The living room is somewhat less crowded, but not by much. I spear a chunk of baked potato into my mouth, relishing the butter and sour cream mixing on my tongue. I must smile a little, because a familiar voice from my left says, “You certainly seem to be enjoying yourself.”
I let my smile grow wider and glance at Eric. “This is so uncomfortable,” I say around a mouthful of food. “This is supposed to be an engagement party—or something—but no one is really talking about…our engagement. Or talking to me at all, for that matter. It’s as if…” I trail off.
“As if you’re a box to be checked off a list?” For someone whose entire aspirations in life revolve around punching other men in the face, Eric is perceptive. I nod.
Eric is not quite as tall as Cam, not quite as wide, but he has these huge hands. Seriously, I have never seen hands that large on anyone. They are currently wrapped lovingly around a cheeseburger that in any other pair of hands would have seemed massive, but in his seems like a Wendy’s Junior Burger.
He takes a huge bite out of his burger, his face still except for the flexing of his jaw muscles as he chews. When Eric’s face is still, I know it means his mind is moving a thousand miles an hour. He doesn’t wear all his thoughts on his face the way Cam does.
After a moment he swallows, turns his head a bit to look at me.
“This family is fucked up in ways you or I can’t even begin to fully understand. Money tends to make people—more of what they already are. Or at least more open about what they already are. You take a guy like Jason. He got all that money and what did it do? Gave him the freedom to show the world that he’s an asshole. On the other hand, you have Cam. Born with money. Uses it—sometimes like an asshole—but never actually becoming an asshole. Sometimes I think money’s greatest capacity is to reveal the the truth about the people who have it.”
I shrug. “Honestly not something I have much firsthand knowledge about.”
He looks sidelong at me. “You mean to tell me you don’t know Cam? After all this time?”
I’m no longer certain I know what we’re talking about. “What do you mean?”
He turns fully toward me, his brow furrowing as if he’s contemplating how to explain something difficult to a dimwit. Then he shrugs and his face softens. “I mean that Cam’s a good guy. But you don’t need me to tell you that.” I don’t, and frankly Eric needs to mind his own business. I think I see where he’s going, but then he throws me a curveball. “You know to be careful, right?” His voice is low and does not carry, and I know he does that on purpose. And so I know that he knows about the arrangement I have with Cam. I look away. Somehow it seems more…dishonest…going through with this sham engagement with Eric knowing about it. It bothers me more that he knows than that Katy does. Possibly because it feels as if we are somehow making him complicit in our deceit, potentially smudging his integrity along with ours.
“There’s nothing to worry about,” I say, forcing myself to keep smiling.
He touches my shoulder. “If you think that,” he says, “then I don’t think you know yourself or Cam very well. If you think that, then you don’t know how painful this could end up for the both of you.” He sighs. “But you don’t actually think that.”
I find myself shaking my head, not in agreement or disagreement with him, but because I don’t want to talk about this right now. I don’t want to talk about it ever. If it was anyone else telling me what I do or don’t know about myself, I’d get angry and possibly start kicking expensive furniture. But it’s Eric, and I don’t think it’s possible for me to ever get mad at him. Instead, the conversation just makes me sad. I search around the room for a way to change the subject.
“Talk about someone enjoying themselves,” I say, motioning across the room with a finger, “check out Eli over there.”
Eric follows my gesture and grunts. “If he was any happier there would have to be two of him just to contain the joy.”
In fact, Eli does not look happy. He’s surly at the best of times. Mastered scowling by the time he was ten years old. At first he just aimed the scowl at Cam, having learned to resent his older brother’s easy glide through life early on. But after a while the look just seemed to freeze on his face, and he walked around looking at everyone like that. It became his thing. When someone new would ask what his deal was, the response would inevitably be, “That’s just Eli.”
