One and Only

by Jenny Holiday

  And he couldn’t do that to her. No fucking way.

  So he did what he had to do: he shook his head.

  He wanted to do it gently, to infuse that “no” gesture with all the regret in his heart. So he only shook his head a little—the slightest amount, really.

  It was enough.

  Tears rushed to the corners of her eyes, and she clamped a hand over her mouth.

  He wanted to crush her to him, to soothe away the hurt he had caused. But that would only be self-serving, would only prolong the pain and complicate the untangling. The best thing he could do for her was cut her loose as kindly but decisively as possible.

  So he dropped his gaze from her gorgeous face to the ground—where it belonged.

  Somebody gasped.

  The square pattern in the parquet flooring at his feet blurred.

  He swiped his hand over his traitorous eyes, and, keeping his gaze squarely on the floor, he turned and walked out of the room.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  He ignored them all. Jay’s insistent pounding. His mother’s gentle pleas. Even Elise had come by and knocked and yelled at him through the locked door of his room.

  Eventually, they gave up. He heard them whispering in the hallway, wondering if he had actually left somehow, though they noted his car was still in the lot.

  “If you’re in there, I need to talk to you,” Jay shouted.

  Yeah, that was not happening. No one was going to tell him anything he hadn’t already told himself. Nothing that came out of their mouths would shame him more than he already was. He had fancied himself a fallen angel before? He’d had no fucking idea how much farther there was to fall.

  “The end.”

  He read the words aloud because they applied to so much more than just book one in the Clouded Cave series, didn’t they?

  He set his Kindle down on the bed beside him and closed his eyes.

  What a book.

  He allowed himself one moment of…happiness wasn’t the right word. Pride maybe? Gratification? To think that the person who had written such an amazing book had, for one moment, deluded herself into thinking she wanted him. It was astonishing.

  He could see where all her bravery came from, too. It was all right there in her book. In her characters. It was like she was trying out those feelings, playing with different permutations, in her story. As the main character emerged into the alternative world through the cave and her eyes were opened to the injustices of that world, she could have gone right back through to her own world. The universe of the book allowed that—it was a two-way portal.

  It did not seem to him a mistake that the woman who had leaped off the CN Tower despite her intense fear—and who confronted her sick father—had also written this book.

  He picked up the Kindle again and downloaded book two. Since she was writing for children—on the surface of things—her books weren’t long. It had taken him only two hours to read the first one. And he was going to spend the whole goddamned night torturing himself with the rest.

  He was halfway through book two when the pounding started again.

  “Cameron MacKinnon, open this motherfucking door, or I will break it the hell down!”

  Gia.

  He almost laughed. The doors in this place were old and the locks so flimsy as to be almost decorative, but the idea of the tiny wisp of a model breaking down his door was incongruently amusing.

  She broke the door down.

  He bolted to a sitting position. “What the fuck, Gia?”

  “That’s my line, Cameron!” she shouted, stalking toward the bed and grabbing the tie he still wore and using it to haul him up to a sitting position. Once he was upright, she let go of him, put her hands on her hips, and said, slowly, “What. The. Fuck.”

  Then she slapped him.

  The commotion drew Jay, who was next door.

  He walked in, shaking his head. “God, man.” The disappointment radiated off him in waves, but Cam was used to that.

  “What’s going on up here?”

  Fuck. His mom. He was used to disappointing her, too, but after their unspoken reconciliation, it was hard to face her.

  And bringing up the rear was Elise. The one who’d stuck Jane with him in the first place. The one who hadn’t trusted him not to ruin things. The smart one.

  “Where’s Jane?” he asked through the hands he had buried his head in.

  “As if you have any right to know,” Gia said, and he nodded because she was right.

  “Wendy took her to a motel in town for the night,” said Elise with an eerie calm, given how particular she’d been about making sure all things wedding related were perfect. “She didn’t want to spend the night here. They just left.”

  Which explained why Hurricane Gia had descended with such force just then.

  Elise, who’d been standing closest to the partially unhinged door, fit it back into place. There was a soft click as it closed, but he heard it like the slamming of a jail cell, sealing his fate.

  They all started talking at once. Gia was screaming about how she’d specifically warned him not to hurt Jane. His mother kept saying she thought he had changed, she hoped he had changed. Jay was trying to get everyone else to stop talking.

  Cam sat there and let them come at him. Let the ocean of recriminations wash over him, but instead of scouring him clean, the current left a pile of algae and sea trash in its wake.

  “Do you love her?”

  When Elise asked the question, everyone stopped talking. She hadn’t raised her voice, so Cam wasn’t really sure how he, and everyone else, had even heard her. But the simple, calm question cut through all the agitation in the room, quieting the storm.

  “Tell me the truth,” Elise said. “Do you love her?”

  He looked down at his discarded Kindle. It was in sleep mode, with a picture of the cover of Jane’s book on the screen. He reached out to touch it, as if it were a talismanic object that could lend him some of its power.

  “Yes.”

