Chapter Twenty-Five:
Broken
We rode without a word, and I was conflicted: distressed that Cameron was angry with me; yet happy—even a little smug—that I had pulled off my first business meeting with distributors without getting us killed.
We pulled into a small parking lot where a stationed school bus had been converted into a fast-food stand. It was mid-afternoon. I was starving. The smell of greasy fries was the best thing I had ever smelled by that point. Cameron barely looked at me while we waited in line. The extent of our conversation was limited to “What do you want to eat” and “Veggie burger with extra fries.” Cameron asked for mayo for my fries. I didn’t need to say anything.
I followed him around the back of the converted bus through a band of trees. I could hear crashing water as we neared the end of the trail. Fifty feet above ground, a waterfall plunged in an almost perfect line down the face of the rock and into a gurgling bath of water. People, sporadically spread about the trees and grass, picnicked and took in the breathtaking scene. Cameron dug a blanket out of the backpack and spread it on a tiny patch of grass as if he had been there before. We were mostly hidden in the brush.
While he ate and brooded, I threw my helmet-hair back into its cozy ponytail. This caused Cameron to smile, which he tried to hide from me. I wasn’t sure what, exactly, I had done to make him angry. There was no doubt in my mind that nothing about the meeting had gone according to his plans, and that I didn’t do anything that I was supposed to do—like stay quiet.
With a bit of food in my belly and Cameron’s mood seemingly bettered, I figured I would get it over with, whatever was bugging him.
“You’re angry with me.” I was really good at stating the obvious.
“Uh-huh.” Cameron was lying on his back with his legs crossed one over the other.
Apparently I was supposed to guess what I had done wrong—which I wanted to do as much as a serial killer wished to confess every crime he had ever committed to the rookie cop who had just stopped him because of a broken taillight.
“Can you tell me why?” I asked.
“Things could have gone really wrong in there.”
“But they didn’t,” I replied.
“They could have,” he reiterated, with emphasis. “I had no idea what was going on.”
“Welcome to my world,” I mumbled, spearing my straw though the plastic lid of my cup.
Cameron half-smiled. “Emmy, when I don’t know what’s going on and can’t understand what you’re saying, I can’t react.”
“You don’t have any faith in me.”
“It has nothing to do with my faith in you and everything to do with my mistrust of them. These people aren’t angels. This isn’t a game. As far as I knew, the old man was threatening to put a knife at your throat as soon as I wasn’t looking.”
“He never threatened me.”
“I had no way of knowing that,” he griped.
“Considering the circumstances, I think I made the right decision.” I was convinced of this.
Cameron exaggeratingly rolled his eyes at my cockiness. “I should have known that you’d be able to charm yourself out of trouble. Must be in your genes.”
I wasn’t sure if he’d meant that I had charmed myself out of trouble with the distributors or with him. It didn’t matter in the end. I had taken his change in demeanor as a signal that I was on my way to being forgiven. I decided to swoop in for the kill and snuggled up against him. He didn’t recoil.
“I got you everything you wanted, didn’t I?” I said with a sigh.
“Yes, Emmy,” he conceded, also with a sigh. “You made me a lot of money today. But it’s just money. I would have preferred it much more if you would have stayed out of their grasp.”
Something moved within the trees. Cameron abruptly pushed me off and sprang up. An old lady strolled by, shakily leaning on her cane. She was about ninety years old and maybe eighty pounds soaking wet.
“Sorry,” Cameron said awkwardly to me. He laid back down on the blanket. If I hadn’t been aware of his paranoia, I would have been insulted by his fear of being seen in public with me.
I propped myself up on my elbows and looked at Cameron.
“What’s going to happen when things settle down?” I wondered.
“What do you mean?”
“What happens to me when the danger is gone?”
“You go home,” he said instinctively. He hadn’t changed his mind, after everything.
I tried to keep it cool. “And then what?”
“And then nothing. You go back and live happily ever after,” he said, refusing to look at me.
“What about us?” My voice was shaking.
Cameron was silent.
“I could just stay with you,” I offered.
He laughed, but his tone was tight. “Em, you get yourself in more trouble when you’re bored. Do you really think you could just stay home and wait around for me while I go to work? I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a nice fantasy, but we already tried that, and it didn’t work.”
I was flustered. “I could go to work with you. Turns out I’m pretty good at it. You said so yourself.”
“Absolutely not! I won’t allow it.”
“Why not?” I exclaimed with unnecessary whininess. “Carly does it.”
“Carly can’t do anything else. You …” He took a breath to calm himself and his voice. “You have a life, school, a family, friends. And you would be much more at risk than Carly because of my position.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I grumbled.
