One and Only by Jenny Holiday (16)

They made it into the elevator at Jay’s building before they launched themselves at each other.

The evening had been interminable. It had basically been a repeat of the afternoon, forcing Cam to watch Jane shriek with delight while partaking in the thrills offered by the amusement park. Except the afternoon version of Jane had been wet and wearing a bikini.

And then there was the sexting.

They had established a rhythm by which they would hit a few waterslides and then rest for a while on their lounge chairs, the girls enduring re-application after re-application of sunscreen. (Ushers, apparently, were allowed tans.)

The adorable thing was that Jane wasn’t actually that good at sexting. She would start things with a vaguely suggestive topic like:

And he’d write back:

He figured out pretty quickly that she didn’t want him to leave it at that. She wanted him to escalate things, even if she couldn’t quite make herself respond in kind. She kept prodding, asking flirty-but-benign questions until he hit her with something like:

And then she would blush hard enough to send Elise into a panic.

Then she would get into the pool, come out drenched, announce her intention to hit one of the water slides, and the whole damn cycle would start again.

And then there’d been dinner, a never-ending meal at some kind of bullshit “small plates” place. They must have ordered thirty tiny plates of poached quail’s eggs, thimble-size chicken pot pies, and other assorted hipster bullshit, yet Cam left the restaurant as hungry as he’d arrived.

Then they’d dropped the girls off one by one, ending with Elise, because they’d made the trip in her car. Jay had been at her house, which had meant they’d had to go inside for a drink and lots of discussion about who among the relatives was going to be ushered into the wedding ceremony in what order. Then, finally, finally, he and Jane had hit the road, intending to take the subway to Jane’s house, where his car was parked. It was endless, logistical torture.

But then, when they hit their transfer point, where they were meant to change trains, Jane said, “Do you think Jay will spend the night at Elise’s? When we were at her place it sort of seemed like he might be staying over.”

“No doubt,” Cam had answered, gesturing for her to precede him up an escalator. “This is one of their last nights together before the wedding. Elise has this thing—”

“The sex palate cleanser,” Jane interrupted, turning toward him as she stood on the step above him.

Cam laughed. “Yes! She says they can’t have sex a certain number of days before the wedding.”

“Believe me, I know all about it. I just thought it would have kicked in already—I thought it was a weeklong ‘cleanse.’”

Cam shrugged. “They apparently had a discussion about it.” And a very forceful discussion it had been. He’d overheard them bickering in Elise’s kitchen on his way to the bathroom. Cam had a feeling his sexting with Jane was nothing compared to what went on behind closed doors with his brother and Elise, but he chose not to think too much about that. “The terms have been renegotiated, and the sex palette cleanser now officially kicks in when we move to the wedding site.”

They stepped off the escalator at the top. “So that means…” Jane paused under a set of signs. One directed them to another subway line, the one they needed to take to get to Jane’s house. The other directed them to the street above them.

The street that was a two-minute walk from Jay’s condo. The condo that Jay was not in.

“Let’s go,” he said.

He had to admire her restraint. She knew exactly what he was talking about. Hell, it had been her idea. But she walked calmly as she led them up the stairs to street level. Sailed serenely down the crowded street as if they had all the time in the world. Murmured a polite “thank you” when he held the door to Jay’s building for her. Nodded at the concierge as if she were a bored aristocrat.

And then, the instant the elevator doors shut behind them, that restraint shattered and she catapulted herself at him.

Damn. Their day had been one long, ball-busting bout of the most maddening teasing he’d ever experienced, and now it was finally, finally time.

He caught her with a groan and put his hands all over her. Mouths and hips slammed together as they fought to grab handfuls of each other. When the elevator dinged and the doors opened to the eighteenth floor, he staggered out, backward, relishing the momentary cry of displeasure from her that lasted until she realized what he was doing—that he was, in fact, dragging her along with him in an attempt to get them inside Jay’s place.

“This isn’t going to be some long-drawn-out thing the first time,” he said against her mouth as they fumbled their way down the corridor. “It can’t be. I have to get inside you now.” He felt bad about it, but there was nothing to be done because the day behind them, and the woman in front of him, had taken him to the very edge. He was a teenaged boy, ready to blow at any moment. No, actually, correction: he was a goddamned saint, a master of the Kama Sutra, given that he hadn’t already lost control half a dozen times today.