  Once he told the truth—after that little “yes”—he tried to make them see that it didn’t actually change anything. He tried to explain to them that it was because he loved Jane that he had rejected her. That a quick, singular humiliation was better than the lifetime of disappointment he was otherwise capable of inflicting. When had he ever done right by a woman? He tried to make them understand that he’d gotten it wrong from day one, with Alicia.

  “That wasn’t your baby,” his mother said quietly, drawing an astonished gasp from Jay.

  “What? You knew?” Cam demanded, suddenly angry. She had known that all these years? Hot adrenaline coursed through him.

  “Her parents came to see me before they left town,” she said. “I should have told you, but…”

  “But what?” he demanded, trying and failing to wrap his head around this new information.

  “You were hurting so much,” she said, still speaking softly, like he was a wild animal she was trying not to spook. “You started pushing me away. I was afraid you would see my knowledge as an intrusion on a matter you were trying to keep private. As overstepping.” He thought about how often in those years he had accused her of precisely that. Even an innocent question about his day he would twist into an unwelcome invasion of his privacy. “I’m sorry,” she said, holding her hands out to him like she wanted to come closer but didn’t dare. “I can see now that it was the wrong decision, but at the time I thought I was preserving your dignity. Respecting your privacy. Protecting what was left of our relationship.”

  So his mother knew the truth about Alicia.

  And of course Jay knew the truth about Christie. Which he proceeded to share with everyone. The whole humiliating story about how Cam had come home to find that she’d…moved on.

  And it went on from there. Cam felt like he was in a witness box being cross-examined by a hostile prosecutor. Except that was wrong, because everyone in this absurdist courtroom was defending him. He was the one insist
ing on his own guilt. So if he was the prosecutor, who was that guy on the stand everyone was arguing about?

  And just like in a courtroom, they were twisting what he said, ferreting out little bits of truth, piecing together the big picture. When his mother asked him a series of direct questions about the circumstances surrounding his discharge from the army, he couldn’t lie to her. Whatever else happened, he was done hurting his mother. Their time together yesterday had meant everything to him.

  “So what you’re saying,” said Gia, holding up her hands like they were at an evangelical revival, “is that you let yourself take the fall for this Becky person. The same way you did for your high school girlfriend.”

  “It’s not that simple—”

  Jay cut him off. “From where I’m standing, I’m thinking, yes, it is that simple.”

  How to make them understand that intentions didn’t matter? That it all added up to the same outcome? That what people believed about him had become true—or maybe it always had been true. That the distinction didn’t matter. A fallen angel was still fallen.

  “I owe you an apology,” said Jay.

  “What? No.” Goddamn it. He did not need that. He didn’t want it.

  Then the room exploded again, starting with Jay and Cam arguing over who owed whom an apology, then on to Gia and his mom drawing wild, unfounded conclusions over what they were calling his secret heroism.

  “Enough.” Cam raised his voice to cut through the din, unleashing some of his accumulated anger at his audience. “The details don’t matter. What matters is that I’m no good for—” Fuck. His voice broke. He couldn’t even say her name. “For someone like her,” he finished on a mortifying whisper.

  The room was silent for a long moment. At least that was something. Then his brother spoke. “We’ve had our troubles over the years, Cam, but I never took you for a coward.”

  Everything in Cam revolted at the word. It had taken every ounce of strength he had to witness Jane, walking toward him with her heart on her sleeve, prepared to give him everything, and to look at her with a blank face and turn his eyes to the ground. That wasn’t cowardice. That was the strongest fucking thing he’d ever done. He wanted to lunge at his brother, to pummel him with his fists. But instead he pulled back sharply on the thin thread of control he still had, and said, “I’ll only hurt her. I can’t do that. I refuse to let her settle for me.”

  “You’re not afraid of hurting her. You’re afraid of getting hurt yourself. I get it. You had a bad run, with Alicia and Christie, but—”

  “Christie may have done a shitty thing,” Cam said, unable to stop himself from interrupting, “but she saved me. Christie and the army saved me.” He huffed a bitter laugh. “For a while, anyway.”

  Jay scoffed. “Really? Because from where I’m standing, it’s looking a lot more like you saved yourself.” When Cam didn’t respond, Jay threw up his hands. “Anyway, as I was saying: You want to be a coward? Slink away with your tail between your legs? Fine. Your prerogative, bro. But at least own up to what it is you’re actually afraid of.”

  The thin thread connecting Cam to his sense of control finally snapped. He moved toward his brother, thinking of nothing but getting Jay to shut that taunting mouth. But Jay, ever the bigger brother, was quicker than Cam. The room exploded again as Jay shoved him, hard.

  “Stop,” said Elise, holding up a hand. Like before, her quiet certainty cut through the din. Cam realized with a start that she had been utterly silent this whole time, that she hadn’t spoken since she’d posed her initial question. A question she repeated now, looking right at him as she spoke. “Do you love her? I don’t really give a shit about the past, or intentions, or fears. That’s the only question that matters, so I’m going to ask it again. Do. You. Love. Her?”

  He was so tired. Tired of fighting. He was a soldier, but he was a defeated one. He spoke quietly, but the single syllable was a roaring river in his ears. “Yes.”

