Chapter 23
Cami
A knock sounds at my door and I pull myself up off the couch before replacing the lid of the ice-cream and tossing the spoon onto the coffee table. I groan as I pull the blanket tighter around me and trudge towards the door.
I’m exhausted. It’s been a huge few days. Bec has been sick so I’ve been doing extra hours at the store, I had a late shift at The Dark Room last night, I’ve got a killer headache, and to top it all off, I’ve had my period all week. Though, my only saving grace is that it finally went away this morning. But still… it was torturous.
I mean, why is it that women have to be the sex to go through all that shit? We get the stabbing pains that make us want to crawl into teeny tiny little holes and die. We have men thinking we’re diseased. We get the mood swings. We have the headaches, and just to make matters worse, we have to deal with all the different sanitary products… like what the fuck are these menstrual cups anyway? It sounds fucking weird to me... and kind of messy. I mean, that’s one thing I just can’t get my head around. I’ll have to google that one.
The only good thing that comes from dying once a month is the possibility of popping out a baby… well, for the lucky ones that is. I swear, there should be some kind of way we can just turn our periods off. I mean, it would be great if they only existed when trying for a baby. You know, when we’re thinking about falling pregnant, we could just say ‘Body, it’s time,’ and it would just do its thing. That way, there wouldn’t be a period to get in a man’s way when wanting to get nasty and they wouldn’t be asking to shove it up our asses so much… but then, it’s kind of like an unspoken rule of being a man to want to go there.
The person at the door grows impatient of my dawdling and knocks again. “Hurry your stinking ass up, Cameron Drew.”
Ahhh, it’s Rylee.
Just for her comment and because I feel like being a bit of a bitch, I go a little slower.
I finally make it to the door and pull it open before turning around and making my way back to the couch. I fall down into it and pick up where I left off with the ice-cream. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Rylee grunts as I hear the sound of the door closing before she wheels her pram over and drops down on the couch beside me.
“Headache,” I grumble around the spoon.
“Ahh,” she says with a cringe as she reaches across and gives my leg a supportive squeeze. “I really feel for you, but I need you to get your shit together. We’re going out.”
“Sorry to burst your bubble,” I tell her. “But the only place I’m going is to the fridge to pour myself a glass of wine.”
“Yeah… nah,” she says. “I need a girl’s night. I’m going nuts at home all the time. What about the movies? We could see that new Chris Hemsworth one that I know you’ve been dying to see and you could get popcorn.”
I pout my bottom lip out. “I really do like Chris Hemsworth.”
“I know,” she says. “Go get dressed and take some painkillers. We can curl up on your couch afterward.”
“Fine,” I say. “But do you mind if I invite Kelly? She was really wanting to see that one.”
“Sure,” Rylee grunts. “I might as well invite all the girls too. They’ll die if they found out we were perving on a Hemsworth brother without them.”
“Good point,” I laugh as I pick myself up off the couch and grab my phone. “You call them while I get myself presentable.”
I stop by the kitchen and find some painkillers just as Rylee had said before making my way down to my bedroom. As I get myself dressed, I give Kelly a call and hit speaker.
“Hey, what’s up?” she says as she answers the call.
“Rylee and I are hijacking your night. We’re going to the movies and you’re coming with us.”
“What are you seeing?” she questions
“That Hemsworth one you won’t stop talking about.”
“Oh shit,” she says, suddenly extremely perky. “Count me in. I’ll be there in five minutes.”
She instantly ends the call and I focus on getting myself ready while listening to Rylee out in the living room making the calls to the girls. I quickly look in the mirror and decide it’s probably best to run a brush through my hair before taking myself out into public, and before I know it, I’m pushing the pram out my door with my best friend.
As I lock up my door, Kelly walks up the hallway and gives Isaac a bright smile before saying hello to us. “Thanks for inviting me,” Kelly tells me as we head down to Rylee’s car.
“Of course,” I say. “I think you would have killed me if you knew I saw that without you.”
“Damn straight,” she laughs.
I buckle Isaac into his car seat while Rylee tackles the pram. She groans and grunts at it and Kelly and I give each other a knowing grin. There’s nothing funnier than watching Rylee struggle with the basics. I mean, to put her pram down is literally just pressing a button and folding it over, yet every damn time she ends up screaming at the thing.
Once Isaac is safely secured into his seat, I bump Rylee out of the way and get the pram shoved in the trunk of her car in no time.
Before we know it, we’re pulling up at the movie theatre and meeting the rest of the girls. We head inside and order as many sodas and boxes of popcorn that can fit in our hands and even stack some on top of Isaac’s pram.
We make our way into the theatre and the first thing I notice is that it’s dead quiet. We’re the only ones here and I turn to Rylee. “Are we in the right theatre?”.
She pulls the tickets out of her pocket and double checks the details. “Yeah,” she tells me. “What’s the time?”
I hit the home button on my phone and look down at the time. “It’s 8:36 pm.”
“Ahhh,” she says with a cringe. “We’re a bit earlier than I had thought. The movie doesn’t start until 9:15 pm.”
“Oh, ok,” I say with a shrug as I sit down between Lexi and Rylee and get myself comfortable. I grab my box of popcorn and start chomping away as I prop my feet up on the empty chair before me.
