One and Only by Jenny Holiday (10)

By the time Jane got up the next morning, Cameron had made his bed, helped himself to a shower with the towel she’d left for him, and made breakfast. He’d even thought about looking up a recipe for hollandaise sauce on his phone. He’d been lying before when he’d fed her that line about only making eggs Benedict for his lovers. Cam could make passable versions of lots of basic dishes. He’d had to learn, as a kid, because his mom often worked nights at the diner. But his repertoire wasn’t very extensive.

He’d thought better of hollandaise, though. Not only did it sound like an easy recipe to mess up, it was better not to go there, having declared that there was a certain level of intimacy associated with the dish.

So scrambled eggs it was again. But he didn’t think she’d mind because he had also made her a—

“Oh my God, is that a chakram?” she shrieked.

The juxtaposition between her sleep-rumpled hair and pajamas and the fact that she was literally jumping up and down in front of his work-in-progress was pretty amusing. “Yeah. I saw a flattened box in your recycling, so I decided to give it a shot.” He moved to stand by her side at the tiny kitchen table. “I made the basic shape out of cardboard using my pocketknife.” She ooohhed like he had informed her he’d conducted open-heart surgery with his pocketknife. “So I think all you need to do is get some spray paint.” He showed her the image on his phone he’d been using as a guide. “Silver on the outside here,” he said, pointing to the corresponding part on the cardboard, “and gold here.”

She’d gone completely silent. She stood there mutely, blinking at his creation. All of a sudden, he felt like a total fool. She’d probably just been being polite before. What had he been thinking? Was he a five-year-old at the craft table? She probably had some much more elaborate creation in mind. Something classier than spray-painted cardboard. “I, uh, saw that there were a few different versions of her chakram when I looked online,” he said, because, hell, why not add to his idiocy by talking about it? But he couldn’t seem to stop. “Of course, I don’t know the difference between them like you do, so maybe I made the wrong one. I thought this yin-yang-style one looked cool, but—” God. Stop. He forced himself to shut his mouth.

She turned to him, her eyes shiny with—were those tears? “Oh, hey,” he said as one escaped from the corner of her eye. “Don’t cry. You can tell me it’s shit. I’ve been through basic training, sweetheart.” Not to mention a summary trial. “I’ve got thick skin.”

She shook her head, and the motion dislodged another tear on the same side. “It’s perfect,” she whispered.

Whoa. That was not the reaction he’d been expecting, and he lost his breath for a moment. Warmth suffused his chest, and he reached out to brush away the two tears. He used his thumb to get them, and he’d been going to pull away when she grabbed his hand and brought it to her lips, kissing the back of it like she was the duke and he was the maiden in a fairy tale or something.

“Thank you,” she said. It was almost like no one had ever done anything nice for her before.

He cleared his throat, in search of his voice. “Damn, if that’s what I get for a little cardboard craft project, you need to raise your standards.” He busied himself setting out the eggs that he’d been keeping warm in the oven. “I hope you don’t mind I whipped together some breakfast.”

“Are you kidding?” she said, clearing away the newspapers he’d laid under his little DIY-fest. He noticed she very carefully moved the chakram to the top of the refrigerator, which was pretty much the only surface in the tiny kitchen that was empty. “I’m sorry I slept so late. You should have woken me.”

“I have to say, I didn’t take you for a lie-about,” he said, pouring her a cup of coffee and gesturing for her to sit.

She grinned. “I hate getting up in the mornings. Last night’s exhaustion aside, I’m usually up late working.”

An image flashed into his mind of her hunched over her computer in the dark. More of a movie, really, than a still image, because then she got up and laid down on the very bed he’d slept in last night, and—

“And I have to say, I didn’t take you for an early bird.”

He tamped down the spike of desire the dirty movie in his mind had summoned and loaded her plate with eggs and two pieces of toast. “In the army, there’s no sleeping in,” he said.

“I suppose not.” He slid the plate over to her and she moaned, which didn’t help on the whole desire-tamping front. “The only thing I think I love more than eating is eating without having to cook.”

Damn, and right now, there was nothing he loved more than feeding Jane Denning.

“So, Cameron,” she said through a mouthful of eggs. “I feel that you and I have achieved a sort of détente. Would you agree?”

“I guess so,” he said, wary because it seemed like he was being set up for something. Were they going to have to talk about yesterday’s ill-advised kiss now?

“So tell me about the bachelor party.”

“The bachelor party?” he echoed.

“It’s tonight.” She cocked her head. “I assume you’re going?”

Shit. He didn’t know. It would be weird for the brother of the groom not to go to the bachelor party, he assumed, but not only had he not received an invitation, he hadn’t even known it was happening. But then, he hadn’t really been around, had he?

Jane leaned forward on her chair like she was going to whisper a secret to him, though they were, of course, alone.

