“I think TSA would find that suspicious.”
“They’d get over it. TSA are very understanding. What are you wearing right now?”
A deep breath over the phone, and then a sigh. “Nothing.”
“Photo or it’s a lie.”
“Dream on. I’ve been thinking about you. Want to guess what I’m doing right now?” And she had the nerve to giggle.
Jesus, I needed to get off this plane. And find a restroom.
***
Aimee managed not to let her GPA drop that semester, even though it seemed as if we were always together, and her typical library schedule—which I had always thought was extreme and unnecessary—was thrown out in favor of our…ahem…extracurricular activities. I discovered, to my delight, that my good friend Aimee, whom I had known forever, possessed a sexual appetite I would never in my wildest dreams have expected. I had expected her to be as reserved and serious in bed as she was in her studies, but I was wrong.
Eric didn’t seem surprised by the evolution in our relationship at all. The first morning Aimee emerged from my bedroom wearing my OU sweatshirt he merely looked up from the eggs he was scrambling, raised one eyebrow, and said, “Good morning, sunshine.” They had a normal conversation just as if everything was completely normal, she stole a forkful of his breakfast in an utterly normal manner, and when she left for class they said, “Laters,” in a totally normal manner.
As soon as the door closed behind her he turned to me. His expression was flat. “I saw this coming,” he said.
“Sure—” I began.
He held up a hand. “It’s no shock, Cam. Everybody who’s ever known you two has seen this coming for years.”
News to me. “Serious?”
“Yes.” He rubbed his face. “And let me say something else serious.”
I didn’t know if I was up for a protective-big-brother conversation from my friend, but I kept my mouth shut for a moment. “The floor is yours.”
“I think you two are fucking perfect for each other.”
Without a doubt my mouth fell open. “No shit?”
He smiled. “No shit. You two have been circling each other like wrestlers since before we were all in high school. Everybody knew she was the only one for you. Everybody knew you were the only one for her. Ever.” He paused. “Everybody but you two.”
Could have knocked me over with a feather.
“And now, not to sound as if I have no faith in you, let me follow that up with this: don’t fuck it up, Cam. Aimee is the kind of girl, you get one shot with her. If you burn her, she’ll never forgive you.” He was leaned against the kitchen counter, huge arms crossed over his chest.
I waited for the threat, but got impatient. “And what, you’ll kick my ass?”
He shook his head, his smile almost sad. “No, man. You’ll do that yourself.”
Christmastime, Last Year
Aimee
For a while, I referred to myself as Cam’s “Miss August”. Then “Miss September”. It got pained looks from Eric, and midway through October Cam asked me to stop. I know it for what it was: I was keeping my guard up and my hopes subdued. Because I knew Cam, and his history with women. And as much as I wanted whatever was going on between us to be more than temporary, a niggling voice in the back of my mind told me that I was rolling the dice every time we were together. Yeah, right now I kept rolling sevens, and it was good. But sooner or later the dice were bound to come up snake eyes, and Cam would get bored with me, and then this wonderful part of my life would be over and I would have to try to locate all the scattered pieces of my heart to try and stitch myself back together.
I reminded myself that I was being reckless.
You never create anything good without risk, my dad whispered in my head.
And then Cam told me about his Christmas plans.
I told him there was nothing wrong with us doing Christmas at one of our family’s houses. Or both, for that matter. Our parents lived in different economic universes, but still shared the same little town in north central Oklahoma. It wasn’t more than a ten minute drive between our childhood homes. My father had been feeling unwell the past couple weeks, and I wanted to spend time taking care of him. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have minded parking myself on one of the Simons’ huge, soft rugs in front of a crackling fireplace. Definitely with wine. Possibly without clothes.
But Cam had another idea.
“I just want to be away. With you. It doesn’t have to be for long. It doesn’t even have to be on Christmas. We can do it before. Just so we get time with just the two of us.”
I hadn’t expected Cam to outdo me in the “emotional” department, but then I’ve always been a pragmatic girl. “We’re alone together quite a bit,” I said, thinking of all the time we spent sequestered alone together in my apartment, or in his bedroom. Or in the back seat of his car. Or that one time in an empty biology lab in the sciences building.
His eyes took on a sparkle that made me go all fluttery. “This will be different. I want us to do something special.”
“Special,” I repeated, suddenly feeling a twinge of suspicion. “Is this just a ploy to get me to try butt stuff?”
Cam’s mouth dropped open at that, and he sputtered a bit before he could get words out. “What—? No. No, this is not a ploy to get you to try butt stuff.” He closed his eyes, obviously searching for patience. “You weirdo. No,” he opened his eyes and almost drowned me in the depths of his blues. “I just want two days with you.”
And to be truthful, going away with him for two days to unwind from semester projects and final exams and the stress of working at a bar through the winter sounded like a little piece of amazing. I’m not much for thinking about what I “deserve”, but I felt if I deserved anything it was a short break from my stressors.
“Okay.”
