10 Years Later

by J. Sterling

  You’re a selfish shit, I told myself, realizing that I had no right to feel this way. I didn’t own Cammie, but fuck me if I didn’t want to. I had been a supreme idiot back in high school when it came to her—not that she was perfect either.

  Cammie was stubborn and refused to listen to reason. Two qualities that I admired, actually, except when she used them against me, and then they became her worst quality. Not that I ever told her any of that. Hell, I never told her half the things I should have.

  What the hell did I know about good, healthy relationships? Absolutely nothing. I was raised in such a high degree of dysfunction, I could have majored in it. My parents had only gotten married when my mom found out she was pregnant with me. Them they spent the next seventeen years of their lives hating, ignoring, and blaming each other for their misery. My house was filled to the brim with the emotions of two people who couldn’t stand the sight of each other. They never talked unless it included screaming or yelling. The worst part was that I had no idea this sort of thing wasn’t normal.

  My parents divorced the summer before my senior year, and it was as much of a relief to me as it was a shock. Even after I finally realized how screwed up their relationship was, them actually calling it quits and my dad moving out messed with my head more than I could have ever imagined. They might have hated each other, but at least they were together. I was a mess emotionally that last year of high school. And even though Cammie ended up being the single bright spot during that drab year, I kept all my feelings to myself.

  Tucker’s annoying voice broke through my trip down memory lane. “Does she know she’s the reason you became a cop?”

  “Dude, she doesn’t even know I’m a cop at all. You know this already.” Damn, if I didn’t sound like a whiny bitch.

  My mind continued its journey into the past, digging up old feelings and emotions I tended to keep to myself. For as unloving as my parents had been to each other, I had never felt unloved. My mom constantly doted on me, gave me hugs every time she saw me, and told me she loved me every day. But she also apologized a lot for not giving me enough, or being there enough, or doing enough. I learned pretty early on what guilt felt like when she told me these things as tears streamed down her face.

  It wasn’t intentional on my mom’s part, I finally realized that as an adult, but it was still pretty shitty to experience that as a kid. All I knew at the time was that I had done something that made my mom cry. A lot. And I didn’t know how to not feel bad about that. I didn’t understand that her crying wasn’t even about me, because she never tried to explain it all that well.

  My dad was definitely colder and more standoffish than my mom was. He only hugged me occasionally, but I still knew that he loved me. Maybe it was the way he looked at me with less hatred in his eyes, or that his tone of voice wasn’t the same cruel one that he used with my mom . . . whatever it was, it was his way of letting me know that he didn’t dislike me the same way he disliked her. And the boy in me who craved the acceptance of his father, took it for what it was. My point being—I felt loved. And in the grand scheme of things, that was what mattered.

  “So you didn’t play sports,” Tucker said. “But you were the class president, though, right? Didn’t you tell me that once?”

  I frowned, trying to remember ever sharing that with him. “Yeah, I was.”

  “Did you have posters and stuff? Bake cupcakes telling everyone to Vote-4-Dalton?” he asked as he held up four fingers, chuckling and clearly making fun of me.

  I hated admitting this to him. “Yes to the posters. No to the cupcakes. The posters were a requirement, okay?”

  I remembered painting the posters in my living room with my mom. We had spent half the night trying to come up with clever words that rhymed with Dalton. And when that didn’t work, we tried rhyming with Thomas. Double fail.

  Tucker shot me a questioning glance. “But you won.”

  “Hell yes, I won!” I exclaimed, as if it was a no-brainer.

  He looked at me before making a face. “Did no one run against you?”

  I spit out a laugh. “No, smartass. I ran against three other guys, actually.”

  “Stud,” he said, actually sounding impressed.

  “I was well liked,” I said with a smug smile.

  “Apparently. What made you want to do that? Run for president, I mean?”

  Staring out the windshield as I relaxed into the seat, I thought hard about his question. It had been a long time since I’d thought about my days as class president.

  “I really wanted to get into college and since I wasn’t playing any sports, I needed all the extra shit I could get that would look good on my applications.”

  “That’s seriously why?”

  “Yup.”

  When I was about thirteen or fourteen, I finally realized that not all parents and households were as messed up as mine, so I decided that I needed to get away for my own sanity. I looked at a map of the United States and determined then and there that I would do whatever it took to get accepted to a decent college on the East Coast, and New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts all seemed like perfect candidates. They were just about as far away from California as you could get.

  I met with my guidance counselor at school and found out exactly what I needed to do to give me the best chances for college acceptance and an academic scholarship. My future was in my own hands. If I failed to get good grades, I could kiss college good-bye. My parents would never be able to afford to send me to school, let alone out of state.

  It had been one of the few times I was thankful I didn’t play any sports. Being an athlete would have been a time-consuming luxury I couldn’t afford. Instead, I focused on my studies, participated in student council, ran for class president when I was able to, and joined various clubs. I was nothing if not a kid determined to change his future, even if I had no clue what I wanted to do.