“I need to know if there’s going to be a stripper.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Stripper,” she said, enunciating the word like he wasn’t a native English speaker. “I don’t care what the answer is, but I need to know. Elise keeps talking about crashing the boys’ party, but she is not going to be cool with a stripper, and it’s infinitely better that if there is one, she not know about it. So do me a favor and tell me now and I’ll be able to keep her away if need be.”

“I honestly don’t know,” he said.

“Can you text me an update?” she asked.

“I guess so?” Shit. That shouldn’t have come out as tentative as it had, like he was asking rather than answering a question. “Yes,” he said more firmly. “I’ll try to find out what’s going on and let you know.” Of course he was going to Jay’s bachelor party, for God’s sake. Despite their recent clashes, they were brothers.

Maybe it was time he started acting like one.

“So you quit the army?” Jane asked suddenly, waving away his offer of more eggs.

He blinked, taking a moment to adjust to the new topic. “More like the army quit me,” he finally answered, hoping she wouldn’t press matters.

“What’s next?”

Damned if he knew. I was going to go to university would make him sound like a lunatic. He was so clearly not university material that anyone with any sense would laugh in his face. And Jane was nothing if not sensible. But, his tour having ended several months earlier than planned, he had no fucking clue what was supposed to come next. “Honestly, I was planning to take a couple months to readjust to civilian life and go from there.” That sounded passable. He had savings. It wasn’t an unreasonable plan.

“And by ‘readjust to civilian life,’ you mean ‘sleep with the female half of it.’”

He would have thought she was teasing, on account of the aforementioned détente and all, but her tone was hard to read. When he didn’t answer fast enough, she said, “And where are you going to live? Jay’s condo?”

Another question he couldn’t answer.

That was probably his cue to leave. He pushed back from the table and took his dishes to the counter. She didn’t have a dishwasher, so he ran some water into the sink.

“Look, I’m sorry,” she said. “That came out all naggy. I just think you have so much…”

“So much what?” he snapped. She winced, and he immediately felt bad, but he needed to know how she’d been planning to finish that sentence. “Were you going to say ‘potential’?” When she didn’t answer, he added, “That seems to be the word. Cam, you have so much potential.” He was trying not to be a bully, but he couldn’t quite keep the sneering tone from his voice. “That’s what Jay always said.”

“I had a great time yesterday.” Her voice had gone all quiet, like she was afraid of how he would respond. “You seemed…different.”

“Different from what?” he pressed. And why were they suddenly having this heavy conversation about his future?

She looked at him without speaking, but there was something in her eyes. Affection, maybe? A fondness that hadn’t been there before? Well, shit. It was better that she knew the truth about him before she started getting ideas. He wasn’t the kind of man she could go on day trips with, flirt with, and then rely on to be there, cheerfully making breakfast and solving her cosplay problems the next morning. The last twenty-four hours had been an aberration. If she was getting ideas, she needed to stop.

“When I said the army quit me, I meant I was dismissed from service. I was charged under the military’s code of service discipline, tried, and…” He held out his hands. “Here I am.”

Her eyes widened. She had probably only heard of stuff like that on TV. It hadn’t been dramatic like that, his trial. Mostly because although Becky had testified on his behalf, he had quite clearly committed the offense he’d been charged with. He didn’t even blame them—you couldn’t just contravene the code of service and walk away. He did blame them, though, for the fact that Biggs’s trial had resulted only in a demotion to lieutenant while his had resulted in dismissal. But what had he expected? Biggs was a reg force officer, and he’d been a reservist.

“What happened?” Jane asked.

“I broke the code of service: Striking or Offering Violence to a Superior Officer. Offense number 103.17.” He still remembered the number. Could even recite the relevant section from memory. God knew he’d spent enough hours staring at it, trying to think of some way to salvage his career. To explain that yes, he’d done what they charged, but it had been in service of preventing a larger crime. But the military rightly didn’t deal in shades of gray.

Her eyes got even wider and she repeated her question. “What happened?”

“Exactly what it sounds like. I attacked my superior officer. Two guys had to pull me off him.”

“But you must have had a reason. It can’t just be—”

“My point,” he said, raising his voice to talk over her, “is that you were wrong about me. I don’t have potential. Never did. All the shit people say about me is true.”

She stood there blinking at him. Good. He had finally shut her up. He reminded himself that he was doing this because he liked her. Maybe she truly believed her own story about not wanting a boyfriend. But just in case she had read too much into that kiss, he needed her to know that he was never going to be the man for the job. If she ever changed her mind about moving beyond her “fine collection” of vibrators, she deserved better than him.

“I’ll try to find out about the bachelor party,” he said as he turned to show himself out. “And if I don’t see you tonight, good luck at Comicon.”

