Charlie’s jaw dropped again and I belly laughed, tossing my head back before meeting her eyes with a challenging gaze.
“Did you just say I have nice tits,” she said, but already she was laughing, too. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that. Ever.”
“Well, it’s true,” I confessed. “Now, are you going to strip, or is my girl backing out of a challenge because she’s too old?”
Charlie laughed incredulously, her arms still crossed as she shook her head at me. She opened her mouth to argue again, but then simply closed it before she leaned up and stripped off her socks from her feet. She’d already taken her boots off earlier, and she sat back with one eyebrow cocked, popping her feet up on the dash.
“There,” she said. “Happy?”
“I mean, I would have much preferred the shirt, but I’ll take what I can get,” I teased.
Charlie chuckled, looking out the window again as her now-bare feet bopped along to the song on the radio.
She was peeking out of her shell, and I knew I had to make another move while I had the chance.
I slipped my phone from the center console, thumbing through it until I found the song. Once Ain’t No Mountain High Enough started playing, I tapped the plus volume button on my steering wheel, watching Charlie as I did.
At first, she didn’t respond, other than to cast me a confused glance as to why the music was suddenly so loud. But as the melody floated in and she recognized the familiar intro, she smiled.
“This always makes me think of the summer before our senior year,” she said. “Remember? When we all drove up to Erie?”
“I do,” I said. “Ready for the duet?”
She scoffed. “Oh, please. Like you’ll sing. I tried to get you to for years and—”
But before she could finish the sentence, I was already belting out Marvin Gaye’s first verse, and for the third time, Charlie’s mouth hung open.
I finished the first verse, using my right hand to grip an imaginary microphone as I tilted it toward her.
But she didn’t sing. She just gaped.
“Come on, don’t leave me hanging,” I said as Tammi Terrell’s part faded out. I sang Marvin’s next little part, still holding the microphone for her to jump in, and then, just before the chorus hit, I saw another sign.
“STRIPES!” I called out, and then I pulled the microphone back, belting out the first part of the chorus as Charlie whipped around just in time to see the sign pass by.
She turned on me, mouth open in a surprised smile, but she only paused a moment more before she ripped her shirt over her head and spun it around like a rodeo rope as she joined in on the chorus. We both laughed our way through the words, though I was more than a little distracted now that her simple, nude bra was exposed. My hand drifted over with the microphone, but as she leaned to sing into it, I dropped down lower and cupped her breast with a squeeze.
Charlie swatted my hand away, still laughing as the second verse kicked in, and then she threw her hand up and pointed out the window.
“STRIPES!”
I’d seen the sign, too, but not before her. So, I held the wheel steady with one hand, stripping out of my sweater before peeling it off that arm and tossing it toward Charlie. She caught it on a laugh, and then the second chorus started.
We sang loud and entirely off key, but neither of us cared. And when I looked over in the passenger seat, I saw Charlie — all of her.
I saw her when she was nineteen and nervous, her hands tucked between her thighs in my old Pontiac.
I saw her eyes wide and lips parted as I slid inside her for the first time.
I saw her under a white veil as she promised to love me for the rest of her life.
And the way she looked at me, the way she tilted her head to the side just an inch, I couldn’t be sure what she was thinking, but I did know one thing.
She still loved me.
Even if I didn’t know why, I knew she did.
The song faded out, both of us still bopping along, and she leaned one elbow on the console with her hand propped on her chin.
“Kiss me,” she whispered.
I slowed, glancing at the road once more before my eyes found hers. She watched me with brows bent together, like being near me hurt her as much as it healed her. I framed her chin with my pointer finger and thumb, lowering my lips to hers slowly and purposefully, as if that kiss was my only chance to keep her outside of her shell. I’d finally coaxed her out, and now I needed her to stay.
My eyes found the road again, ensuring I was driving safe before I glanced back at her. She was still watching me, a small smile on her lips now.
“I love you.”
I rubbed her lower lip with my thumb, tracing where I’d just kissed her. “I love you, too.”
When my eyes glanced back to the road, I smirked, leaning in to press my lips to hers once more.
“And Charlie?”
“Yes?” she breathed.
I smiled wider, kissing her nose.
“Stripes.”
Charlie tilted her head again, then she whipped around just in time to see the sign fly by.
“Damn it!” she yelled on a laugh, then she poked my ribs over and over as I laughed, too, trying to dodge her jabs. I memorized her laugh in that moment, the way it left her lips at different decibels, the tone of it sweet and song-like.
I wanted to bottle it up and keep it forever, just in case I ever wanted to take a sip of this night again. Later. In another time.
In a time when maybe she wouldn’t be mine anymore.
“So, I have to strip now?” she asked.
I just lifted a brow, because she already knew the answer.
Besides, I was too busy tracing the lines of her face, tacking them to the foam board of my memory, hoping to keep her there forever.
But when she reached behind her, eyes on me as she unclasped her bra, everything else faded away.
And I prayed to God for more time.
***
Charlie
“That was so fun,” I said as Cameron unloaded our bags from the trunk.