  “So what the hell are you still doing here?”

  “What am I supposed to do? Run after her and tell her I made a mistake? That I’m sorry I publicly humiliated her?” Even as he spoke, though, something heavy and unfamiliar gathered in his gut. It was like that big shove from his brother had jarred all the fear out of his body. And this thing he was left with? He was pretty sure it was hope, though he would have expected hope to be light like a feather, capable of taking flight, not cumbersome and sick-making. But the weight of their arguments, as they started to make a twisted kind of sense, was actually staggering. “Tell her I’m sorry? Those are just words. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all. Intentions don’t matter. Words don’t matter. Not with me anyway. My actions have spoken for themselves.” It was by his actions he’d been damned. It was because of his actions that he didn’t deserve Jane.

  “So don’t tell her you’re sorry,” said Elise calmly. “Don’t tell her how you feel. Show her.”

  Show her.

  Elise might as well have slapped him. He sucked in a breath.

  Show her.

  Could he…do that?

  “Yes,” Gia said, her calm voice all the more potent because she’d spent the last several minutes yelling. “You think you don’t deserve Jane, and God knows I’m inclined to agree with you. But shouldn’t you let her make that decision? You say you love her? Then have some goddamned respect. Don’t assume you know what she wants. So man the fuck up, Cameron, and show her how you feel.”

  “How?” He allowed the single syllable to fall from his lips because…Dear God, because he was finally defeated, convicted at his own trial. Either that or he was insane, infected by this hope virus, a fast-acting poison that was attacking all his systems at once.

  “I don’t know,” said Elise. “But it has to be big. I don’t think more words are going to work on Jane. She lives with words all day long.”

  She was right. Jane felt things through her stories—they’d just been talking about that. And what had she been doing tonight but trying to break free? To live her own stories, not just tell them, despite the fact that it was hard for her, terrifying even. That’s why she was so brave. Feeling things was hard.

  Something he had said to Jane back at the CN Tower floated into his consciousness. He’d said it to her before jumping onto the glass floor, and then a little later she’d said it back to him before jumping off the freaking building.

  Sometimes you have to open your eyes and jump.

  “I have an idea,” he said, looking at Elise. The bridezilla. His future sister-in-law. “But you’re not going to like it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THE WEDDING DAY

  Elise kept looking at her watch.

  Was it weird that Elise was wearing a watch? She was in her dress, which was a stunning strapless thing with a giant, puffy tulle skirt and a veil that hung halfway down her back. She was wearing the understated earrings and bracelet that Jane and the others had helped her pick out after about eleven hundred hours of shopping.

  She was also wearing a huge, chunky men’s-style watch with a wide, black leather strap. Probably it was Jay’s.

  But whatever. Elise was running the show here. If there was one thing Jane had learned from her beloved bridezilla, it was that there was always a method to the madness. It was better not to ask questions.

  They were obviously keeping Cameron away from her, because she hadn’t seen him all day. Part of her was screaming that she shouldn’t let them, in the name of preserving some dignity. That she should be above needing to be babied, that they shouldn’t have to move mountains on Elise’s big day because they were concerned about Jane’s tender sensibilities. That she should be able to lay eyes on the man and not collapse on the floor sobbing.

  But another part, the part concerned with self-preservation, knew better. Her heart wasn’t just broken, it was absolutely shattered.

  Cameron had talked about IEDs—improvised explosive devices. It was an apt metaphor. Because what was left
after the damage wasn’t even recognizable as a heart. And because she’d been the instigator. She’d overseen the destruction of her own heart. She’d pressed the button herself. As much as she wanted to blame him, to be angry at him, she couldn’t. He had told her, explicitly, what he wanted—and didn’t want. But she, with a degree of hubris sufficient to star in its own Greek tragedy, had thought she could change him. Hadn’t she learned from her father and Felix that people didn’t change?

  Clearly, she would have to see him at the ceremony, and at the reception, but until then, she was happy to minimize her contact with him. She appreciated that the girls seemed to know that without her having to say anything. In fact, she wondered if maybe he’d left, either of his own volition or because Elise or Jay had asked him to. Did she dare hope? She wanted to ask Elise, but she didn’t want her friend to think she was suggesting they kick Cameron out of the wedding if they hadn’t already. You couldn’t ask the bride to eject the groom’s brother merely because he’d hurt your feelings.

  “Here, sweetie, put some of these in.” Gia entered the room the girls were using to get ready and handed Jane some Visine.

  “Is it still that bad?” Jane asked, looking around for a mirror. Last night, in the motel she’d escaped to, she’d cried all the tears out of her body, then fallen asleep in Wendy’s arms and succumbed to a few fitful hours of sleep. She had awoken to bloodshot eyes with racoon circles underneath them. Gia had done her best with the concealer, but no amount of makeup could disguise the redness of her eyes themselves.

  Instead of answering, Gia came over and tapped Jane’s forehead, prompting her to tilt her head back.

  When she was done, Jane’s eyes were watery from the eye drops. The act of wiping them somehow triggered actual tears. Again.

  “Why does this keep happening?” she asked as Gia pulled her into a hug.