“Yes,” she said, panting as he pulled away long enough to stick his key into the lock. She took the opportunity to unbutton his fly and shove a hand into his pants. He grabbed her ass as he pushed the door open, then spun her around and pressed her back against it. She was grinning from ear to ear, trying not to laugh.

“What?” he asked, reaching up under her T-shirt to unclasp her bra.

“The first time?” she asked.

“That’s right,” he said, groaning as his hands made contact with the bare flesh of her breasts. He allowed himself one caress before going straight for her nipples, rubbing each between a thumb and forefinger. She gasped and arched against the door. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d said this was going to be fast, but he was still going to do his damnedest to make sure she kept pace with him. “After fast there’s going to be slow. Or fast again. Or whatever you want.” He paused in his assault long enough to slide her shirt over her head. “Take off your pants.”

She obeyed, and he had to close his eyes as he reached into his pocket to grab the condom he’d optimistically stashed there this morning. He needed a moment to collect himself because there was “fast,” and there was “over before it started.”

“Hurry up,” she urged, grabbing the condom and tearing it open. He shoved his pants down. They only made it as far as his knees before she rolled the condom onto his shaft.

“I can’t even believe how much I want you inside me,” she whispered, wonder in her voice.

He’d been going to take his clothes off, too. Surely there was time for that, he’d thought. But he had been wrong. So he did what he had to do, which was to swipe two fingers over her opening to confirm what he suspected. “Oh God, how can you be this wet for me?”

“How can you be this hard for me?” she countered in an almost confrontational tone that somehow made him even harder, which should have been impossible.

The image of her standing there, naked against the door while he was fully clothed with his pants around his knees, was suddenly too much. He took himself in hand and positioned his cock outside her entrance. She moaned and rocked her hips, grabbing at his chest like she was trying to climb up him, inside him. So he pressed his palms flat against the door behind her and slammed the rest of the way inside her, relishing the sharp, satisfied exhalation that resulted.

Then he did it again and again, harder each time, driving her higher and higher up on her tiptoes. And each time he was rewarded with a louder response from Jane.

He hadn’t been lying when he’d said this was going to be quick. He lasted only a few more strokes, but it was okay because by the time he exploded in ecstasy, she was screaming and her pussy was shuddering around him, squeezing out every drop of pleasure from him. His arms, still braced on the wall on either side of her head, shook and his heart felt like it was going to jackhammer out of his chest.

She was panting, too, as she slumped against him like a rag doll.

“Sorry,” he said. She had come, and rather spectacularly, too, but he still felt compelled to apologize for how brief their encounter had been.

A vague scoffing noise emerged from where her head was tucked into the crook of his arm.

Still. He continued to feel the need to throw out an excuse or two. “I guess that’s what happens when you meet a pretty girl after five months of celibacy.” Though he was pretty sure that wasn’t what was going on here. He and Christie had enjoyed themselves plenty when he’d returned from his first deployment, but he’d never had a sexual encounter that had been quite so…intense.

Her head popped up, which was good because after a day tromping around in the heat, he couldn’t smell very good. Her expression was hard to read. It looked like she was contemplating some big problem, trying to solve a riddle, which was impressive because his own brain was still firmly lodged in his pants.

“What’s next?” she said, still with that strange expression on her face.

“I’m thinking shower,” he said, watching her like a hawk to gauge her reaction. He couldn’t articulate why, but it felt like a lot hinged on his answer. “Shower, then slow.”

“Slow?” She sent that single eyebrow up, and he let himself relax a little. It felt like he’d passed a kind of invisible test.

“Yeah.” He leaned in, way in, wanting to recapture the sexually charged aura that had surrounded them all day. He put his nose right against her neck and inhaled the mixture of sunscreen and her. “Nice and slow,” he drawled. “Like we’ve got all night.”

Which they did.

It was a damn good feeling.

“My brother has shampoo and stuff,” Cam said a few minutes later as he shed his clothes in the bathroom and watched the still-naked Jane unload some miniature toiletries from her bag. “And Elise has some girly junk here, too.”