He threw them over his shoulders, closing the trunk and reaching for my hand as my mind ran over the memories that resurfaced from the evening.
“I can’t believe how much the campus has changed,” I added, offering to take my bag from him. He just shook his head, tightening his grip on my hand. “The old bonfire pit is gone. I mean… gone.”
“Guess they needed a Science Center more than drunken bonfires.”
“They’ve got their priorities wrong.”
He chuckled at that, opening the door that led into the hotel lobby. When I stepped inside, a wave of familiarity washed over me, and I frowned.
“I’ve been here before.”
Cameron smirked, dropping our bags by my feet as he dug out his wallet.
“I’ll go check us in. Be right back.”
He made his way to the desk as I looked around the run-down lobby, wondering why it felt so familiar. I also couldn’t help but question why it had been the place Cameron chose for us to sleep that night. To say it was a little shabby for his usual taste would be an understatement. The carpeted floors were stained, the lighting low and dingy, with various bulbs burnt out and not replaced. We were one of very few cars outside, which didn’t surprise me being that our university was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. Still, I was surprised we hadn’t driven back into the city for the night, to a more grand hotel.
Then again, I’d given up on trying to figure out any of Cameron’s moves that night.
From planning a spontaneous weekend trip to singing in the car on the ride out to Garrick, he’d surprised me. What had surprised me most was how he’d managed to turn my entire night around — maybe even my entire week.
It had been surreal, driving around campus, seeing all that had changed since we were students there. He’d wanted to take me to the old bonfire pit at the end of the night, after dinner at the small
diner on campus, of course, but the pit had been demolished and replaced by a modern, all-glass and steel building.
So instead, we’d sat at the edge of the dock on the campus lake and recounted all the nights we’d spent around that fire pit, from the night he’d nearly punched one of his fraternity brothers for ogling me to the night he’d told me about his parents.
That was the night I told him I loved him.
He’d taken almost three months to say it in return.
I didn’t mind waiting for him, though — not back then. With Cameron, his word meant something to him. There was so much thought and intention behind every sentence that left his mouth, and I knew that if and when he did tell me he loved me, he would mean it.
Maybe more than anyone had ever meant it before.
And when he did tell me, I’d felt every part of my heart squeeze at his words. We were napping between classes one lazy, rainy afternoon, and he woke up before me. I opened my eyes to find his there staring back at me, and he swept my hair out of my face, told me he loved me, and leaned in to seal that confession with the sweetest kiss of my life.
I was smiling at that memory when Cameron returned from the front desk, holding up a key card between his thumb and index finger.
“Come on,” he said, picking up the bags again. “Let’s get you to this room.”
“Anxious to get me alone there, Mr. Pierce?”
Cameron eyed me. “You were stark ass naked in the seat next to me for the last half hour of our drive into campus, and I couldn’t touch you. Does that answer your question?”
I flushed, biting my lower lip as he reached for my hand and dragged me down the hall to the elevators. “It was your idea to play Stripes,” I countered. “To be fair.”
“There’s nothing fair about you being naked when I can’t touch you.”
I laughed, but inside my stomach flipped inside out. The last time he’d tried to touch me, I’d rejected him — the same way he’d rejected me so many nights in the last five years. It wasn’t that his touch didn’t still elicit a need within me, but that night, Reese had been the main man on my mind.
I didn’t want to touch Cameron when I was thinking of Reese.
We shot up to the top floor of the hotel, and I stared at the buttons in the elevator, something about them triggering a memory, too. But it wasn’t until Cameron opened our door and ushered me inside our room for the night that it hit me.
“Oh my God…”
I balked at the horrid floral wallpaper lining the room, a wallpaper I couldn’t forget even if I tried. My eyes trailed the large bed next, the white comforter lined with a red bed liner at the bottom, rose petals spread across both. I found the wide balcony next, but just barely glanced at it before my eyes stuck on the large jacuzzi tub in the corner.
“Cameron, is this…?”
“The room we stayed in after our first bonfire at Garrick together?” he finished for me.
“It is, isn’t it?!” I laughed, running my fingers over the wallpaper as I looked around. “God, it hasn’t changed a bit.”
“It might be the only thing,” Cameron said.
“I hated this wallpaper then. It’s even worse now.”
“So bad,” Cameron agreed, but he dropped our bags on the bed and crossed to where I stood, pressing me against the papered wall. “But it was the last thing on my mind that night.”
“And tonight?” I breathed, eyes falling to his lips.
“I hadn’t even noticed it until you said something.”
Cameron looked at me in that moment as if he’d walked through the desert and I was an untouched, natural spring. I flushed, and he leaned in slowly to press his lips to mine, that kiss sending a jolt of electricity to my core. I arched into his touch, his hands pinning my hips to the wall as he kissed me harder, but he broke the kiss before the flame could catch.
“I thought we could take a bath,” he said. “Like that night.”
I smiled. “That sounds nice.”
“I’ll get the water running. Why don’t you pop that champagne over there?” He nodded to a bottle cooling in an ice bucket.
But when he moved away from the wall and I pushed forward, half of the wallpaper came with me.
