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.
“I think you’ve said mo
re on this trip than you have in the past five years.”
He paused.
“Well, I should have been talking to you more. I should have let you in more.”
Cameron squeezed my hand, and I squeezed his in return, my eyes closing at the truth behind his words. “I know it’s hard.”
“It is,” he agreed quickly. “But I’m your husband, and I should have been there for you. When everything…”
Cameron’s voice broke, and he cleared his throat, adjusting his position behind me.
“I’ve been seeing someone,” he said, and instantly, my heart froze, the beat stuck under my rib cage. But before I could draw any conclusions of my own, he clarified with, “A therapist. His name is Patrick.”
I sat up, twisting a little until I could see Cameron’s face.
“How long?”
“A little over a week,” he said, and I felt the tremble in his hand still intertwined with mine.
Cameron hated talking, hated opening up and feeling vulnerable, and here he’d been doing so with a stranger — and now, with me. I leaned against him again, this time curling into him, my cheek against his chest as I wrapped my arms around his middle.
“There’s so much I want to tell you, Charlie,” Cameron said, his hand running over my damp hair before he pressed a kiss to it. “So much I need to tell you, things you need to hear, but I may not be able to say it all at once. I may not get it all out tonight, but I promise you, I’m trying. And I will tell you everything. I will.”
“It’s okay,” I tried, but he shook his head.
“It’s not. And I could start in a lot of different places, but the first thing I want to say to you is that I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry I left you to battle the grief over losing Derrick and Jeremiah on your own. I was stupid to think you needed space and time. You’re right — you needed me, and I wasn’t there.”
Emotion strangled me like a noose, its hands wrapping tight around my throat as I wrapped my arms around Cameron tighter. He was so warm, yet he was shaking, and I tried as much as I could to make him feel comfortable.
The words he was giving me, they were more than he’d given me in years — and I knew how much they hurt for him to say.
“I was devastated,” he said, his voice just above a whisper. “When we lost them, I felt like somehow it was my fault — like I had failed you and them in some way I couldn’t even be sure of. And I wanted to help you, to make you feel better, but I didn’t know how. I was useless. I tried rebuilding your library and packing away any memory of our boys…” He swallowed, voice thick with emotion. “Like I could make them disappear. Like I could fix your pain by removing any reminders of the reason it existed, instead of facing it head on with you.”
My heart broke with his admission. Here I’d felt like it was my fault, like I was the one who’d failed by not carrying our boys into a healthy birth, and Cameron felt that same pressure.
It was all too much for us. For both of us. Why hadn’t I ever thought to ask him if he was okay?
“When I told Patrick about what happened, he asked me how I felt about losing them,” Cameron said. “The boys. And at first, the answer was easy. I was sad, I was angry, I was devastated and heartbroken. I blamed God, blamed myself, blamed my shit father even though I haven’t seen him since I was eight. Somehow it was his fault, too, and that’s when Patrick helped me realize something I hadn’t before.”
My breath caught, and I held it in my lungs as I waited for Cameron to continue.
“The truth is, I was more angry than anything when we lost the boys, Charlie. I couldn’t handle the pain, or the thought of not having them in our lives, but I could spend hours and hours every night being angry. And what Patrick helped me see was that I wasn’t mad at you, or at me, or at the doctors or the stupid grieving books your parents gave us,” he said, shaking his head. “I was angry because it wasn’t fair. I was angry because of the injustice of my life, of being an unwanted child who, in turn, couldn’t have the children he wanted more than anything.”
I closed my eyes, tears I hadn’t even realized were building rolling down my cheeks in two symmetrical lines.
“Oh, Cameron,” I whispered, holding him tight. “You weren’t unwanted.”
“Yes, I was,” he said louder, his voice strong and sure. “And it’s so, so fucked up that they could have me when they didn’t even want me. A druggie mother, an abusive, asshole dad. They didn’t want a kid, and yet they got me.”
He was shaking, and I smoothed my hands down his lower back where I held him, lips pressed against his chest.
“And here we are, two people who love each other more than anything in the world, and we couldn’t have our boys.” He swallowed. “That’s what I played on repeat, over and over, until my thoughts were scrambled and knotted. All I could think was how we wanted those boys and we couldn’t have them. But we deserved them, Charlie. Damn it, you deserved them.”
Cameron grabbed my arms, pulling me up until my eyes met his. He ran his hands up and over my shoulders, my neck, until they framed my face as his eyes searched mine, begging me to hear him.