He leaned toward me and kissed my lips. That fluttery feeling intensified, the way it did every time Cam kissed me. His hand on my waist, his eyes searching mine, he said, “Since you brought it up, it behooves me as part of my due diligence to ask: are you certain that butt stuff is off the table?”
“Completely.”
***
What Cam had in mind was a cabin on Broken Bow lake, outside the town of the same name. Broken Bow lays nestled in a swath of rolling mountains and timber, the lake a jewel of engineered geography, the town a McDonald’s and a Walmart with low-income housing built up around them. During Prohibition, the area was the leading producer of moonshine for the nation.
We sat on the rug in front of the crackling fireplace, a plate of cheese and fruit between us. His hand rested on my bare thigh. He sipped his moonshine and coughed. “Goddamn that stuff is potent.”
I sipped mine and relished the burn as it glided down my throat. “You rich people and your sensitive palettes.”
He looked at me, his eyes appraising. “How is it that we have spent almost our entire lives together and there is still so much for me to learn about you?”
I shrugged. “I’m a deep subject,” I said, leaning against him.
He rested his face in my hair. “I intend to plumb the depths of this particular subject,” he murmured.
I giggled. “You already did that a half hour ago,” I said, running my hand down the front of his boxers. I felt his flesh twitch against my palm. “But if you want to get up so some more learnin’, I’m game, O Intrepid Explorer of My Depths.”
“I mean more than that,” he said, breathing deeply. “I mean that you amaze me every day, and I want to know all the amazing things about you. However long that takes.”
It took a minute for the implication of his words to sink in. “Cam, we—”
“I mean, I’m not, like, suggesting we do anything different than what we’re doing,” he went on hurriedly. “I like us.” He squeezed me tighter to him.
“I like us, too.” I felt a hollow ache in my throat.
“I just…” he seemed at a loss for words. “I have a
history. That history isn’t easy to trust.” Had Cam been reading my mind? He took my face between his big hands, and I felt safe and warm. “I want you to know that I’m not going anywhere. You’re not Miss November, or Miss December, or even Miss Senior Year. I need you to understand that.”
Oh, God, I could have melted.
“I love you,” I breathed.
His lips opened for a brief moment, and I could tell he was trying out how the words sounded in his mind.
“I’m all yours,” he said.
It was almost enough.
There's A Word For That
March 3, This Year
Cam
On the day Aimee broke up with me, the ring was in my pocket in a tiny, black velvet box. For what I had paid for it, I felt the box should be quite a bit bigger—like, it was the kind of ring that should have been delivered in an old-timey steamer trunk carried by two rough, burly men with Bronx accents—but the jeweler assured me that, not only was the box exactly the size it was supposed to be, but that Aimee was going to be absolutely over the moon, regardless of the size of the box.
Pro tip: jewelers do not possess the skill set to properly forecast my ability to fuck things up.
I mean, really, the date should have been a slam dunk. I probably shouldn’t feel so secure in how the night could have played out, considering how it did play out, but…we were solid. Everything about our relationship was made of gold, and I was about to sprinkle that gold with diamonds.
That might not have been entirely true, but it was damn close enough.
***
Backtrack a week. Admittedly, the week before I had told her that she had seemed withdrawn lately. She had been distracted, not as consistently available. Our lovemaking was still passionate, but not as frequent, and it required more coaxing on my part. And I knew—I knew—that Aimee was troubled because her dad’s health had taken a turn. She was worried and feeling guilty about being here when she felt she should be back home helping her mom take care of him. And I knew that, on top of that, mid-term exams were hammering her. She was stressed well beyond the norm. She hadn’t been eating or sleeping well.
And when I talked to her about it—called her on it, really—her response had been almost hostile. Before going to class, Eric had cooked a couple of extra pancakes and left them for her, and she was picking at them when I tried to talk to her about what was going on with her. Because that’s what people in relationships do, right? They talk.
I started by rubbing her shoulders. The muscles were tense under my fingers. As I squeezed and moved my hands, she groaned and leaned forward. I took that to be a good sign.
I wanted to tell her that I didn’t feel like a whole person when she was withdrawn and unavailable. I wanted to say that when her life was upside down, my life was also upside down. That if there was anything—anything—I could do to take some of the burden off her, that I would move the earth to do that.
What I said instead was: “You remember how, when we first got together, we were all over each other? Like, all the time?”
She sighed and took a slow bite of pancakes as my fingers worked. “Yeah.”
“It feels like we’re not there any more.”
The muscles I had begun to work into suppleness began to tense under my fingers.
“Cam—”
“It’s just—I know you’ve got a lot going on—”
“A lot going on?” She was sitting up straighter now, and I could tell the conversation wasn’t going the way I thought it would.
