EIGHT
Duke
Archie turns out to be an absolute bear of a man. I never considered myself to be on the scrawny side, but next to this monster, I feel as delicate as a Victoria’s Secret model. His beard alone deserves a medal.
The HQ was loaded easily on his tilt-tray, but not without the guy’s clear disdain at having to come out so far to pick it up. I swear he hasn’t stopped swearing under his breath since he got here, shooting me filthy looks, and asking how long I plan on sticking around.
The more locals I meet, the more unwelcome I feel.
“I’ll make some calls, see how long it’ll be to get the part.” He slips the weathered baseball cap off and scratches his head with the same hand as he frowns. “Drop by in an hour, and we’ll sort out how you’re going to pay me. I don’t do payment plans, and I don’t do cash.” He narrows his gaze on me.
“I’m sure we can sort something out.” I turn to look for Cammie, finding her fussing over the deadheads on the roses at her front door. “Is that okay, Cam?”
“Huh?” She straightens up, the loose tank she has on doing nothing to hide her gorgeous figure.
“Archie asked if I could be at the shop in an hour. Would you be able to give me a lift if I spot you some gas money?”
“Yeah, no worries.” She dusts her hands off, walking closer. “How are the kids, Archie?”
“Good, thanks, love.” Archie’s lips split into an enormous grin. So the guy knows how to smile? “Dean just started Ripper Rugby, so that’s keeping us all busy.”
“Awesome. He’ll love that.”
“They asked after you the other day,” the guy says with a wink.
I marvel at the way her mere presence has shifted his entire demeanour. He’s gone from brisk and abrupt to relaxed and soft within seconds.
“Well,” she says with a shrug, “you just tell me when you’d like a night off and I can come babysit again. I’ll bring my popcorn-maker over and the kids and I can have a movie night.”
“Sounds great, Cammie.” Archie turns to face me as she walks back to her roses, and the smile slides straight from his face, his eyes hard. “See you soon.”
“Yeah, thanks.” I place a hand to the back of my neck and rub it as he gets in his truck and promptly pulls down the driveway.
“He’s okay.” Cammie’s sudden statement causes me to flinch.
I narrowly avoid throwing a fist at her, keeping my arm stiff at my side. “You shouldn’t startle people you don’t know like that.”
“Oh, come on. I was getting you back for the coffee incident. You can sneak up on people—why can’t I?”
“Because it’s not the same,” I snap, marching toward the house to get my shit. The sooner she drops me in town the better. I can find somewhere to stay while the car is fixed, get a new phone charger since mine is at home, and put a heck of a lot of distance between this frustrating woman and me.
Cute, but frustrating.
“Hey.” She hurries after me. “What was that about?”
“Nothing,” I mutter, throwing a hand up to ward her off. “I’ll grab my gear and we can go, huh? I’ve got some other shit I can do until I need to be at the shop.”
“We can have coffee,” she announces, as though I didn’t just snap at her, as though I didn’t come close to punching her lights out. “I’ve got time to kill before the show too. Thought about doing groceries, but we could at least make the trip to town worth it by snagging some of Donna’s apple and ginger muffins before they’re all gone. Honestly, you have to try them. She slices it, puts a slab of butter in the middle”—Cammie animates the whole process with her hands as she talks—“and heats it up. It’s so good.” Her voice drops on the last word, her eyes rolling back in her head as her lids droop.
I should find it funny, amusing at least, but her inane ability to talk the hind leg off a donkey drives me nuts. The phrase “silence is golden” was coined for a reason. Pretty sure somebody out there discovered how peaceful it could be when you were left without the chatter of the world, and he decided to aptly name how precious it was to find such solace; he didn’t just come up with the saying for shits and giggles.
“I’m sure her muffins are delicious, but you’ve already done a lot. I wouldn’t expect you to waste half your weekend on me.”
She frowns, twisting her lips to one side. “Well, if you’re sure. I mean, I don’t get much opportunity to go there anymore. Work keeps me busy during the week, and between the theatre and the odds and ends I volunteer for, Sundays are pretty much the only time I have to myself outside of errands and she’s closed then.”
Again with the talking. I pinch the bridge of my nose and sigh. “Whatever, then. Would you like me to give you something for the food last night and this morning?”