This is different, though. Now he sits in a single overstuffed chair that he’s drawn into the corner of the room. He leans forward, elbows on knees, a beer dangling from his fingers. There is no food anywhere near him, so I assume he’s drinking his lunch. He glares at the floor, heavy eyebrows beetled together over his nose. His shoulders carry a tension ordinarily not present. There is such an air of hostility about him that everyone else is steering clear of him, leaving a bubble around him that is empty of people.
“If he squeezes that bottle any harder he’s going to pop the top off of it,” I say. “Shouldn’t you, like, go talk to him? He likes you.”
Eric shrugs his wide shoulders. “Maybe. I don’t know. He’s got a lot on his mind.”
I know that I am at least partially responsible for the terrible anger showing through on Eli’s face.
As if he can read my thoughts Eric says, “You didn’t do that to him. Cam didn’t even do that. All the misery he’s experiencing can be laid one hundred percent at Jason’s feet. You heard how he treats him. Dangles everything the kid’s ever wanted in front of him, just to snatch it back. And why? To gain more control over Cameron. Because that’s what Jason wants. Control.” He takes another bite of his hamburger and says around the mouthful, “It’s what makes him such a good businessman, and such a terrible father.”
I can’t disagree with what Eric has said. But I also can’t shake the heavy feeling that I am at least somewhat to blame for the things happening to Eli. After all, I could have told Cam no. No, I will not come to your family’s house. No, I will not pretend to be your fiance. No, I will not take your money.
No, I will not be able to take care of my mom.
A well of bitterness and helplessness rise up inside me and threaten to bubble out of my throat. I clamp my lips down tight. If I start crying I’m not sure I’ll be able to get control of myself.
And then I feel a hand on my other shoulder. “Hey man, you trying to steal my girl from me?” Cam’s hand trails to rest on my shoulder blade. It’s warm and it feels good and suddenly I just want to trust that hand, to relax against it. But I can’t, not with Eli creating a black hole in the corner of the room. Not with the words “my girl” just hanging so nonchalantly in the air around us, as if they are right to say, as if he has the right to say them.
Well, doesn’t he? He paid an awful lot of money for you to go getting hung up on a couple of words.
“What if I am?” Eric says playfully.
Cam’s hand is now on my hip, pulling me to him mock-possessively. “Then my good sir,” he says in a crappy British accent, “I must challenge you to a duel.” It’s silly, and funny, and yet it also is thrilling to be held tight against him like this.
“I completely, exuberantly accept,” Eric says, lengthening his Okie drawl until he sounds like a hillbilly, except for his use of the very un-hillbilly “exuberantly”. “’Course, the challengee gets to pick weapons.”
Cam nods sagely. “Indeed, you rogue. Choose the weapons with which I shall lay you low for besmirching my honor.”
Eric smiles, lays his plate on an end table. He lifts his huge hands, palms out. “Just these.”
“Ah, quite,” Cam says with a laugh. “Hard pass. Maybe some other time.”
And then something passes between them, a look I can’t quite understand, and Eric puts his hands back down, the joking over. “I hope not,” he says quietly.
“What the hell is wrong with you two?” I say, getting exasperated.
Cam recovers his composure quickly. “Eric is jealous.” Eric rolls his eyes.
“Of what?” I can’t help but ask.
Cameron looks down at me, and he smiles that soft half smile that always feels as if it’s just for me.
“Of us. What else?”
His eyes are warm, crinkled softly at the corners, and I can imagine him leaning down, kissing me softly. Something in my chest feels as if it’s melting, warmth oozing through me. My calves tense, almost of their own accord, to lift me to meet him.
Instead, he shifts his gaze to Eric. “Did you hear,” he says smoothly, “that my date to my own engagement party has invited a plus one?”
Eric looks confused. Glances at me. “Aren’t I your plus one?”
Ah. I see what Cam is doing.
“You, as it happens, are one of my plus ones, Eric. A girl has to have a backup.”
“So you invited me and a backup me?” Such confidence.
I shake my head. “Of course not. I invited Marie, and you as backup, Mister Big Fighter Man.” Beside me, Cam chuckles quietly.
