One and Only

by Jenny Holiday

“We lived in this trailer park, and everyone hated me. They were scared of me.”

  “I’m sure your bark was worse than your bite,” she said, hating the way he was talking about himself, wanting to somehow make it un-true with her words, though that was impossible.

  He finally turned, and he flashed her a small, defeated smile. “Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I became what they saw. The trailer park was called Deer Haven, which was stupid because there were no deer anywhere and the place was not a haven.” She smiled. The way he could inject humor into what was clearly a painful subject made her heart twist. “They started calling me the Devil of Deer Haven.”

  “Well, that’s a little melodramatic.”

  He shrugged. It was strange to be talking to him from so far away. She was still on the stool at the breakfast bar, and he was leaning against the counter next to the stove, which was as far away from her in the kitchen as it was possible to be. “It suited me, for the most part. I was a loner by that point. I didn’t need people bothering me.”

  “So you’re the devil with an angel tattoo?”

  “There was this woman named Mrs. Compton who lived in the park. She was exactly what you picture when someone says the term ‘trailer trash.’ Looked much older than her years, bad dye job, constantly talking about conspiracies and supernatural shit, usually had a wine cooler in hand. But she liked me. She was the only one who did. She had this crackpot idea one summer that she was going to start reading palms and doing tarot cards. So she had all these library books out, and she’d practice on me. She’d give me Oreos. I’d eat with one hand and let her examine the other against the charts in her books. She was always telling me that I was a fallen angel.”

  “Oh,” Jane breathed, understanding dawning. Of course. The tattoo was a fallen angel. The tattoo was him.

  “She’d go on and on about it. I wasn’t the devil like everyone said, she’d insist. I’d just fallen out of heaven.” He rolled his eyes. “I didn’t see much difference. Wasn’t Lucifer himself a fallen angel?”

  “No.” She wasn’t much of a theologian, but she knew comics and science fiction, which were littered with otherworldly beings. “I think there’s a subtle difference.”

  He looked up at her, and she was startled anew by his brilliant turquoise eyes. “And what is that difference?”

  “If you’re a fallen angel, I think it implies that you might get back in. To heaven, I mean.”

  He nodded once, a sharp, decisive nod, like she’d given the correct answer on a test.

  Then he picked up the plate of sandwiches, crossed the kitchen, and set it down on the breakfast bar. “Eat up,” he said, back to his usual gruff self. “You’re going to need your strength for what I’m going to do to you later.”

  There was still something tapping at the edges of her consciousness, a pre-formed thought that wanted to be examined, but she couldn’t quite grab it. Didn’t really want to, truth be told. Instead, she let the innuendo wash over her, warm her, and then chased that warmth away with an involuntary shiver of anticipation. “I can’t eat that,” she said, though the perfectly golden toast with a line of cheese oozing out the sides made her want to cry. “T-minus four days now; it’s after midnight.”

  “Eat,” he commanded, sliding the plate directly under her.

  “Goddamn you,” she said, picking up half a sandwich.

  “Now it’s your turn,” he said, coming around and sitting down next to her at the bar.

  “My turn for what?” she asked even as she groaned through a heavenly bite of buttery, sharp cheddar.

  “If we’re playing midnight confessions, you’re up.”

  She laughed. “Okay, hit me.” She was an open book. He’d seen her vibrators. He’d had his face between her legs, for heaven’s sake. She couldn’t think of anything she wouldn’t feel okay about confessing. Cameron was cool that way—he could be kind of jerky when he chose to, but now that she knew him, she could safely say he was utterly trustworthy. She really could tell him anything.

  “You hardly ever drink. What’s up with that?”

  Except that.

  She exhaled and leaned forward, resting her elbows on the counter and her head in her hands.

  “It’s okay,” he said quickly. “You don’t have to answer.” It wasn’t lost on her that she’d used the exact same words on him earlier, when he’d reacted to her asking him about his tattoos. She was pretty sure that he had never told anyone the true meaning behind that angel tattoo. He had trusted her. Could she do the same?