She slices a hand through the air with a huff from between her velvet-red lips. “Don’t be silly; you were my guest.”
The entire fifteen-minute car ride continues in the same fashion. She chats incessantly about pointless shit that stretches from the reason why she chose to have no colours in the house, to why she prefers to listen to old-school grunge rock on Spotify over the modern songs played on the radio. Yet, as I sit quietly in the passenger seat, watching her gesture wildly and crumple her face in a stern expression, it doesn’t escape my notice that she avoids the obvious elephant in the coupe: why she’s single when clearly, once, she wasn’t, and what the hell all the kids stuff around the place is about. Last I checked, young unattached females didn’t have entire children’s dining sets in their kitchen cupboards, child-sized food items in their fridge, and pictures of toddlers with them in their hall unless they were a mother.
Cammie doesn’t once speak like she is. In fact, the only family she makes scarce mention of in her chatter is her parents, who are separated.
It’s intriguing, meeting a person who keeps secrets just as I do and viewing it from the other side. I wouldn’t know half her struggles if I hadn’t been in her house, listened to her talk. Is this how I appear to people I meet?
“Archie’s shop is over there.” She points out the windscreen at a flat-roofed garage across the intersection we’re currently stopped at. “Your car’s probably inside. He doesn’t like leaving them out in the yard; thinks people are going to randomly vandalise them.” She rolls her eyes as she says this, as though the thought of anybody doing such a thing is too ridiculous to believe.
I eye the place as she pulls around the corner and glides us into a parallel park on the roadside. It seems tidy enough, as though the guy takes pride in his workspace, which is always a bonus when it comes to tradesmen. A messy workshop could mean the same lack of care spilled over into his job, and while I know the HQ isn’t some fine supercar, I still expect to be paying for quality work.
“Donna’s café is usually packed on a Saturday, so be forewarned that space might be at a premium if you want to eat in.” Cammie kills the engine, and removes the keys.
“Takeaway’s fine with me.” Wide open spaces are also fine with me, so if she wants to eat out in the street, I’m all for it.
She opens her door and rises from the car, promptly reaching between the seat and the door pillar to retrieve her bag from where she’d slung it behind the driver’s seat. “Come on,” she singsongs when I don’t move. “Don’t know about you, but that toast has worn off and I’m famished. There’s also a tall cup of coffee with my name on it.”
I sigh as she closes the door with a thud, and reach for my handle. She needn’t worry about me staying in the car too long: the shift in the air as she exited and closed her door was enough to spike my heart rate. There’s a reason why I travelled most of the way with the HQ’s window down, the same reason why for most of this journey I kept a hand securely gripped to the seat between my legs.
I needed to anchor myself in the storm, find stability to cling to while I ride out the crazy rollercoaster of anxiety I live with now.
Cammie fusses with her hair, smoothing down wayward tresses as she stands on the sidewalk waiting for me to join her. The woman really is a sight for sore eyes. Her skin is flawless, her kissable lips painted a dark shade that pulls my eye to them every time, and those lashes—dark and framing her eyes perfectly. But I don’t sense that she spends a lot of time on her appearance—rather she’s been doing this look for so long that it’s second nature to wrap herself up in the cloak of invisibility before she steps out into the world each day.
You look at her, and she’s a pretty girl. She’s not a woman hiding a deeper pain. She blinds people with her visual appeal so that they have something to stop at, a reason not to dig any deeper to find satisfaction from being in her presence.
I wonder if distraction is the reason why she’s so damn talkative, too.
“I’ll pay for this,” I tell her as we start toward the café.
“Rubbish.” She stares straight ahead, her gaze locked on a real estate office across the street. “I said you don’t need to pay me back anything,” she protests, but her focus is clearly on that realtor.
“You looking?”
“Huh?” Her eyes burn bright as she snaps back to the present.
“The realtor. You were staring at it. You want to grab our bite to eat and go check out the listings in the window?”
“No,” she snaps.
The terse response takes me by surprise.
I hold the door for her, and she hesitates, an apologetic smile pursing her lips. “I’m sorry, Duke. There’s just … stuff going on, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you like that.”
“Duck’s back.” I brush it off with a flick of my chin toward the counter. “Quick, while there’s only a couple of people at the till.”