“Well, I’m not willing to take any chances. Not with you.” His voice was icy. “Besides, it’s not just up to me. You become a risk to the whole organization if you get caught by rivals. The leaders would have our heads before they let any of that happen.”
“So promise them that you won’t do anything if something does happen to me. That you’ll let me die if I’m dense enough to get caught.”
Cameron stared at me vacantly. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard. Don’t ever say that again.” He briskly stood and started packing everything up. “We need to go before it starts getting dark.”
I did what I was told and struggled to keep up with him as he stomped back to the bike.
It started raining about one hour left into our trip home. By the time we drove up the gravel driveway, it was dark, we were soaked, and Meatball was anxiously waiting by the cottage door, waiting to get out of the rain. Cameron immediately got a fire burning in the cast-iron stove while he was on his cell phone, dictating numbers to Spider. He smiled at me on occasion, particularly when he repeated the day’s purchase prices to a flabbergasted Spider. He was keeping busy, throwing paperwork into the fire as he went through them one-by-one with Spider and making supper for the both of us while he replayed the day’s events over the phone. He stayed on the phone the whole time we were eating, talking about what I assumed to be business, though I didn’t understand any of it. Eventually his phone died, and he had to reluctantly hang up. He insisted that I sit, or even better, go to bed, while he did the dishes.
I didn’t want to believe it. But while I continued to watch him, while he tried his best to pretend that everything was okay, something was creeping inside of me. A remembrance of my former life—the one that I could never go back to. I was aware of the sharp stab in my heart, like the stitches on an old wound were coming undone.
Things inside me were shattering, falling to pieces. It was the look on his face that gave him away.
I had seen it played out in front of me a thousand times. It was the look that my brother had given me the last time I saw him. It was my mother’s pressed smile on the day she had come for a surprise visit in Callister, right before she came up with a lame excuse as to why she needed to leave, quickly. It was the avoidance of eye contact that the inconsequential boys had when they were getting annoyed with my lack of affection … Cameron was getting ready to leave me. I wanted to latch onto him, hard, so that we would never be separated. At the same time, I wanted to run away, so that perhaps I wouldn’t feel the pain when he found a way to let me go.
Whoever said that love hurts was wrong. Love is excruciating, especially when you can feel it slipping through your fingers and there is nothing you can do about it. Like someone was playing tug-of-war with my limbs, ripping to shreds whatever was left behind. What it would feel like when love was lost … I wouldn’t survive that. I closed my eyes, willing the tears to stay hidden behind my eyelids and focusing on breathing in and out instead of the pain that was ramming in my heart.
Cameron finished the dishes and turned the tiny kitchen light off. With the only light coming from the shimmering flames that shone through the square of the stove window, my tears were safely out of sight.
“We should get some sleep. It’s been a long day,” he said with a fake yawn and a bogus stretch of the arms.
I noiselessly followed. It didn’t matter that the tears blurred my vision. I wouldn’t be able to see anything anyway. But Cameron caught my arm as we climbed up the stairs.
“Are you crying?” he asked with utter surprise. “Emmy, what’s wrong?”
“You’re going to leave me no matter what I do, won’t you?” I sobbed. “I won’t go back without you, Cameron. I can’t. You’re all I have.”
Cameron laughed softly. “Is that what you’re crying about? That whole thing about you going back home?”
He wrapped his arms around me, pinning my arms to my sides, whispering through my sobs. “Em, I’m not going anywhere. We’ll make it work, I promise. Whatever it takes. Please don’t cry.”
I stood in his arms until the sobs finally subsided into sniffles. He let me go and gently lifted my shaking chin. He kept my eyes for a bit while sadness swelled his darkened features. “I never knew you were this broken.”
“Only when you’re not there.” I sniffed and let him wipe the remaining tears.
“You’ll probably die if you stay with me,” he told me.
“Then I’m dead either way, because I won’t survive without you.” There was nothing that he could say that would convince me that being without him was the better option.
He sighed and shook his head. “Whatever I do just makes everything harder. Worse for you.”
It was in the flickering light of the fire that I noticed that familiar sparkle in his eyes and suddenly I understood. The rush to get everything done, the fake yawn, the attempt at getting me into bed, early … Cameron was right. I was broken. Probably beyond repair. But, in that moment, and all those other moments, when it was just us, and especially when he looked at me like that, smoldering, as if I were all he needed, I didn’t feel broken. Like a shattered coffee mug that had been superglued back together—with him, I could barely feel the cracks. I felt whole.
I latched onto him. He kissed me and carried me to bed. The other stuff—life—was left behind for another night.