Rylee gets Isaac fed and wraps him up for a sleep while I chat away to the girls as we wait for the movie to start. People start making their way into the theatre and soon enough, the place is packed and the sound of the audiences’ whispered conversations are heard throughout the theatre.
The lights dim and the whispered conversations come to a stop as the screen finally flickers on. I look up at the wide screen and throw another piece of popcorn into my mouth. The preview begins and I know I have at least another few minutes of this crap before the goodness that’s Chris Hemsworth appears before my eyes.
I watch the preview for an action movie that looks like something Jace would probably drag me along to before the next one comes up. The clip starts with a close up of a photo appearing as one of my all-time favorite songs play. The photo has a couples’ joined hands, the two of them firmly clutched in the others. The camera begins to zoom out and their arms appear, next their chests, and finally the couple’s whole bodies. As the camera continues to zoom out, I see a strange familiarity within the image that has me gawking like a confused idiot.
Surely, I must have missed something.
I mean, it’s me, on the fucking screen. It’s a photo Rylee had taken of me and Jace in the center of the dance floor at The Dark Room nearly two years ago. I feel my eyebrows pull down as I continue staring at the screen.
How did my photo get on the movie theatre’s screen?
The photo of Jace and I fades away and the song continues to play. The photo is replaced by another, this time just one of me smiling at the camera. I glance over at Rylee who’s looking up at the screen with a smile on her face. I mean, why isn’t she gawking at it? “What the hell is going on?” I question.
“Shut up and watch,” she tells me.
I look back up at the screen and do my best to focus on what’s before me. Obviously, something is happening here and I need to be paying attention. I remember taking this particular picture, well, I wasn’t the one taking it. I was sitting on Jace’s couch and he was annoying me by taking picture after picture on his iPhone. It was so annoying but the whole time, I couldn’t stop laughing.
Again, the picture fades before it’s replaced with another. This time, it’s me at the old Style me Crazy. I stand behind the counter, completely in my own world as I lean forward on my elbow, again, it was a photo that Jace had taken. My heart rate starts to pick up as Rylee slides her hand into mine.
The picture fades and is replaced with another. This time, a selfie I had forced Jace to take with me one night at Cole’s place. Next up, a soundless video of me laughing before trying to steal the camera away from him. That’s replaced by another photo, and then another, and then another. On and on it goes, videos and photos until the song comes to an end.
Every single photo was a memory of my time with Jace and it didn’t take me long to realize that the string of photos and videos were put together in order, from when I first met him to the very last one of me in my red dress at the re-launch of Style me Crazy.
I find silent tears running down my cheeks before I start looking around. It’s clear Jace had made that video just for me, so surely, he must be here.
I turn right around and gasp at the sight I see, even in the dim lighting of the theatre, it’s clear as day that the man standing at the very back of the theatre in a suit is Jace King.
My eyes instantly roam all over him as I push myself up from my seat. He grins down at me as though he has a secret that he’s been dying to tell me.
My heart practically leaps out of my chest. I need to hold him. I need to tell him just how grateful I am that he put that video together. He’s nothing short of amazing, and I swear, he just made my heart explode.
As I squeeze my way past all the girls’ knees to get to the aisle, it’s then I notice all the audience in the theatre aren’t random people. In fact, I know every single one of them. My family. My friends. All the fucking boys. Bec, Lilly, and Kim. Hell, even all the people I know and love from The dark Room are here.
“What the hell?” I murmur to myself as every last eye in the theatre lands on me.
Jace’s grin doesn’t move from his face as he takes a step down the stairs. My heart stops. I need to get to him. He needs to hurry because I’m not going to be able to run fast enough.
Every thought in my mind disappears. All I see is him. I don’t care that suddenly every person I know on the planet is in this room. I don’t care that my face is up on a movie screen. I don’t care that my head is pounding so hard it makes it hard to breathe. All I see is him.
He takes another step down the aisle and I find myself taking one in his direction. Every step he takes is met with one of my own, right up until he stands right before me, taking my waist in his hands and pulling me in.
I don’t get a chance to say a single word because his lips are already on mine. His fingers splay out over the back of my waist, taking up nearly my whole back with his large hands. My own travel up his strong chest to find home around his neck before my nails run up the back of his head, claiming him as my own.
I breathe him in as I kiss him, and good god, he smells like a wet dream. All too soon he pulls away and rests his forehead against mine. He reaches up and wipes the tears off my face before his hands come up and untangle mine from his hair. He laces our fingers together and I take in the moment. It’s nothing short of perfection. “I love you, Cami,” he says.
How did I get so lucky? I close my eyes as the words wrap around me. “I love you too,” I whisper back before looking up at the man who makes me feel so damn alive. “That video was amazing.”
Pride shines through his eyes and I can’t help but push up onto my tippy-toes and press my lips to his one more time.
As I pull away, he smiles down at me. “Come on,” he says before leading me all the way down the stairs until we’re standing so close to the screen that I could reach out and touch it.
Jace comes to stand right before me and I find myself grinning at him like an idiot. “What are you doing?” I laugh as his thumb runs across my knuckles.
At that, he drops down to one knee and smiles up at me with his heart in his eyes. “Something I’ve been wanting to do since the day I met you.”