She weaves her way through the small round tables—all wooden with mismatched chairs—to the cabinet displaying the baked goods. A couple of people greet her as she passes, and I hang back a few steps so I can watch her interact.
It’s curious, the way she clearly knows so many people in her small community, and yet her home life demonstrates she’s probably one of the loneliest people I’ve ever met.
“Do you have particular tastes?” she asks as we stop at the counter. “Or are you willing to try the apple and ginger?” Cammie nudges me with her elbow, a smile reaching her eyes as she looks up at me.
“Whatever you suggest,” I answer.
She goes ahead and orders, remembering how I like my coffee when she picks a flat white for me. Our drinks come in brightly coloured takeaway cups, the muffins individually bagged in brown paper, ready to go. Cammie walks ahead as we leave the café, oblivious to the sneaky stares we get as I follow. I glance back at the people, unassuming types including an older lady with a blue rinse, a white-collared man who stands at the leaner by the front window reading the morning paper, and a mother of twins, who watches us walk out as she absently talks to one of her children. Nobody’s threatening. Nobody seems to offer ill will. Simply people from a town small enough that everybody knows each other’s history and habits.
People who look out for one another.
People like I used to be.
Since I’ve been back in civilian life, I’ve retreated into my head, building a carefully constructed thick shell around me. The shit that happened overseas affected me worse than I’ve ever given it credit for. It changed me so significantly that there wasn’t much of the old me left inside to recognise the difference.
I’m a completely new guy. And the new guy is a douche.
“So,” I start as Cammie leads us past the car toward the intersection. “You mentioned you spend a lot of time in theatre. Are you a nurse? A doctor?” I swallow back the unease wedging in my throat at being the one to initiate personal conversation. With a woman who gets under my skin, no less. But hey, if I can practice with her, maybe it’s the first step towards being the old non-douchey Duke again?
Fingers crossed.
She laughs at my question, handing me the bags of muffins so she can use her free hand to push the pedestrian button. “Not that kind of theatre, although I can see why you thought that with how I said it and all. That’s kind of funny actually. I should tell Mum, she’d get a laugh out of it. Me: a doctor. Like that would happen.”
Once more with the runaway tongue.
“I meant thespian theatre,” she continues. “The drama club in town here do one major show a year, and some smaller street-performance style events in between. I’m part of the crew.”
“The crew. Like backstage?”
“Yeah.” She flashes me a sweet smile as the walk signal buzzes.
I shake my head in disbelief as we start across the road. If somebody had shown me a picture of Cammie and asked me what I thought her pastime was, I would have stabbed a guess at one of those YouTube makeup bloggers you see chicks sharing all over Facebook.
Acting? Backstage? Never would have picked it.
“Explains the black clothing, I guess.”
She drops a short “Ha” before taking a deep breath to prepare for her next verbal marathon. “Not quite. I’ve always been into that kind of look. I was a Goth in high school, if you can believe it. I guess it sort of spilled over into the rest of my life; but I suppose you could tell that by my house, huh?” She peers up at me as we approach the low timber railings that surround the local parkland. “Although, it’s not just my house. I co-own it with my ex, Jared.” Her face falls, and I get a sense that this is the stuff she said was bothering her before. “He wants me to sell it so we can wrap up our separation.”
“I take it you don’t want to?” I offer her my hand so she can steady herself as she climbs over the chain linking the bollards.
“No. I love that house. I’d stay there forever if I could. It holds so many special memories, things I don’t want to let go of, although …”
“Although?”
She sighs as she takes a seat at the picnic table tucked beneath a sprawling oak. “He’s right about one thing: it’s not healthy, the dependency I have on keeping those memories alive.”
“The only memory you should ever forget is a bad one.” Because, fuck, don’t I know that?
“Anderson, Piata! Somebody fucking answer me!”
I shake my head clear and focus on tearing my paper bag perfectly in the centre so I can spread it out to make a kind of plate.
“That’s the problem,” Cammie says, pulling her muffin out and dumping it on top of her bag, crumbs everywhere. “No matter how good the memories are, they all link into one hell of a bad one.”
“And you choose to hang on to it?” I ask as I lean over and take a bite, hoping she’ll reveal a little more about what exactly happened to her.
She wasn’t wrong, though: these muffins are good shit.