It stuck to my sweater, the ripping sound the only thing I heard before my eyes were wide and staring at Cameron, who was trying his best not to laugh. I turned, feeling where the paper was stuck to the back of my shirt, little strips of it connecting me to the wall behind me.
“Not exactly the magical place it used to be, is it?” I asked, laughing with Cameron.
He helped me unstick the paper before I peeled off my sweater, still wearing my blouse beneath it. Cameron’s eyes caught on my chest before he ripped them away and made his way over to the tub.
For a moment, the only sound was the water running as I untwisted the metal top on the champagne and prepared to pop the cork. I felt Cameron’s eyes on me, like they had been all night, but the anxiety they brought when we first left our house was gone, replaced by an easy comfort.
I was having fun.
The trip I’d been dreading with the man I didn’t want to spend time with was turning out to be exactly what I needed. I was out of the house, out of the town I hadn’t left for a while, and back in a place where I felt connected to Cameron.
But as much as I loved it, it also hurt.
Because now that I was alone with my husband, I couldn’t remember why I ever let Reese in my heart in the first place.
I thought back to when he first came to town, to how I was feeling then. I remembered still wanting Cameron, even on the night Reese opened up to me about his family at my parents’ house. But somewhere along the way, Reese showed me how unhappy I was. It wasn’t that I hadn’t felt that way before Reese came back, but he just put a magnifying glass to it.
And he asked me to do something about it.
He asked me to not settle, to not be okay with being unhappy. And so, I’d found happiness in him.
And I loved him, too.
That was the truth. I had wanted him when I was younger and those feelings were only multiplied now.
But he had Blake, and he didn’t tell me about her. That was what weighed most on my mind now when I thought of him. I could no longer see him dropping to his knees to touch my scars at the Incline, or feel his hands on me under the sheets of our fort, or hear his voice whispering my name the first time he had me.
They were all muted by the woman he kept a secret.
My eyes met Cameron’s from across the room where he filled the tub. He offered me a small smile, and I knew without a doubt that he would have told me about Blake, had he been Reese. But he wasn’t Reese. He was Cameron — my husband, my family.
Then again, he’d kept secrets from me, too.
I poured the champagne into two flutes, dropping a couple of strawberries from the bowl next to the bottle inside each one before crossing to Cameron. He was frowning, his focus on the water when I handed him his glass.
“It’s not as hot as I remember,” he said, one hand feeling the water still as he took the glass in his other.
“I’m sure it’s fine.”
He lifted a brow. “Feel for yourself.”
When I did, I laughed. “Oh, my God. It’s lukewarm.”
“At best.”
I chuckled, but I saw the frustration shading Cameron’s face. He was trying so hard to make the night magical, to relive an evening that had meant so much to us years ago.
Carefully, I sat my glass on the edge of the tub, stripping out of my blouse and letting it fall to the floor before my fingers began working the buttons on my jeans. Cameron’s face smoothed when he saw me undressing, and he swallowed, eyes catching on my lace panties as I dropped my jeans to the floor next.
“We’ll make it work,” I said, unhooking my bra with an arched brow. “You going to let me get naked all alone?”
Cameron smirked, shaking his head as he watched me a moment longer. Once my
bra was unclasped and dangling from one finger, he stood, stripping with me. We watched each other with only the sound of the water running, and once we were both bare, Cameron cut the water off and thumbed through his phone until a soft melody started playing through it.
He grabbed his glass first, settling back into the water with his legs wide enough for me to sit between them. I crawled in carefully, but it was useless, the water sloshed over the sides as I sank down, taking my seat in front of him.
“It’s almost cold,” I said on a laugh, and Cameron blew out a frustrated breath from behind me. “But I still remember what it felt like that night,” I added. “How hot it was, and the bubbles — remember?”
“I do,” he said in my ear, one hand holding his glass while the other trailed circles on my knee. I leaned back more into him, letting his body envelop mine.
For a while we just sat there, silently sipping on our champagne and touching each other gently. I would reach back for Cameron’s hair, running my fingers through it, and he would trail the skin of my collarbone, making me shiver under the touch. Eventually, our hands met in the middle, and our fingers folded together as I leaned my head back on a sigh.
My eyes caught on the old chandelier in the middle of the room, its bronze paint chipping, only half of the bulbs lit. I chuckled again, lightly enough that I don’t even think Cameron noticed.
“Why did you bring me here tonight?” I asked after a while. “Back to Garrick? To this hotel?”
Cameron pressed his palm flat to mine, his fingertips slipping between mine slowly until we were holding hands again.
“Honestly?”
I nodded.
“I wanted to bring you back to a simpler time, I guess,” he said on a breath. “And maybe I wanted to come back to this time, too. So much has changed since we fell in love here — good and bad. I thought maybe if we could come back here, to the beginning, we could remember what that felt like. What it was like just falling into each other and not having to think about anything else.” Cameron chuckled. “A time before bills and houses and steady, nine-to-five jobs.”
I smiled, leaning my head back on his chest.
Best Kept Secrets (Complete Series) Page 32