“Yeah,” I plowed on, in retrospect, like a donkey. “I just thought, maybe, if you could make some time for us—”
“For us?” Her fork slammed down on the table and she shrugged my hands off her. “For us? When do you ever do anything for us, Cam? You do things for Cam Simons. It’s all you know how to do, because you don’t know what it’s like to be anything else.” It was as if a dam had burst and a torrent of suppressed words were pouring down a canyon toward me. “You don’t have to bust your ass studying, because your family has more money than God and you don’t need to know things. You don’t need to try hard at anything; either it comes easy for you, or you buy it.”
I took a step back, feeling my face heat up. “Aimee, that’s—”
“No, it’s not unfair, Cam. It’s the truth. You frolic through life like nothing means anything, like everything is just going to work out because, by God, you’re Cam Simons and life always turns up roses. But life’s not like that.”
“I don’t think—”
“Stop interrupting me.”
It was the first time Aimee had ever yelled at me, and I froze. She didn’t, though. She was a steamroller.
“My father is dying, Cam. Don’t you get that? My dad is dying, and I can’t go to him because it’s more important to him that I make it through college than it is for me to be with him. And college is kicking my ass right now. You’ve never struggled, so you can’t relate, but I’m struggling now, Cam, and it’s hard. So here I am, a pile of work on top of me, a job I hate, a dying father, and you want…what? More sex? That’s what you’re after right now? For me to be a better fuck-buddy?”
“No—” Her face was bright red and her eyes were filled with tears and I had no idea what to say to fix it.
Aimee took a deep breath and continued on in a calmer tone of voice. “I have all this going on, Cam, and you’ve never once asked how you can help me. You have all this free time, you have all this potential to do great and amazing things, but you’ve never bothered to tell me you love me, and you’ve never offered to help. You are able to look at someone having a tough time and have the gall to ask them to give you more of themselves for nothing in return.”
I admit that I was angry. Aimee’s words had struck nerves in my soul that I didn’t know existed. Didn’t she know that I would trade away everything in my life for her? That all the privilege of my father’s money, all the free-wheeling, playboy living I had done in the past meant absolutely nothing to me? That the only thing in my life that was real was Aimee Strauss, and everything else was just extra shit that I was hauling around with me because of my name?
I didn’t say that, but I thought it. Should have said it.
Instead I ran away. Grabbed my keys off the shelf by the front door and stormed out of my own damn apartment without a word. My throat hurt and my eyes burned and I got in my car and just drove around. I did that for a couple of hours.
When I got back to my apartment, Aimee was gone.
I knew she had a test, so I waited for her to come back. But she didn’t come back that night. It was the first night we had spent apart in months. I didn’t sleep because my left side, the side she curled up against, was cold.
The next day, she texted me around two in the afternoon. “I’m sorry.”
I kinda thought that maybe she should be sorry, but a smarter part of me knew it would be a mistake to say so. “I’m sorry 2.”
And she came back to me later that evening, and we made love, and I thought everything was back to normal.
And I realized that none of the words I had said to her that morning had come out the way I intended. That maybe I had never said the words to her the way I intended to say them. And that maybe Aimee needed to hear them the right way.
The night away from her assured me of one thing: I hated not having her with me. I wanted her by me all the time. I wanted to smell her, to hear her voice, to feel her pressed up against me. I didn’t want to breathe in a room where she wasn’t.
There’s a word for that.
***
I should have led with the ring. I should have led with telling her that she was right, that I hadn’t said all the things to her that I should have said, and that I should have been more attentive to her stress and her troubles and offered to help. And then given her the ring. She would have said yes.
She sat across from me, her face glowing in the light from the single candle on the table between us. She wore th
is blue dress that clung to her waist, but hung loose over her thighs and had a square decolletage that was almost demure. She’d had her hair done, and in the light it looked like fire. When I looked at her I could barely breathe.
Our appetizer, turkey meatballs covered in mozzarella, were mostly untouched. Aimee seemed distracted, as if she had somewhere else to be but didn’t want to tell me. She replied to my attempts at conversation in grunts and monosyllables, her eyes moving around the room.
It was a rare moment in which I had no idea what to say.
I knew what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her everything she meant to me, and that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. I wanted to tell her that there was no force in the world that could take me from her, and that no matter what she was going through that I would be with her.
I wanted to show her the ring, and put it on her finger, and be all hers for the rest of our lives.
And if I’d led with that, if I’d started with the ring, that’s what would have happened.
But of course I didn’t.
Instead of reaching into my left pocket for the ring, I reached into my right pocket.
“It feels like we’re two strangers sitting here at this table,” I said, trying to keep my tone light.
Aimee’s eyes immediately found mine and softened. “I’m sorry,” she said, touching my hand. “I just have a lot on my mind.”
I nodded. “I know. You’ve got a lot going on. You’re stressed the hell out, and I can tell every time I look at you.”
“Does it make me ugly?” she said with half a smile.
“Nothing could make you ugly.”
Her smile became a complete one, and outshone the candle on the table. “Thank you.”
“I want to help you de-stress.”
She raised her eyebrows. “How?”
All Yours: A Second Chance Romance Page 8