  Warmth flooded her chest. Of course she could. Hadn’t she just been thinking how trustworthy he was? She took a deep breath. “My dad was an alcoholic.”

  He nodded. “That’s rough.”

  She shook her head, not because she disagreed, but because that wasn’t the hard part.

  “I used to kind of cover for him,” she started, trying to think how to put everything in context. “I was the youngest—my brother is four years older. And my mom was deep in denial. He hated disappointing her, but it was like he couldn’t…”

  “Couldn’t not drink?” Cameron finished gently.

  She nodded, hating that a lump had formed in her throat. “So I kind of took it upon myself to try to…minimize the evidence. Like, I’d put him to bed in the guest room. Or if he was out late, I’d try to stay up and meet him at the door with a snack to make sure he didn’t make too much noise banging around in the kitchen. Or…” God, it was so humiliating, though she wasn’t sure why. Her mature, rational mind knew that none of it was her fault. “When he got sick, I’d clean it up.” She swallowed hard. “Somehow, it was important to me that my mom not know how bad things really were. But of course, as an adult I can see that she had to have known.”

  “Oh, sweetheart,” he said, laying a hand on her forearm. She could feel his gaze, but she didn’t turn her head. Since they were sitting side by side, she could get away with not looking at him, so she kept staring straight ahead. It was the only way she could do this.

  “How old were you when this was going on?” he asked quietly.

  She shrugged. She couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t. “Five, maybe, when it started? Six?” she ventured. “I don’t really remember. It was just always a thing I did, until…”

  He squeezed her forearm tighter, and she appreciated that he didn’t prod her to continue. In fact, paradoxically, it was his patience that made her want to keep going. Now that she’d started, she wanted to unburden herself fully.

  “So anyway, I was a big reader. The library was my happy place, you know?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You don’t say?”

  She chuckled, loving the gentle teasing. “When I was eleven, I found this shelf of books in the kids’ nonfiction section about being the child of an alcoholic. There was this stuff in one of them about how often kids of alcoholics are forced to parent their parents. It was like a lightbulb went off—that was exactly what I was doing. So then I went and got grown-up books on the subject. There was this one targeted at spouses of alcoholics. It had a chapter about protecting your children from your spouse. Not physically—my dad was never violent. But, like, stuff about how it wasn’t fair to expect the child to step into the parental role, and how it could actually create lasting psychological damage, blah, blah. Anyway, I got mad.” Her skin felt hot and prickly just thinking about it, a mixture of residual anger and shame over what that anger had spawned. “Cameron, I got so mad.”

  She paused. Was she really going to continue? She kind of felt, stupidly, like telling this story to another person would make it more real. And making it more real might make it more painful. And she wasn’t sure she could deal with that. But then the hand that had been resting on her forearm slid down and grabbed her hand.

  His hand was so big. So warm.

  She took a shaky breath. “I didn’t dare bring those books into the house. I read them in the library, put them back on the shelf, and I went home. I was seething. I mean, I’m
sure puberty had something to do with it, but mostly I was just done. Like, a switch had flipped inside me. When I got home, he was drunk, which wasn’t unusual. I was the only one there. My brother was a top student, and his schedule was loaded with extracurriculars.” Extracurriculars that he had to quit, later, so he could work to support them. Jane would never forget that. “My mom wasn’t home. He was out of booze. That used to happen a lot, and it would tick me off. Like, didn’t he know by now how much he needed? Why couldn’t he plan ahead? Normally, I’d talk him out of driving to get more. I’d make him a sandwich and tell him I needed help with my homework. I never did, but that always seemed to trigger something in him. Like, he was fine with being a drunk, but some part of him didn’t want to be a shitty parent. So sometimes food and math homework would be enough to sort of land the plane, and he’d go pass out. But sometimes it wouldn’t work, and he would be determined. Those times, I used to feel like the best thing I could do was call him a cab. I’d stall him and do it on the sly, so that when it arrived it was easier for him to accept without damaging his pride—like, oh, this cab is here, might as well take it.”