It takes a moment for what I’ve said to sink in. Then Eric’s face falls. When it does, Cam laughs for real, long and hard. And even though the situation between Eric and Marie pisses me off—it’s just so melodramatic—the look on Eric’s face makes me want to laugh a little, too, even though I know it would be cruel.
A year ago, Eric and Marie dated. It was brief, like a high wind that comes up and takes your breath away and leaves your hair a mess. Anyone in the same room as the two of them could practically see the sparks between them. It was amazing they didn’t break all the furniture in Marie’s apartment with their constant sex-fighting (that’s what Cam calls it; I’m sure it was just very acrobatic). It was a relationship that seemed to truly be going somewhere. Possibly the hospital, due to falling during unbalanced amorous positions. But definitely somewhere.
But then.
But then Eric was in a bar in Norman, by himself, having a beer and a burger. And some guy started giving the waitress a hard time. A really hard time. Another frat boy who couldn’t keep his hands to himself. Eric could tell it was bothering the waitress, so he told the guy to lay off.
The frat boy, obviously a few beers farther along in his evening than Eric, responded with the quite witty, “Fuck you.”
Eric, in his recounting of the story, says that he tipped his beer at the guy in a “cheers” motion, and said, “Just telling you.”
And of course the other guys sitting at the drunk frat guy’s table egged him on. “You just got told, bro! You gonna take that from that asshole?”
The frat boy, who fancied himself a goes-to-the-gym sorta guy, got up from the table. “You don’t tell me shit, bro.”
If he had only pushed Eric, or tried to hit him, Eric would have just blocked the punches until the guy got frustrated and walked away. But that’s not what the guy did. Instead, the waitress had spotted trouble brewing, and hurried over—with a tray full of empties—to try to smooth things over. And with her loaded tray she wasn’t quite quick enough to move to a safe distance when the frat boy reached out and grabbed her breast.
“See bro,” he said to Eric. “You don’t tell me shit. I do what the fuck I w—”
And that was why Eric hit him instead of just blocking drunken punches. He claims to have taken it easy on him, and maybe he did. Regardless, the guy came out of it with both his eyes swelling shut and half doubled over from the brutalization that happened to his ribs. His friends swooped in and snatched him out of there, escorting him out of the bar quickly.
Later, when the asshole was describing his “crazed, unprovoked attacker” to his younger sister, a petite blond named Marie, his description of Eric was enough to tip her off that the guy that beat the hell out of her big brother—whom she of course admired, because isn’t some degree of blindness an attribute of all baby sisters?—was also the guy that she’d been having violent sex with the past three weeks.
And so she broke up with him. Just like that. She went to the apartment that Eric and Cam share, slapped the hell out of him (Cam claims to have heard that slap while he was taking a shower), and said she never wanted to see him again, and why. And before he could defend himself, tell his side of the story, she stormed out of the apartment and he never saw her again.
Eric was devastated. He, as he told me and Cam one night when he’d had a couple more shots of tequila than he was used to, had never felt like that about any woman before. That there had been so much more between them than just sex. At the time, his description of their relationship reminded me of Cam and me. And later, when I saw Marie at O’Donnelly’s, she told me the same thing. We stood out back, smelling the dumpster, and she sniffled and looked at the ground with eyes rimmed red, and she told me that she had been certain he was the one. But that she couldn’t be with a guy who would do something like that to another person without provocation.
Of course I tried to tell her, to set her straight, but she didn’t want to hear about it. “This is something you can’t understand, Miss Perfect Relationship.”
Marie’s problem is that she’s stubborn, and can’t let go of a misunderstanding. Even now.
I look at Cam out of the corner of my eye. Is she the only woman you know that might possibly be guilty of that?
Eric takes a long drink of his beer, shaking his head. “You guys are just the best.” To Cam: “Do you possibly have any cyanide in the house, so I can just make my final escape right now?”
