When She Falls

by Jessie Clever

  She bent forward, pressing her forehead to the cool marble of the vanity top, the water still running, the sound wrapping her in oblivion.

  Jesus. Shitting. Christ.

  Lydia straightened and wrenched open the door.

  Cam stood on the other side, balancing on one foot as he attempted to put on boxers. He straightened at the sight of her though, dropping the boxers to the floor so they lay in a pool on his foot.

  “I lied to Rebecca Hatfield to convince her to marry Eric fucking Flickinger so I could get a great fucking deal.”

  It was then that the tears came. Lydia had cried exactly two times in her life. Once when she was just a child and her grandmother had died and once when she had been beaten at a business plan competition by a group of yuppies with a plan to open a fucking frozen yogurt shop.

  Standing there in the inn room, her bare feet pressing into the carpet, sunshine spraying through the bank of windows behind her entirely nude and gorgeous husband, there wasn’t anything left in her to combat it. She let the tension run from her body in big, messy tears. Cam didn’t move, and she knew he was waiting on her. Waiting for her to seek comfort from him when she had never done the like before.

  But fuck it.

  She was goddamn sick of being an independent and modern woman.

  Lydia flung herself at him, wrapping her arms fiercely around him until her fingertips pressed into the muscles of his back. His arms came around her just as quickly, closing her into his sure strength. She let herself cry as Cam nuzzled her temple, pressing soft kisses to her forehead.

  “I would tell you it will be all right, Lydia,” Cam said, “but I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  Through her tears, Lydia laughed.

  “So do you plan to slink away with your tail between your legs?” he whispered, “or take the more courageous route? Walk up and smile those pearly whites at the Hatfields as if nothing were amiss.”

  Lydia punched him in the shoulder, but he noticed her punches were getting weaker.

  “I plan to do neither,” she said. “I prefer a more subtle approach.”

  “Which is?”

  “Bury myself in a giant breakfast of pancakes, butter, and syrup, and hope no one sees me.”

  Cam laughed as they walked into the dining room of Lockridge, which was probably not very tactful as everyone in the room turned to look at him. He waited for Lydia’s scolding, but it never came. He looked down at her to find her looking up at him, a quiet expression on her face. She said nothing, though, as she turned to the hostess asking for a table for two.

  When they were seated, Cam muttered from behind his menu, “So was that really it?”

  Lydia mumbled from behind her own menu. “Was what really what?”

  “Good morning, monsieur and madame! I am Charlotte, and I will be your server this morning. We have on special blueberry pancakes with a touch—”

  “I’ll have a giant stack of those pancakes,” Lydia interrupted. “And an equally giant pot of coffee.” She finished her order with a roll of the shoulder that had taken an involuntary familiarity with a croquet mallet.

  Cam winced for her. “I’ll have the same,” he said to the server, handing her his menu.

  Charlotte might have responded as she left the table, but Cam could only look at his wife. Her hair was swept back off her face in a ponytail, a long, wavy, dark trail down her back. She was wearing another one of those white button down shirts she favored, sleeves rolled to her elbows. He wasn’t sure if she were wearing makeup or not, but if she were, she wore very little. Maybe some mascara, but her features were so natural and serene. Lydia was never serene.

  Lydia also had never cried before. Not in front of him anyway. Even when she had kicked him out after a scant few months of marriage. He watched her carefully as the server returned with their cups and a carafe of coffee for the table. Lydia smiled politely accepting her cup and jumping on the carafe as soon as Charlotte had put it down.

  He didn’t say anything more until after she had taken her first sip of coffee heavily laden with cream and sugar.

  “Was yesterday it?” he asked again.

  Lydia looked at him, blinking.

  “Yesterday’s itinerary of events. That was the whole deal? The whole reason for this charade?”

  Lydia shrugged, followed by a wince as her hand went to her shoulder. “I guess so,” she said. “Although I wouldn’t marginalize it much. It’s not every year that I get a birthday celebration including a luau at an inn in the Berkshires.”