  “You had to grow up too soon,” Cameron said.

  She wanted to say that it was fine. That it was probably nothing compared to what lots of kids go through. That her brother was the one who’d had to grow up too soon. But more than that, she wanted to keep going with the story. Now that she’d started, now that she had this big, warm, safe hand to hold on to, she needed to get it all out, to voice the words that she’d never said to another human being. “But that day, I decided not to do anything. I came home, took stock of the situation, and…told him I was done. I didn’t yell or anything, just basically recited everything I’d learned from my reading. I told him he had ruined my childhood. He was shocked. I was shocked. He tried to apologize, but I’d freaked myself out so much with the confrontation that I shook off his entreaties and went to hide in my room.”

  She appreciated that Cameron didn’t say anything. He simply sat there next to her, listening without judgment. She held on to his hand like he was a life raft and let the next sentence rush out of her mouth before she could swallow it back. “I heard him leave. I heard him close the front door and start the car. I did nothing. He drove off and crashed into a giant tree and died.”

  “Oh, sweetheart.”

  She could tell there was more coming, and she didn’t want it. She turned to him for the first time since she’d started her sad tale, and, yes, there was sympathy in his eyes. Pity even. Not acceptable. So she tugged her hand from his grasp and held it up to him, palm open. “Don’t try to tell me it’s not my fault. If I had done my usual caretaking thing, my dad would still be alive today.”

  To his credit, Cameron didn’t say what she expected, which was some variation on “it’s not your fault.” Or “he was the addict.” He merely nodded, not like he was agreeing with her necessarily, but like he was hearing her and wasn’t going to contradict her.

  So she took a deep breath and confessed the rest. “The worst part is that my big decision to stop enabling him was selfish. I wasn’t doing it because I wanted him to get better, to stop drinking. It was entirely self-interested. I simply didn’t want to deal with him anymore.”

  She took a shaky breath. It was out. It was kind of anticlimactic, but it was still a huge relief. She had considered confessing, but to whom? It would have destroyed her mother. Her brother was too busy keeping them together. And later, with some distance from the situation, she’d thought about telling the girls. But they would have tried to talk her out of feeling the way she felt, and the way she felt was part of her. It had shaped everything that had come afterward.

  But as relieved as she felt to have told someone, now she needed a way to figure out how to get things back to normal with Cameron. Because she didn’t want to talk anymore. Later, she’d have to examine what it meant that she’d told her deepest secret. Later.

  “You haven’t asked about the sleeve,” Cameron said.

  “Huh?” What was he talking about?

  He laid his tattooed arm on the counter between them. “You asked about the others, but not the sleeve.”

  Jane’s breath caught a little. God bless him; he was giving her exactly what she had been silently wishing for—a return to normalcy. He knew somehow, and he was turning the conversation back to him, trying to draw her pain onto him.

  She smiled, overwhelmed with emotion because at that moment, it felt like the nicest thing anyone had ever done for her. It took a few seconds for her to find her voice. “Right, so, Cameron, what’s the deal with the sleeve?”

  He rotated his arm back and forth, showing off the swirling mixture of trees and flowers and stylized waves and stars. “It doesn’t mean anything.” He grinned. “It’s just generalized badassery.” Then he shoved the rest of his grilled cheese into his mouth.

  “I don’t know,” she said, picking up her own abandoned sandwich even as she took the cue he was so generously handing her. “I don’t know how badass flowers are. You should have gotten a Terminator arm or, like, naked ladies and AK-47s.”

  He put his hands on his hips in mock outrage. “Are you impugning my manhood?”

  She shook her head. “Oh, no. I would never do that. I’ve seen your manhood.”

  He swatted her butt playfully. “Yeah, well, finish your sandwich, because you’re about to do more than see it.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  TUESDAY—FOUR DAYS BEFORE THE WEDDING

  Some guys had a thing about sleeping with a woman after sex. If it was just a hookup, they wanted out as soon as the main event was over. Cam never saw the big deal. After sex, he was tired. And if he was in a warm bed with a soft woman, the path of least resistance was to stay there. So he had done his share of sleepovers, in the era between Alicia and Christie. Guys were always like, “But, dude, you gotta manage her expectations. You gotta get out of there.”

