Just For You

by Leen Elle

  "It means," she countered, her voice a little more level and her tone a little more aggressive, "that maybe everything happens for a reason. Maybe it's a miracle, I don't know. Maybe it's a sign that everything you're doing in your life isn't the right way to go about doing things."

  "You're going to have me believe that this whole thing," he gestured widely with his hands, "this entire thing, our meeting, was Fate? You expect me to believe that this was written in the stars and predestined before we were even thought of?"

  "Maybe I am." She crossed her arms over her chest and Cameron rose onto his feet again.

  "That's insane, Imogen. It's bullshit."

  "How? How can you sit here and tell me that this is nothing more than coincidence, Cameron?" Despite herself she started to laugh. Was there any way of getting him to understand? "It can't be. Unless I'm also a liar now, this is the real thing. I'm not trying to push your buttons. I'm not trying to radically turn your world upside down. All I'm trying to get you to realize, Cameron, is that things don't always have to be black and white; good and bad; right or wrong; fact or fiction."

  He stopped and considered her for a moment, focusing on the birds playing on the top of the water, swooping down here and there to try and catch an unlucky fish. He took a deep breath and sighed. Finally he closed his eyes and pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.

  She started to tap her foot, counting down the seconds until he was converted.

  "Say I… actually believe this… this… say I actually believe that this journal you threw away at thirteen somehow comes full circle again."

  Imogen raised her eyebrows.

  "Am I supposed to up and just change?"

  "I didn't say that, and you know it. You heard me. Unexplainable things happen. I'm merely suggesting that because something you can't sit and pick at and figure out happens to you doesn't mean that your entire world is up in smoke. You've got to learn to let things in, Cameron. You don't want to trap yourself, do you?"

  He thought about it before answering, hard and good. "No."

  "So then consider yourself lucky." Imogen sat back down again.

  That was it. Confrontation had and confrontation over. The only way to move from this point on was forward and away.

  "You wrote in it too, didn't you? I know you did. Just to get back at me."

  "What if I did?"

  "I knew you would." She smiled and that signaled that armistice was accomplished. "Probably something snarky and completely opposite of what I was trying to tell you."

  Cameron licked his lips and sat back down, too, a little further away from her than he sat before. "For someone who preaches about being open minded, you sure don't look at the entire picture either."

  Imogen stiffened and told him to explain.

  "You never try to see where I'm coming from."

  "Because I know exactly where you're coming from."

  Cameron swallowed hard and, after a time, licked his lips. They dried quickly. She was still looking at him, with her arms firmly crossed over her chest. Her fingers were tapping out a rhythm on the skin of her opposite arm.

  A thousand things to say to her flooded his mind all at once, until the chaos and babble was so loud he couldn't hear anything else. He tried to pick out individual statements, but they were soon lost in the cackle of others. Screw it. He sighed.

  "I don't even want to argue with you. I'm too tired for this."

  Imogen smiled at him, indicating to him that she won the battle. She hadn't won the war just yet. She looked around, finally turning to look into the trees behind her. She could make out a clearing, where there sat a white bench which faced the water. She bent over and grabbed the blanket, forcing Cameron to step backward to avoid falling over. Tucking it under her arm, Imogen started for the bench in the clearing. It wasn't until she disappeared behind the green leaves of the first few trees that Cameron scrambled to catch up with her.

  He followed her to the bench. There wasn't much room for the both of them, so they were forced to sit quite close. It was a bench built for lovers, not friends. Cameron took a deep breath while the breeze around them drew Imogen's hair into his eyes. He pushed it away and waited for her to speak first.

  "I have a confession to make."

  "Oh?" Cameron felt his palms go damp. She made him nervous and he had no idea why.

  "This bracelet."

  Cameron's eyes instantly went to the silver charm bracelet around the small wrist on her right hand. It was familiar to him.

  Imogen licked her lips and managed a laugh. She lifted her arm to push stray hair behind her ears. The bracelet fell to the middle of her arm, making a pretty chiming sound as the charms bounced against each other. "I intentionally left it in that room."

  Cameron nodded. "I know."

  She turned to him, her mouth half-open. "You did? I didn't realize it was so obvious."

  He shrugged, a deep breath coming through his nostrils.

  "I just. I wanted to see you again," she said. Her voice was soft and nearly lost in the breeze. "It was that book. I wanted an excuse to come back over so I could maybe pry it from you."

  "You really want it that bad?" Cameron asked. He would let her have it, if it was that important. He really had no use for it and figured it might be better left in the possession of its original owner.

  She didn't answer his question.