  “Let’s talk about this weekend,” Tucker suggested. “What are you going to say to her?”

  “I’m not discussing this with you.”

  He punched my arm, and I stiffened as he said, “Don’t be like that. We both know I’m your best friend. If you don’t tell me, who the hell else are you gonna tell?”

  Tucker was right. He had grown to become my closest friend since we became partners three years ago back in New York. We had been working undercover on different aspects of this case in separate divisions before the Feds got involved and paired us together to join forces, minds, and information. He was a stubborn ass at first, but I eventually wore him down, and we’d been joined at the hip ever since.

  I even convinced him to transfer out to LA with me when one of our lead crime family members, Mickey Scarino, moved to the area to expand operations to the West Coast. It didn’t hurt that Tucker’s girlfriend had dumped him a few months prior, and he figured it was time to seek greener pastures.

  Mickey Scarino was one scary son of a bitch who never gave second chances. His temper was legendary, and it usually entered the room before he did. If anyone so much as spoke out against him or questioned his reasoning, he chopped off a finger. Allegedly. He was also smart as hell. In this day and age, you didn’t climb the ranks of a crime organization without being extremely intelligent and one step ahead of everyone, including our squad.

  We were on surveillance duty pretty much twenty-four/seven, fed by leads thanks to my informant Eddie, who was still located on the East Coast. Eddie was the guy who let me know about the West Coast move and the planned operations there. He had been feeding me information for years, and so far, everything he told me had panned out. I trusted him as much as I could trust a member of the mob who wanted to stay out of federal prison.

  Born and raised in Brooklyn, Tucker never thought he’d leave. But one visit to Santa Monica and he was convinced he had found his new home. “These are some of the best tits I’ve ever seen in my life. They’re everywhere. And I want to meet them all,” he confessed to me after a day at the beach.
I laughed, knowing that eventually even fake tits got old, especially when they were attached to vapid, self-absorbed, brainless females.

  Tucker gave me a knowing look. “You don’t even have a plan, do you?”

  “I have a plan!” I lied, knowing that it wasn’t really a plan per se, as much as it was a mission. Get Cammie. The end.

  “What is it? You Cammie, me Dalton,” he mocked as he pounded his chest like Tarzan. “You my woman now.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “I like it.”

  “You would. Fucking caveman.” He reached down toward his feet and pulled up a bag filled with snacks.

  Shrugging my shoulders, I glanced at him. “I figured I’d try and start with talking.”

  “You should start with kissing,” he said seriously.

  “Now who’s the caveman?”

  He snorted as he pawed through the contents of the bag in his lap. “Still you. You’re just the new kind of caveman. The sensitive kind. A metrosexual caveman who cares about feelings and shit, but secretly still wants to drag her by the hair and pull her into your lair.”

  “I’m not metrosexual, and you’re an idiot.”

  “Yeah, but I’m your idiot.” He smiled before taking a bite of a cold egg sandwich.

  “Are you in love with me? Is that what this is about?” I said, fucking with him.

  He snorted again. “You wish I was in love with you.” His accent came out even thicker as his mouth was filled with food. “Right now I’m in love with this healthy egg white sandwich crap you made me eat.”

  “It’s good for you,” I insisted, relieved that he liked the sandwich. Tucker ate like a Mack truck, and ever since we moved here, I’d been trying to get him to eat better things.

  “I said I liked it,” he mumbled around a mouthful.

  “You said you loved it. See, I’m smart.”

  “I might not be as smart as you, but our guy just walked out to have a smoke.” He pointed with the hand holding his sandwich two blocks ahead at the man we’d been gathering information on ever since we transferred to California.

  I reached into the backseat to pull out the department-issued camera and started taking pictures of our suspect using a long lens. Anyone who came outside to talk to him got their picture taken as well. It was like being in photography class all over again . . .

  • • •

  As I had walked into Advanced Photography my senior year of high school, my heart had thudded against my chest at the sight of Cammie Carmichael sitting in the back of the class alone. Her head was down like it had been so many times since that day last year, and she’d been writing something in a red spiral notebook. The shorts she wore were so short, they made her legs look like they went on for miles. Not that I minded the view.

  I took the empty chair next to her and reached out to touch her arm. The contact sent a buzz through my fingertips and straight to my dick. She jerked her head up, her long brown hair spilling across her shoulders, and I thought her eyes lit up as she noticed it was me.

  If it was possible to remove someone’s pain, I wished in that moment that I could do it. Cammie’s world had fractured into a million broken pieces, and I desperately wanted to pick them all up and carry them until she was whole again. I wanted that light that used to shine out of her every day to come back. It killed me to watch her pull away from life.

  “You’re in this class?” Her expression softened, and I longed to reach out and run my fingers down her cheek.

  “Yep,” was all I managed to say in response.

  “I’m glad.” She smiled again before focusing her attention on the teacher at the front of the room.

  • • •

  “Yo. Earth to dickwad. Jesus, seriously?” Tucker snapped his fingers in front of my eyes, his voice breaking through my concentration as I followed the suspect with the lens of the camera, clicking the button at his every step.