  “I’d give you one,” Cam said before he could stop himself.

  He was sure to get lambasted for that, but instead, Lydia said, “I don’t think I’d very much like one.” She took a sip of her coffee. “I’d rather just do dinner out in Boston with Emily and Shannon.”

  Cam grimaced. “A birthday with the fearsome threesome. Yeah, I can see why you made me stay on the other side of the ocean.”

  Lydia laughed, but he saw the way the joy didn’t reach her eyes.

  “I didn’t make you,” she muttered as two steaming plates of pancakes smothered in blueberries were placed in front of them.

  Charlotte asked if they needed anything else before refilling their coffees and heading off.

  “You packed my suitcase.”

  Lydia dropped the knife she had been using to apply the entire tub of butter to her pancakes. “Oh shit, I did pack your suitcase, didn’t I?”

  He looked at her. “It’s rather hard to forget.”

  Lydia set down her fork and focused her attention on him, which had him shifting in his seat.

  “I really owe you a giant fucking apology, don’t I?”

  Cam raised an eyebrow. “I’ve never been the recipient of a fucking apology, but if it’s anything like last night, I’d be willing to talk about it.”

  She tried not to laugh and ended up snorting at him instead. He considered that a victory and reached for his own tub of butter.

  “I shouldn’t have thrown you out.”

  He dropped the ramekin on the table, his eyes flying to Lydia. She attacked her pancakes with the butter knife, lifting each pancake to shove more butter between the layers.

  “I’m sorry?” he asked when she didn’t elaborate.

  “I shouldn’t have thrown you out,” she repeated. “It was very childish. I should have asked you to leave.”

  Cam weighed that statement to see if it really made their past sound better than it was or if it may have suggested that Lydia was feeling remorseful. He thought it a step in the right direction but perhaps not complete exoneration.

  As he watched her, the conversation with Rebecca Hatfield poked at his mind, tempting him to look at the other side of things. Lydia’s side. They really were two entirely different people. Maybe he couldn’t help someone who was so different. Maybe he couldn’t save them because they weren’t meant to be together to begin with.

  “Lydia—”

  Whatever he had been about to say was cut short when Evelyn Hatfield’s familiar call of greeting ricocheted across the dining room. The short, bustling woman approached their table, hands upraised in greeting.

  “Lydia, my darling, and Cam, my handsome lad,” she said the last bit with a strained Scottish accent that had Cam grimacing a smile. “I am so glad you both could make it to my little party, and I wanted to thank you for making the drive out.” She clasped her hands together, her chubby fingers sliding around one another. “And I don’t know if it was the party atmosphere or just the show you two put on last night, but Rebecca is suddenly determined to get this wedding planned!” Evelyn shot her arms in the air like a ref declaring a field goal in an American football game. “We’d like to stop by the shop tomorrow and get all the details worked out. You can have an agreement drawn up by then, right?” She turned to Cam, laying a pudgy hand on his shoulder. “Ronald likes to have everything in writing. Even when it comes to his daughter’s wedding. I told him to just give me a c
redit card, but you know. Men!” she said with enough exclamation to not need the exclamation point at the end.

  Cam darted a glance at Lydia. Her face had paled, her features pinched as she looked at Evelyn Hatfield. His heart pounded in his chest for her, and his grip on his fork and knife tightened until he thought he might break the silverware in pieces.

  Then Lydia smiled, a smile he had come to know in the first few months of their marriage. The practiced, polite, society smile that had been drilled into Lydia from an early age.

  “Of course, I can, Mrs. Hatfield,” Lydia said.

  Evelyn cooed with a flick of her hand. “Oh, please, darling, it’s just Evelyn now.” She bent down conspiratorially. “After the show you two put on last night, you’re practically family!” She tossed her head back on a laugh. “Until tomorrow, dearie!” she called, waddling away from their table.