  "When I was twelve," she started, "my father's father died. He was the first person I ever knew to die."

  Cameron felt his entire body tense. He wasn't sure where she was going with this story and even less sure about what she was expecting his reaction to be. The story sounded too private already, and he looked away from her to try and give her some privacy.

  She went on. "We went out to the graveyard to watch as his coffin was lowered in the ground when I saw, a few headstones down, a man. He was alone, dressed in black, too. He was mourning. He had a top hat on, I remember that distinctly. He was tall, thin. His face was moon-pale and long. In his right hand he held a bouquet of red roses."

  Cameron was blinking rapidly now, trying to guess what the point of this story was. He couldn't understand it.

  "When he left, I walked over to the gravesite where he left the roses. He came to see a woman there. She died three years before, the same day my grandfather was being buried. Two weeks later I told my parents I was going to the store but really I went back to the cemetery. That man was there again, standing just as before, holding roses. He was in plain clothes, though. Every day after that I was finding an excuse to go back there. Every day I found him standing at that grave with roses fresh and ready. I was spying on him for a year when I realized that he only wore the tux on the anniversary of her death. To this day I'm not even sure he ever noticed me. I never got up the courage to talk to him but some part of me fell in love with him…" Her voice started to fade into a quiet song. Her gaze, which rested on her knees, was now on the horizon. "I don't know how he knew or was related to that woman in the grave but I was staggered by the devotion he had to her. I always wanted to ask him about her, to get him to tell me their story. I didn't fall in love with him as much as I fell in love with the idea that you can love someone that much, or that you can be loved that much by another person. Even after death, you can't be kept apart. It was inspiring to me, I suppose. Part of that was why I wanted to start that journal. I wonder some days if he ever got a hold of it. Did he read it? Did he write in it, too? It's important for us to leave these things behind, Cameron." Imogen turned toward him and, after a moment's hesitation, placed one of her hands over his. He cleared his throat and became like a statue, but Imogen didn't move away.

  "Our love is part of our legacy, don't you see? In this world, in these times, it's especially important to remind each other that good things do happen. You can call me a hopeless romantic all you want, but you sit there and think about where you might be if you didn't have the love of your family. I'm sure you've been in love before. Think abo
ut how that changed you."

  He was thinking about the way it changed him. His opinion quite differed from Imogen's, on some levels. To him, love was messy and unpredictable. Those traits, in his mind, were less than good.

  "There was this girl," he started. Imogen's entire face lit up and she gave him her full, undivided attention. Cameron was sure not to meet her eyes. "Her name was Charlotte and we met in high school. We were both seniors but we attended different schools."

  He stopped and played with the next words. He wasn't sure he could say them. Never before had he told anyone else about her or their relationship. Todd knew about Charlotte only because he eventually came into contact with her, but Cameron had never before verbalized anything he ever felt, not even to Todd, his best friend in the world. Cameron was moving his jaw around, finally squeezing his fingers into a fist. Imogen's hand fell away from his, leaving a searing cool spot in its place.

  "We had a good year. I did love her. We were each other's first everything and so it got serious quickly. Probably too quickly. The fall of the next year I was off at college and she was at bootcamp. She joined the navy. I wasn't too happy about that when she told me. At that time, the war was just breaking out and I knew she'd be sent overseas. I was right. We tried to make it work by writing letters and e-mails. Anytime she got a chance to visit, she would come back to me, but eventually things started to change. We started to change. I was always in awe of her, though. I still am." He looked up at Imogen, who was staring at him intently. She nodded, telling him to go on.

  He wasn't sure if he could. All that heartbreak and pain, things he struggled to rid from himself for so long, was coming back to him now, effortlessly. All that hard work and none of it paid off. His chest was tightening around him. He sighed, leaning his head back. His hair fell over the back of the bench and he closed his eyes against the sunlight that beat down upon his face.

  "She broke it off. I was surprised but now that I think back I shouldn't have been shocked. We were two different people, we led two different lives. She was over there fighting a war that I should have been fighting. I didn't realize it until I got her last letter, but I started to resent her a bit. My reverence and respect for her started to turn sour. She was in the line of fire when I was home, safe. She was protecting me when it should have been the other way around."

  Imogen clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth and moved, but before she could say anything, Cameron was talking again. It was starting to spill forth from him, uncontrollably, like a dam trying to hold back too much water was finally breaking apart.

  "I let her go. I had to. She had to concentrate out there, without worrying about me. I had to concentrate on school, but being apart from her didn't do me the favors I thought it might. I still worried about her, still hoped that she'd be able to come home safely. On holidays I thought about how she was spending them, eating cold food with other comrades instead of with her family. We were so young."