“You will be the most amazing mother one day,” he said, his voice breaking. “Whether with me or…”
But he couldn’t finish the sentence, and I hated myself for ever making it a sentence he thought in the first place.
“You will be the best mom in the world. I know it. And I’m just so sorry those boys didn’t get to live long enough to have you as their mother because they would have been the luckiest boys in the world.” He sniffed. “And I would have been the luckiest man.” At that, he choked on a laugh. “I still am, at least for now.”
“Shhh,” I said quickly, leaning in to kiss him, and we both exhaled together once our lips met.
I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him into me, twisting in the bath as the water sloshed over the sides again. I straddled him the best I could in the space we had, our chests fused together as he kissed my lips hard enough to bruise them.
“I’m so sorry, Charlie,” he said between kisses. “I just wanted you to know that. I was hurting, too. I lost them, too. But I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you the way I should have been. I’m sorry I haven’t been here, not really, since the day they left.”
“It’s okay, Cameron. It’s okay. I understand.” I kissed him again, softer this time — longer. “There’s no right way to handle what we went through, okay? We were both just doing what we could. That’s all we had to give, and it’s okay.”
“I’ll never forgive myself,” he whispered. “But I had to tell you. I wanted you to understand. And more than anything, I need you to know that I have always loved you, Charlie. Always. That never wavered — not ever.”
“I know,” I said quickly, but in my heart, a familiar pain stung me like a wasp. Because though I knew he’d always loved me, he had wavered — he had strayed from my love and into the arms of another woman.
And I still didn’t know why.
But I pushed those thoughts from my mind, choosing to focus on the little ray of light Cameron had chosen to shine on his darkest thoughts that night. He’d let me in, he’d let me see, and I wanted to live in that light as long as I could.
“Cameron,” I said, running my hands back through his hair until his chocolate eyes connected with mine.
“Yes?”
“Do you want me?”
He blew out a long breath, shaking his head as his forehead leaned in to mine. “More than anything.”
“Make love to me,” I whispered.
Cameron’s hands gripped me tighter, his lips finding mine with a sigh of relief and passion. I rolled my hips against him, making waves in the water around us, and I felt those waves washing away any and everything that wasn’t us in that moment. For now, for tonight, we were only man and woman, husband and wife — and he was all I wanted.
“I’ve been aching to touch you all night,” Cameron confessed, his hand snaking under the water
to cup my ass. “But I’m not doing it in a lukewarm bathtub.”
I laughed, head falling back before he pulled my lips to his again. He helped me turn carefully, until we were both facing the faucet again, and then he stood as I leaned forward in the tub. He stepped out first, grabbing a towel off the rack, but when he turned to where I still lay in the tub, he paused, shaking his head.
“God, Charlie,” he groaned, eyes devouring every inch of my skin. “You are so… beautiful. Crushingly so.”
I blushed, following his gaze to where my nipples peeked out of the water, to where my thighs were visible, too. With my eyes snapping back to his, I rolled, giving him a view of my backside as I bit my lower lip.
He groaned again, holding the towel in one hand and offering his free one to me. “Come here.”
There was something about having my husband look at me that way again — like it was that first night he’d taken me to that hotel room, like he wanted me more than oxygen in his lungs — and it gave me a confidence I hadn’t had in years. Maybe ever.
So, instead of reaching up for his hand, I rolled to my back again, letting my knees fall open as one hand slid between my thighs. I kept my eyes on him, watching as he grew harder for me at the sight of me touching myself, and when his eyes found mine, I gasped, letting out a long moan as I slipped one finger inside me.
Cameron inhaled a stiff breath, and I creaked one eye open to see him watching me. His lower lip was pinned between his teeth, his cock rock hard now, and the hand that had been offered to help me out of the tub was now wrapped around his shaft. He pumped once, flexing his hips into his touch, and the sight of him touching himself sent a jolt through me.
I’d never seen Cameron stroke himself, never walked in on him watching porn or relieving himself before bed. There was something about the way his eyes almost closed, the heat that lay within them as he watched me, the pressure of his hand as it slid over his wet crown and down his shaft to the very base of him. I knew every inch of him, every curve, every vein, and every sensitive spot.
That man was mine. He always had been.
When my fingers moved up to circle my clit, Cameron growled, dropping the towel altogether and reaching into the tub until I was cradled in his arms. I giggled as he lifted me, but his lips suppressed that laugh quickly, and he carried me blindly to the bed, dropping me into the comforter with every inch of me still dripping wet.
What He Always Knew (What He Doesn't Know Duet Book 2) Page 8