  Cam looked at Lydia. “You want a Bloody Mary to go with that coffee?”

  Lydia blinked at him, her eyes empty and bleak. “Yes,” she said. “A big one.”

  Lydia crawled into her car an hour later, shrinking behind her sunglasses. If she could have, she would have crawled right into them and disappeared. She settled for slouching down in her seat, her hair crackling along the leather.

  Cam slid in beside her, saying something to the valet as he did so. She kept her gaze straight ahead as Cam eased the car into gear and guided it down the curving drive and away from the Lockridge.

  “I got the contract, didn’t I?” she whispered when they neared the main road.

  Cam glanced at her, but she didn’t return his look.

  “You did, lassie,” he whispered back.

  She didn’t say anything else for the nearly four hour drive back to Boston. When Cam found a spot at the curb in front of her townhouse, she finally looked at him, snatching the sunglasses from her face.

  “What am I supposed to do?” She didn’t let her eyes stray from his face.

  Cam opened his mouth once but seemed to change his mind.

  “What have you always done in a situation like this?”

  Lydia thought about it. “I would call Emily or Shannon and ask them what I should do.”

  Cam nodded. “Then you should do that.”

  He got out of the car, going to the trunk to get their bags. Lydia slipped out into the crisp autumn air that had descended on Boston while they were in the Berkshires. She looked about her, down her quiet street here in Cambridge, at her townhouse she loved so much, at her husband carrying their bags up the front stoop. A sigh welled up somewhere inside of her when she thought of what she’d done, of where she was now.

  She had her contract. She had her big fucking deal, the very deal she planned to rub in Edward Baxter’s face. The very deal that would prove to her father once and for all that Baxter’s of Newbury was not just a pet project for the little woman to mind. Baxter’s was a legitimate business, a business that Lydia planned to nurture, support, and love into something bigger and more beautiful than even she could imagine.

  “Lydia?”

  She blinked, looking up at Cam standing in the open door of her townhouse.

  “Coming,” she said, although she didn’t move.

  “Call Shannon and Emily,” Cam said then, his voice firmer than she had ever heard it before even more than yesterday in the car on the way to the Berkshires.

  Was that only yesterday?

  She nodded as if Cam had asked a question requiring a response and trudged up her front stoop. Cam went in the house before her, carrying their bags up the stairs as she wandered into her sitting room. The afternoon light slanted through the front window illuminating the space in a malleable blanket of warmth. Lydia slid into it, running her hand through the sunshine as she stepped up to the window, her gaze returning once more to the street outside her townhouse, her mind a blank except for one question.

  “Lydia.”

  It was Cam again, but his voice did not hold a question. She turned to him and found a glass of white wine in her hand. She smiled, feeling the muscles of her mouth move with very little emotion behind them.

  “Call.” He placed her smartphone in her other hand.

  He was almost to the door when her tongue caught in her throat, her heart pounding out of her chest.

  “Where are you going?”

  Was that her making that screeching noise?

  Cam turned, a grin smeared across his handsome face.

  “I’m not leaving yet, lassie,” he said, and she noticed he had changed into shorts and a T-shirt. “I’m just going for a run to give you some privacy.”

  He wiggled his eyebrows at her and went out the door.

  I’m not leaving yet, lassie.

  She sat down on the sofa, hard, wine and smartphone held before her like a modern day talisman. Cam was right. It was over. He could leave whenever he wanted. He could leave today. Fuck. Why hadn’t she thought of that?

  Because she had gotten used to him.

  She expected him to be there. She expected him to always be there.

  Lydia looked at her phone, but instead of making a call, she drank a large swallow of wine and sat on her couch, staring out the window at nothing.

  She wasn’t sure how long she sat there, waiting for some sort of inspiration. Part of her wanted to run after Cam, make up some reason why he had to stay to avoid telling him the truth. The truth that she suddenly couldn’t stand the thought of him leaving.