Cam claps his friend on the shoulder. “Don’t be a drama queen. You never know, something good could happen here. Maybe you’ll find true love.” He glances at me and there’s a glimmer in his eye, a heat. “If it can happen to me, it can happen to you, buddy.”
It’s just us standing here. Nobody to try to fool into believing that we’re engaged. No angle to work. Just Cam, his best friend, and me. No reason to make anything up.
If it can happen to me…
Have I been so wrong for so long? Is there something here I can’t see?
As if to rescue me from my own questions, my phone buzzes in my pocket. I glance at it.
“Speak of the devil,” I mutter.
Eric groans.
Marie’s text reads, “Got stuck on turnpike behind accident. Half hour. How goes the fake engagement? Are they buying it?”
I reply, “So far so good. See you in a few.”
To Tell You So Many Things
Cam
I want to commiserate with my best friend, let him know that there is every chance things will work out with Marie if he just puts in some work.
But what kind of example do I set? I’m certainly not the guy he can look at and say, “Man, now that you tell me this I believe it. Thanks for showing me the way.”
No. I am not the guy to be believed.
Not yet.
But by God I will be.
Aimee has wandered away from me, uncomfortable and trying not to show it. Determined to mingle with the Simons Party Crowd. She may not feel as if she belongs here, but she does. Aimee belongs anywhere she wants to be. Because she is dazzling. She shines with an inner glow that she doesn’t even know she possesses, and it’s bright enough—fierce enough—to warn off anybody here who might wish her to feel uncomfortable.
Then I glance at Eli, who hasn’t moved from his corner in thirty minutes, his strange anti-gravity pushing everyone away from him, and I wonder if my sentimental musing is correct. I think it is, but that Eli might be an exception.
I feel bad for my brother. Terrible. The way our father set him up for a fall, and the way I’ve engineered—inadvertently—for him to be doomed to take it, is unconscionable. It’s worthy of the deep hate I sense coming off my brother in waves.
As if he can sense me looking at him, he glances up without warning and locks eyes with me. His eyes are set deep beneath his brow, and looking into them is like looking into a pit. He’s disliked me for most of our lives, but I have never felt the weight of loathing that practically vibrates out of him.
Where
did that pretty girlfriend of his get off to? A while ago they ate together, their heads leaned so close together they were practically touching. I was impressed. Eli has brought home women before, but always ones that served as arm candy. Not exactly tops in the brains department. I always thought he was just too insecure to be with a girl that was smarter than he was.
Maybe he was, but certainly not now. From what Mom tells me, this girl, Holly Jorgenson, is a certified Mensa genius who writes computer code the way Eric fights: fast, elegant, effortless. The fact that she seems disconnected from the world makes it even more powerful when I see her with Eli. Because as soon as he’s within her sight she’s like a laser, singularly focused on him. Her eyes light up, and a smile breaks across a face that I think has experienced precious few real smiles in its life. Combine this with the fact that she is drop-dead gorgeous, and I would be proud for Eli.
If he could just smile a little himself.
But he can’t break away from what Dad has done to him to truly appreciate the woman in front of him.
I look over at Aimee. My fake fiance. The prop I’m using to secure my future with a company I don’t want, in a family that is so truly fucked up that it is willing—well, Jason is, anyway—to destroy one of its sons in order to make a point to the other son.
Anger wells up inside me.
Not at my family. Not at dad, even, or Eli. Not for the situation. But because of what Aimee is sacrificing so that I can play my father’s little game. Sure, I’m paying her. Sure, I’ll help her mom. But I should have just done that, without Aimee having to go through this charade.
Because she means so much more to me. She means everything to me.
And it’s about time she knows it.
The sun is setting on the other side of the house, and the evening outside the big windows in the dining room is turning that deep shade of lavender that always reminds me of evenings with Aimee. I feel a smile touch my face. The air outside will be crisp, perfect for walking along the side of the highway and along the farmland to the west, to take in the air and the sunset. It’s that kind of Oklahoma night.
All Yours: A Second Chance Romance Page 11