  Cam’s take was that he was going to get out of there—the next morning. You could communicate a lot with the way you left a situation, so what did it matter if you left in the middle of the night or waited until the sun came up? Women weren’t stupid—at least not any stupider than men—and when you left before breakfast, issuing a vague “I’ll text you,” everyone knew what it meant.

  So, yeah, he was fine with the sleepover in theory. This particular sleepover, though, was giving him some trouble. Namely, he wasn’t actually sleeping. Usually he fell into a sated sleep after sex. The military shrink he’d seen after his first deployment had been forever asking him about nightmares, trouble sleeping, racing thoughts at night. No, no, and no. He’d always figured he was lucky that way. He was definitely fucked up from watching his brothers blown to bits, but it didn’t invade his daily life too much. It manifested itself only in particular surroundings—usually in wide-open spaces where he felt like the enemy could come from anywhere.

  But tonight. Jane. With her gentle questioning, it was like she had opened a box that had been hidden deep inside his chest, one he had gotten so used to it had become like furniture, something to be walked around but not, fundamentally, of any concern. Mostly, he avoided talking about his tattoos. Or, when people pushed him, he gave some kind of bullshit answer. It was easy. People expected him to have tattoos. He was that kind of guy. They didn’t expect him to have a big emotional story behind them.

  God. The idea that Mrs. Compton had planted all those years ago. That he was more than what he’d done. That maybe his fucked-up-ness could be temporary. That he could get back into heaven. He hadn’t done anything with it then. Had continued doing his thing—working just enough to not get fired, sleeping around, partying.

  But then Jay had come back for a visit, a few years after Alicia’s family had left town and Cam had quit school, and suggested Cam consider the military. Cam hadn’t done anything with the advice just then—except reject it—but underneath Cam’s defensive dismissals that day, the idea lurked. The image of himsel
f in another place, somewhere halfway around the world where nobody knew him. Where they might be able to teach him how to do something important. He owed Jay a lot. It had taken balls to come home and initiate “the chat.” Cam had been so angry then, so utterly unable to see beyond his own misery. “What are you waiting for?” Jay had asked, his tone not angry but also not kind. “Are you waiting for your father to come back?” When Cam had scoffed—perhaps a little too hard—at that, he’d followed with, “Are you waiting to die? Because that’s about all I can see that’s going on here.”

  No, Cam had said, and he’d meant it. He wasn’t suicidal. But Jay’s words had staying power. They rattled around inside him over the next few years. They made him wonder about the difference between being actively suicidal and just sitting around taking up space, passing the time until death arrived.

  What was he waiting for?

  On his twenty-second birthday, while blowing out the candle on a cupcake his mom had brought over to his trailer—his trailer that had been such a falling-down disaster that it had embarrassed even him—the answer had come into his brain fully formed, and it had shocked the hell out of him. He wasn’t waiting to die; he was waiting for everyone to give up. His mom and Jay, specifically. Because they were the only ones who hadn’t. They were the only ones left who loved him—hell, who tolerated him at all. Even Mrs. Compton had died by then, and her kids had come over and cleaned out her trailer and sold it.

  Once Jay and Mom stopped tolerating him—as he knew in his heart they would one day—he would be alone. So he was practicing. Or trying to encourage them to get on with it, like pulling off a Band-Aid quickly rather than drawing it out.

  But what if Mrs. Compton, and later, Jay, had been right? What if he could reverse direction? Stop the free fall?

  And so it had begun. His Hail Mary pass. And for a while, it seemed like it was working. Basic training kicked his ass, but he stuck it out. His first tour had been a success. Yes, it came with PTSD as a door prize, but he’d actually been good at being a soldier. Not that he had any particular skills, but he flattered himself that he was strong and loyal. A good grunt.