“At least we’re not in Vegas or at a spa in the middle of the woods or something,” Wendy grumbled to Jane later that afternoon as they made their way up the elevator of Wendy’s building laden with bags of decorations for Elise’s bachelorette party. Gia was taking the bride to lunch, and then the four of them were going to a not-in-the-middle-of-the-woods salon. After that, the rest of the revelers would arrive at Wendy’s for gag gifts and drinks before heading out on the town.

“Amen to that,” Jane agreed. Elise had floated the idea of a “destination” bachelorette party, but it had only taken a little gentle manipulation to talk her down from that idea, mostly because Elise was intent on crashing the bachelor party and Jay could not be talked into moving his out of his favorite local pub, much less out of the city. “I don’t really get why she’s so keen on this ‘invade the boys’ thing. Doesn’t that kind of defeat the purpose of a bachelorette?”

“God knows,” Wendy said. “She probably saw it in a movie. She’s got some visual in her head that we now have to bust our asses to recreate.”

“She probably saw it on Pinterest,” Jane said. “You know, all those ‘Invading Your Husband-to-Be’s Bachelor Party in Style’ boards?”

Wendy barked a laugh, which perked Jane up immensely after her weird morning with Cameron. Wendy, a take-no-prisoners defense lawyer, was usually all business, but she had a loud, infectious laugh that, if you knew her, was all the more remarkable for how incongruent it was.

“If this was anyone besides one of you girls,” Jane said, “I would have put my foot down long ago.”

Wendy unlocked her door and held it for Jane. “Agreed. If it was anyone else, I’d be staging an intervention, sitting the bridezilla down, and reminding her that the point of all this isn’t the wedding but, like, the marriage itself. But in this particular case, it’s clear that despite the fact that Elise is off her rocker, the marriage itself is going to be just fiiiine.”

“What are you talking about?” Jane asked.

Wendy dropped the box she’d been carrying on a counter and sank onto one of the stools at her kitchen island. “Have you seen the way he looks at her?”

“What do you mean? Jay?”

“Uh, yes. Hello? It’s like he’s eye-fucking her all the time. And it’s been that way since they met. It never, like, wears off.” She sighed.

“We’re talking about Jay here? Accountant Jay?”

“What planet are you on? Yes. Didn’t Gia tell you about walking in on them a couple days ago?”

“No!” God. What had she been missing by skipping all the flower arranging and calligraphy-ing? “Tell me!”

Wendy let loose a low whistle. “I can’t. It will make me blush too much. You’ll have to wait for Gia.” Jane was about to protest that nothing made Wendy blush when her friend sighed again and said, “Let’s just say that even though she’s uptight about what shade of ivory or bone or whatever her shoes are, Elise is being extremely well fucked.” She grinned. “Those two are going to have a very happy marriage.”

Wendy generally had a potty mouth, and she called things like she saw them, but…wow. It was Jane’s turn to blush, and not only because of what Wendy had said. For some reason, the image of Cameron lounging on her guest bed and talking about giving “screaming orgasms” to “his girl” had popped into her mind. She took a deep breath to calm her runaway pulse.

“So what about this Cameron dude?”

“What about him?” Jane countered, taking her time unpacking the bags so as to avoid looking at Wendy. She and Wendy had been inseparable since fifth grade, so it was totally weird that she hadn’t told Wendy about anything that had gone down with Cameron. It was also totally weird that she didn’t want to.

“Whoa. Defensive much?”

“I am not!” Jane turned around. Face your accuser and all that.

Wendy raised her eyebrows skeptically. That was another problem with the whole joined-at-the-hip thing: it also came with ESP. Jane made a split-second decision. “I do kind of have a confession.” It wasn’t an untrue confession. It wasn’t a totally comprehensive confession, either, but whatever.

Wendy clapped once, hard, as if in triumph. “Spill it.”

Jane lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m kind of using him to get out of my bridesmaid duties.” Wendy narrowed her eyes—the hardened lawyer could smell the lie of omission, no doubt—so Jane kept talking. “As far as I can tell, being a bridesmaid is kind of like being a lobster slowly boiled in a pot. It all sort of creeps up on you, and suddenly you’re shoving white felt into a blender.” There. Hopefully that would be enough to put her bloodhound of a BFF off the scent.

Wendy let loose another one of her signature cackles and rolled off the bed. “You’re not wrong there. Come on. We have to cover this condo in plastic dicks because that is, apparently, how our bullshit society says you are supposed to celebrate the impending end of singlehood. And you’re not getting out of this one.”

Cam’s text arrived while Jane was perched in a pedicure chair, an hour into the “getting ready” part of the festivities. Never mind that “getting ready” for Jane generally meant deciding which flats to wear and slapping her hair into a ponytail, and she could be counted on to do that in all of ten seconds. If “getting ready” for the bachelorette party was this elaborate a process, she hated to think what the primping before the actual wedding would entail.

