication across the ocean.

  Or the kiss we had shared one exhausted night in the parking lot of the university library.

  But when Cam turned to me, I saw him in a whole new light. He wore a gray suit, and his black shoes shone in the sunlight. A cream-colored shirt and a patterned gray tie. I recognized the tie tack as the one I had made for him. When he saw me, he smiled, and I felt something come loose inside my chest. This was Cam, but…

  I closed the three steps between us and wrapped him in an admittedly aggressive hug. The wool of his suit felt scratchy and wonderful against my cheek. He smelled, faintly, of the Armani cologne he preferred. The hug was more like an impact than just a hug, and he stepped back a half step, wrapping one arm around me.