  “What?” I played innocent.

  “You took another trip to Cammie Land.”

  “You don’t know what I was thinking about.” I narrowed my eyes as I looked through the lens, making sure it was in focus.

  “The hell I don’t. You get this stupid look on your face whenever you think about her. I was trying to tell you to make sure you got that guy in the gray suit too.” He pointed at some new guy standing next to Mickey.

  “I’m getting everyone that comes out to talk to our perp. You think I’m stupid?” I snapped at him as our suspect sauntered back into the building.

  Tucker tossed his egg sandwich wrapper on the floor of the car. “This case is never gonna end. I swear to God, we’re still gonna be working it at your next reunion.”

  “It’s going to end,” I said as I replaced the lens cap on the camera and set it down in the backseat.

  We had followed this syndicate for years, gathering information and building a case. These things took time, a lot of time. We only had one shot to bring this major crime network to its knees, so we had to do it right. I had often wondered this myself, though, how much longer we’d be doing this.

  “It has to end at some point,” I huffed out as I started the engine.

  “When it does, we’ll be fucking heroes,” Tucker said with a laugh, and my blood instantly cooled.

  The word hero was usually reserved for people who died doing brave things, and if that was what it took to become one, I wasn’t sure I was ready. I bit my tongue, and Tucker mistook my silence as another Cammie moment.

  “Hey.” He nudged my arm. “At least you know she’s still single, right? That’s a good thing. Considering you want to go all caveman on her and shit.”

  I laughed. Tucker was a dumbass, but he still cracked me up. “I don’t know what I would have done if she wasn’t single. Seriously.”

  “You wouldn’t be going to this reunion, that’s for sure.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” I admitted, shaking my head. “No way I could have handled seeing her there with someone else. I’ve waited too long for this.”

  I didn’t need Tucker to remind me about what a blessing it was that a girl like Cammie was still available. I thanked the freaking stars every morning I woke up and heard her talking on the air about not having a boyfriend. If anyone changed that status, it was going to be me. And I was going to start this weekend at the reunion, even if she tried to avoid me or push me away like she did before.

  I remember the day she stopped talking to me, the hurt look in her eyes letting me know that I had done something completely unforgivable. I didn’t even know what the hell I did to make her so upset, but I planned to find out. I might have been a stupid young kid back then who allowed her to walk away, but I was a man now. And a man rights his wrongs, admits where he screwed up, and goes after what he wants.

  And what I wanted was her.

  Best Friends

  Cammie

  My cell phone rang around six p.m., startling me out of the sleeplike trance I’d fallen into. Getting up at four in the morning tended to take its toll on me, and I hated the fact that I could no longer be a night owl like I used to be.

  Kristy’s name flashed across the screen, accompanied by a ridiculous selfie of her making duck lips, which always made me smile.

  “Hooker,” I answered.

  “Whore,” she responded, and I chuckled. “Nice show this morning. I almost keeled over the desk at my office.”

  Kristy worked as an assistant at a law firm. I had no idea how she managed to listen to the show every morning without getting fired, but Kristy could be pretty persuasive when she needed to be. Which was a good quality in a future lawyer, if you asked me.

  I sat straight up on my couch, pulling my feet underneath me. “Holy shit, Kris, I almost died. I thought they knew about Dalton, and I was freaking the hell out.”

  “So was I. It’s not like the guy you liked in high school was named Matt or something. Everyone would have known exactly who you were talking about. And you know everyone from school still listens to that show. They
’ve been listening to Tom and John forever.”

  “Trust me, I’m aware.”

  “So, how’d the little shits find out about the reunion anyway?”

  “My boss, Scott, must have mentioned it to them in the morning meeting.”

  I tried to keep my personal life private at work, but it was harder than it sounded. We were more than coworkers at my office, and we tended to tell each other the kinds of things that friends would. I figured it was the same in most places of business. How could you spend nine hours a day with people and not become friends on some level?

  “You can’t tell those people anything!” Kristy yelled, and I pulled the phone away from my ear.

  “I know. I wish I could just keep quiet sometimes, but it’s hard. I mean, we talk about our lives and stuff. Don’t you do that at work?”

  “Oh, shit yeah. We tell each other everything. I know exactly what half the people did here on any given weekend,” she said with a laugh. “But then again, I don’t work at a radio station where any stories that get told have the potential of being broadcast to over half the state.”

  “Our signal doesn’t reach that far,” I said, correcting her absentmindedly.

  “Ugh. You know what I mean. You have to be careful about the things you tell those people. That’s all.”

  Kristy was right, and I knew it. “It’s harder than it seems.” I didn’t want to be closed off and unapproachable at work, and even though I knew things from my life could be used as radio fodder, normally I never minded. This morning just happened to hit a little too close to home for comfort.

  “You’re leaving for the hotel tomorrow after the show, right?”

  “In theory, yes. I might have to stay after and help prep for the weekly on-air staff meeting, but I should still get there before you do.”