Jane hated to be “that person” who texted while getting a pedicure—could you get any more entitled?—but she sat back and replied.

She laughed out loud, drawing Gia’s attention.

“What are you doing?” Gia lunged for the phone. Jane tried to keep it out of her reach, but her pedicurist was in the middle of applying the glittery emerald-green polish Jane had chosen, so she couldn’t really move. She tried not to whimper as Gia captured her prize.

“Oh my God, is this Jay’s brother you’re texting with?”

Jane wanted to die. She wanted the Earth to open up and swallow her, pedicure throne and all. She could only comfort herself that Wendy and Elise were getting their fingers done across the salon and therefore hadn’t heard Gia’s outburst.

“I, ah, asked him to let us know if there was going to be a stripper,” she offered feebly, knowing there was no way Gia would accept that explanation.

“Yeah,” she said, scrolling on Jane’s phone. “And you covered that waaaay back here. You know, before the part where you start talking about penises.” She tapped the phone a couple times. “I’m going to answer him.”

“No!” Jane’s shriek was so loud that it did draw Wendy and Elise’s attention from across the salon, as well as that of most of the other customers. “Sorry!” she chirped, waving at everyone. Then she hissed at Gia, “If you don’t give me back that phone, so help me…”

Gia handed the phone back silently, all the mirth gone from her face. “Oh, sweetie.”

“What?” Jane had no idea what was going on, but she didn’t like the way Gia was looking at her.

“You like him.”

“I don’t like him.”

“You do.” She heaved a huge sigh. Then she perked up. “Well, we know you’re not gay, Xena!”

“What’s wrong with liking Cameron?” Jane protested, but then quickly added, “Theoretically, I mean. Because I don’t.”

“He’s trouble, that one.”

“Says Elise. But he’s actually kind of…”

“Kind of what?” When Jane didn’t answer, Gia said, “My concern is not what Elise says. You can tell by interacting with him for five seconds that he’s trouble.”

Jane supposed Gia was right. She was the world-weary, jet-setting model, after all. She had tons of horror stories of being harassed on the job, and just as many of, uh, enjoying herself in her travels. She knew stuff, was the point. Certainly more than Jane, whose last relationship with something not made out of silicone had ended five years ago.

“Which doesn’t mean he doesn’t have his uses,” Gia said, cocking her head and tapping a finger against her pursed lips as she regarded Jane. “He is gorgeous.”

“Yeah, if you’re into the whole testosterone overdose thing,” Jane said.

“And really, who isn’t?” Gia said with a grin. “At least temporarily.” But then her face grew grave. “Seriously, though, Jane, have some fun if you want, but don’t get your heart broken.”

“Whoa. Why would you think I’m going to get my heart broken?”

“What were you going to say before? You said, ‘he’s actually kind of…’ And then you didn’t finish. You were going to say he has qualities that no one else sees, right? That under all that womanizing and bluster, he’s actually a misunderstood teddy bear?”

Jane didn’t answer, but she feared her face betrayed her, because Gia shook her head, looking at her like she was an innocent child who didn’t know the ways of the world. “You know that Maya Angelou quote?” she asked. “It goes something like, when people tell you who they are, believe them.”

Jane’s first impulse was to correct her, because the quote was actually “When people show you who they are, believe them.” And showing was something quite apart from telling. And that was the thing about Cameron: what he told her about himself was different from what he showed her. But then she thought better of it, because probably that was too fine a distinction. Cameron had stood before her and said, “All the shit people say about me is true.” He’d calmly informed her that he physically attacked his commanding officer, for heaven’s sake.

“Gia,” she said, her voice catching, which pretty much confirmed that she was an innocent child who didn’t know the ways of the world. She could feel herself flush with embarrassment.

“Aww, sweetie.” Gia laid a hand on her forearm, which was weird because although she was their resident extrovert and party girl, Gia was usually the least demonstrative of their group.

“You won’t tell anyone?”

“What? That you like fake penises?”

“No. About…this whole conversation.”

Gia mimed zipping her lip and throwing away the key. Then she mimed crossing her heart, and Jane’s own was suddenly full of affection for her friend. Gia was a lot of things, but foremost among them was loyal.

Jane slumped in her chair, a bit off kilter as a result of the uncharacteristically frank exchange with Gia and preemptively exhausted when she considered the night ahead.

“But by all means,” Gia said, the forearm pat turning into an aggressive poke. “Do the dude. Break the Felix spell already!”

“There is no Felix spell!” Jane protested, laughing at the exaggerated skeptical face Gia made.

But the truth was, she was starting to fear there was a Felix spell. And she wanted to break it. Crap. She wanted to break it with Cameron.