  Right behind that horrible thought came another. What was she going to say to Shannon? To Emily? Her oldest and best friends?

  I lied my ass off to make a deal.

  Shit, she was turning into her father, not impressing him. Although, maybe he would be impressed by that. She looked at the phone in her hand, swiped it on, and dialed Shannon. It went right to voicemail. Lydia frowned and hung up, her mind drifting quietly to what her friend might be up to, how her father was, and what on Earth she was doing with that hunky man she had stumbled upon.

  Thinking of her friend brought her a respite from the nagging sense of guilt that plagued her, but it was a short respite. Soon she was picking up the phone again to call Emily this time. Her friend answered in a rush.

  “Lydia, I love you dearly, and you know I would do anything for you,” her friend said by way of greeting. “But I’m about to have mind blowing sex with an incredibly gorgeous, wild man, and I would love to call you later.”

  The phone clicked dead in her ear.

  Lydia held the smartphone away from her ear, staring at it with wide eyes and precariously raised eyebrows.

  “Emily Airedale,” she said to the phone as if it could hear her astonishment and provide adequate sympathy.

  Emily Airedale was getting laid. Wasn’t that an interesting development.

  And to a guy she called gorgeous and wild.

  Wild?

  Emily?

  Lydia shook her head, tossing the phone beside her on the sofa, returning her gaze to the window of the house. She blinked as Cam came into view, sweat running down his forehead, cheeks puffing with his breath.

  Gorgeous and wild, Lydia thought. Yeah, that made sense.

  He was leaving, she remembered.

  The thought returned as she saw him make the front stoop, stopping to stretch his legs on the steps. He was leaving, and soon, most likely. He’d held up his end of the bargain, and she’d held up hers. She’d held up hers a little too strongly maybe, and her aching girl parts reminded her of it. Would he leave today? Tonight? Tomorrow? When was the first flight to London?

  She sprang to her feet, making it to the door before Cam had a chance to open it. She couldn’t help it. Her body pumped with an urgency she hadn’t felt in years, and suddenly, she just needed to ask one question.

  Cam looked up at her, pulling the headphones from his ears as he took in the sight of her, a small smile coming to his lips.

  “What would you do, Cam McCray?” Lydia all but shouted down the stairs.

  Th
e hesitation passed over Cam’s face, the same hesitation she had witnessed several times over the past month. But then a feral smile unfurled on his lips, and Lydia knew she had asked the right question of just the right person.

  Sixteen

  Morning came too quickly, and Lydia had to struggle out from under Cam’s arm to shut off her alarm. They had made love again. Twice. Late into the night, they had talked. Talked like they hadn’t when they’d been married. She supposed they still were married, but Cam’s impending departure loomed over her as a reminder of the aberration of their deal. He would be leaving soon, but she didn’t have the balls to ask him when.

  Cam stirred enough to let her slip into the shower, prepare for the inevitability of the day. She recalled what Cam had said the night before, the thought bringing a smile to her face as she shampooed her hair.

  She recalled more than just his words. She recalled the way he had leaned over the counter, a pizza split between them and some empty bottles of beer. The scene so domestic, so casual, so normal, it had brought a pain to her stomach.

  But Cam had leaned in and said, “You are the one that must live with the decisions you make. Make the one that is right for you.”

  That was it.

  That’s all he had said on the matter.

  But it was enough.

  She understood exactly what he was trying to tell her. Some people could make deals on a lie. Some people could make deals by revealing not entirely the whole truth. Some people could go through with it and live with the consequences.

  But could Lydia do that?

  Baxter’s of Newbury had been her entire life. Was still her entire life.

  She looked at the bathroom door, expecting Cam to be standing there, watching her through the glass of the shower wall. Maybe Baxter’s wasn’t her entire life anymore.

  She shook the thought from her mind as she rinsed. Stepping from the shower, she grabbed a towel, wrapped it around her body, and padded into the bedroom.