“I know, but I like my stuff,” she said, unwrapping the tiniest bar of soap he’d ever seen. “I brought a toiletries bag to the park because I wasn’t sure if we would be showering there. So since I have it, I might as well use it.”

“All right,” said Cameron, taking the soap and a travel bottle filled with shampoo from her. He lifted the soap to his nose and sniffed. Yep. Ivory. As he’d suspected that first night at the bar when he’d noticed how good she smelled relative to that chick whose name totally escaped him now. He flipped open the lid of the small bottle. “Watermelon,” he said with satisfaction. He’d called that correctly, too.

She shrugged as she tested the temperature of the water. “Elise’s stuff is much nicer than mine,” Jane said. “But I don’t care. You like what you like, right?”

He held both the bar of soap and the bottle of shampoo up to his nose at the same time and took a good long inhale. His senses filled with Jane. “I like it, too,” he said.

He liked it a lot.

After the water ran cold and Jane had another orgasm—there was something to be said for “slow”—she started to think she might have a problem.

It was just an inkling, a little unformed thought niggling at the corners of her mind, hinting that something wasn’t sitting quite right.

It was easy enough to shove out of her consciousness, though, once she was seated at the breakfast bar in Jay’s kitchen watching a shirtless Cameron make them grilled cheese sandwiches. “That hipster dinner was too small,” he proclaimed, and she had to agree.

She stared at his tattoos. It was so cliché, but they were the hottest thing ever, and when he was otherwise engaged like this, moving silently around the kitchen, she was free to observe them. She couldn’t imagine letting someone drag a needle across your skin in order to permanently mark it, and in that sense, they still sort of freaked her out. But she was starting to understand the power of being made to sit with your own discomfort. Roller coasters, tattoos…wild, animalistic sex. It was all rather exhilarating.

“Will you tell me about your tattoos?” she asked. She’d heard him say earlier to Gia that there was no story behind his ink, but she hadn’t believed him. He froze in place, his back to her, as he stood over the pan the sandwiches were cooking in. “You don’t have to,” she added quickly. He clearly didn’t like talking about the tattoos, so why had she thought she’d be the exception?

“Okay,” he said, flipping a sandwich but not turning around.

She waited a beat for him to start talking, and when it became clear he wasn’t going to, she said, “The one on your back is Flanders Fields, right?” The field of poppies was an iconic symbol of Canada’s war dead, something any citizen would recognize as such, and was probably a pretty logical tattoo for a soldier to have. She figured it was the safest one to inquire about.

“Yes,” he said after a beat. “The crosses at the top are for dead buddies.”

“What were their names?” she asked, feeling like Cameron was the kind of guy who’d rather she skip the platitudes.

“Eric and Haseeb. They were our IED guys.”

“IED?”

“Improvised explosive device. They were the bomb squad.”

“Oh God.”

“That’s what the PTSD is from,” he said, his voice matter-of-fact, devoid of inflection. “We all watched them get blown up. We…couldn’t save them. Or the boy who was the bomber. He was so young.”

“Oh my God,” she breathed, feeling like a stupid broken record, but she realized with a thud that next to the crosses was a small crescent and star, the symbol of Islam. He’d immortalized his fallen comrades and the boy who’d killed them.

“I mean, who does that to a child?” he spat, his voice suddenly angry. “Uses a child as a weapon like that?”

There were a million more questions swirling around in her throat, but she swallowed them in favor of asking, “And the angel?”

He was still standing at the stove, so the tattoo in question, which was on his chest, wasn’t visible, but she could see it in her mind. It was an angel, all sleek and muscular and masculine—kind of like him. But its head hung, semi-obscured behind one of its mammoth wings, while the other extended to its full, fearsome wingspan. The image was huge—it covered most of his chest. It was hard to explain why exactly, but there was an aura of sadness about it.

“You don’t have to tell me,” she said when he remained silent and still. “It’s none of my business.”

“I was a bad kid,” he said, seeming to come to life as he used a spatula to move the sandwiches from the frying pan to a plate. But he didn’t do any more than that. Just kept standing there facing away from her.

To hear him call himself “bad,” so clinically and with such detachment, made her shiver.

“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.”