“I feel as though it’s the final betrayal if I don’t.” She tips her head forward, her hair sliding to curtain her face as she picks at the edge of the muffin with her nail. “I’ve been trying to think of ways to keep the place, ways to make it work. I’ve been thinking about turning it into a B&B, but I’m not sure if that would be enough separation for him.”
I can’t be sure what happens in the seconds that follow, only that wherever she goes when the voracious woman finally silences, it seems to absorb all of the negative shit that had begun to surface with her admission about the house. She quietly picks at the food, only the slightest movements made as she brings the crumbs to her lips. A gentle northwest breeze lifts the ends of her hair, giving the sun a chance to catch the lighter tips. She’s beautiful, and although I think she knows it, she chooses to ignore it.
“Anyway.” The face that lifts to meet me doesn’t belong to the same woman. A smile splits her lips despite the fact her eyes are still dead. “Tell me more about you, Duke. What’s your story?”
“Not much to say.” I shrug, turning the coffee cup in my hand. “I’m between jobs at the moment, kind of deciding where I want my life to go next.”
“What did you used to do?”
“Army.”
Her eyebrows shoot upwards, a slim finger lifted to point at the chain around my neck. “So that’s why you wear that. Is that your tags?”
I nod.
“That’s so cool.”
Fuck—she’s just like everyone else. “No,” I snap. “No, it’s not.”
Silence falls between us, and although I can see her fight to keep it that way, she caves and keeps talking. “I didn’t mean to piss you off. I’ve just never met anyone who served before. Thought you might have some cool stories about being overseas, you know, experiences to share, that people like me who’ve never been in a plane might not have had the chance to have.”
“Count yourself lucky, then.” I snatch up what’s left of the muffin and chew it angrily before swallowing and continuing, “Not all those experiences are great ones, and if I could trade places with somebody who’d never left this great country of ours, I would. But at the same time, I probably wouldn’t.” I laugh bitterly. “And you know why? Because trading places with somebody would mean they’d have to experience the bullshit I did. I couldn’t do that to a person, even if I didn’t like them.”
“Well, I apologise for being so fucking naïve, then.” Cammie bundles her rubbish and rises from the table, marching over to the bin with it. “We’ll get your bag out of the car, and then I’ll leave you at Archie’s.”
Fuck. This is why I don’t bother with people anymore. She asked an honest question. How was she to know what I went through, why I was medically discharged? And yet, like the douchebag I am, I took it out on her.
Because that’s who I am now—a man who blames everybody he meets for bullshit they’re not even aware of.
Unless you’ve been there, you just don’t know. And that’s not her fault. Hell, it’s not even mine. It’s nobody’s. Yet I just lumped her with it as though she should burden all the blame for the horrors that fucked me up as a man.
“I’m sorry, Cam.”
“No.” She whips around and marches back to the table, stopping by my side. “That’s the second time you’ve had to apologise to me for losing your temper, and you know what? It makes me think you’re not the kind of person I need to be around.”
She has a point.
“Let’s get my fucking bag then, and be done with it.”
“Let’s.”
I trail behind, my tail firmly tucked between my legs as she marches ahead, struggling over the chain on her own rather than accepting help from me again. Not a word is spoken as we cross the intersection again to her car, which for a chatterbox like Cammie, is kind of poignant.
I can’t imagine many people piss her off to the extent that they actually get the silent treatment. And what’s weirder is, after wishing she’d shut the fuck up for the better part of a day, I miss her voice.
She pops the trunk on her car, and wrestles my pack out of the back before dropping it unnecessarily hard on the road.
“Thanks for the place to stay.” I don’t even look at her; I don’t deserve to meet her eyes.
“Best of luck, Duke.” She makes no bones about getting in her car and turning it on, signalling that she’s ready to leave. I heave the pack up to my shoulder, and after checking the way is clear, cross the road to Archie’s workshop.
Her motor runs behind me, the soft hum of the engine as it idles. The urge is too strong as I reach the door to the office, so I give in and look back at where her BMW stays stationary on the roadside. From this angle it’s too hard to see what she’s doing. The fact she hasn’t chosen to drive away yet, to me, means one of two things: she’s checking I make it over here okay, or she’s too mad to think straight.
Knowing the effect I have on people, I’m going with the latter.