  He stopped, the last sentence echoing over and over in his head. So young. Eighteen years old and they thought they knew everything. They acted as if they did, as if they had it all figured out.

  "We don't talk. We stopped talking after she was sent out for her second tour overseas, and that was about six months after we separated. I still wonder about her, wonder if she's married or if she has children. I thank her for what she did- not only for this country, but for loving me when she had no reason to love me."

  So there it was. Of course Charlotte was always going to be in his heart and in his mind. There were parts of her that he never got over.

  "Do I believe in love? Yes. I've experienced it, I've seen it, and I've lived it. Love can be strong but the pain you feel when it's gone is just as strong, if not even more." His voice was sad, heavy.

  "I don't believe that."

  "Agree to disagree, then."

  Cameron stood and walked a few steps forward, to the lake. In his mind he was walking back down the boulevard to Charlotte's house. He was eighteen. He was still in high school. He still had a spring in his step and a smile on his face and he was bringing her a handpicked bouquet of yellow and purple wildflowers.

  "Cameron!"

  Imogen and Cameron turned at the same time in the direction of the voice. It was Alex, who was waving his arms in the air and jogging toward them.

  "Yeah?"

  "Hey, Mom said to tell you…" Alex stopped to pant, bending over at the waist and supporting his weight on his arms, which gripped his thighs, just above the knees. "Whew, it's hot out here and I ran all the way from the house." He gulped. "Dinner. Now. Both of you."

  Cameron and Imogen smiled at each other and then walked over to Alex, waiting while he caught his breath. The three of them turned and started to walk when Imogen placed her hand on Cameron's forearm.

  "Hey, remember how I told you I was going to get your mom to do something fun with us during our trip?"

  Alex looked up, interested. His attention shifted between Imogen and Cameron, who flanked either side of him.

  "Yes?"

  Imogen smiled so big that her mouth seemed to stretch from ear-to-ear. "I've figured it out. Karaoke. Tonight, after dinner."

  Cameron chuckled.

  "Hope your singing pipes are ready," Imogen said. Before Cameron could protest, she interrupted him, throwing the blanket she carried at his chest. He caught it with one hand. "Race you to the house!"

  Cameron could feel the breeze on his face, left behind by Alex and Imogen as they left him so suddenly, racing each other to the back porch.

  Alex won.

  Chapter Nine

  Pull Yourself Together Now And Fall In Love With Me

  Cameron was surprised that Imogen was able to get his mom out of the house. They walked into the bar. Darkness invaded their eyes and they were made to adjust to it. Gray smoke undulated slowly in the air, twisting and turning, making patterns that were both beautiful and deadly. The smoke settled onto their skin and hair and burned their eyes and throats.

  On the bar was a man, balding and pudgy, in his mid- to late-thirties. He was already well past drunk, singing a terrible rendition of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." His singing was more of a wailing, so loud that no one inside the bar could even hear their own thoughts.

  "Perhaps this was a bad idea," Cameron shouted to Imogen over the screaming. He winced, wondering just how much longer the song would go on. It was beginning to give him a headache. He could feel it, just at the temples. It was a dull ache, but he knew that a few more songs by tone-deaf drunkards would turn it into a full-fledged sledgehammer pounding in no time.

  Imogen made a face at him and shook her head. She was leading Sylvia toward the bar, ready to order drinks. Sylvia wasn't as averse to the idea as Cameron thought she might have been. In fact, he was surprised at her readiness to jump in.

  "What are you having tonight?" Sylvia asked Cameron. He had been watching the man on stage embarrass himself further by attempting to grind against empty air, and he turned when his mother asked him the question.

  "Hu? I'm not drinking. God knows what you two are going to get yourselves into and one of us has to be sober."

  "Lighten up, would you. It's a bar, that's what you do. You drink!" She signaled to the bartender that she was ready to order. Just as he slid a cold beer toward a young man, he wiped his hands with a towel and made his way to Sylvia and Imogen. Two martinis for the both of them. Dry.

  "I wouldn't have pegged you for a martini type girl," Cameron said to Imogen. He had to stand closer to her than he was comfortable with. Her body heat was tangible against his chest and legs, where their bodies made contact. He was forced to speak directly into her ear.

  She looked up at him and smiled, holding her martini toward him. If he had a drink of his own in his hands, she would have clinked their glasses together.

  "Shows just how much you don't know about me."

  "Yeah," Cameron raised an eyebrow. "Just when I think I have you f
igured out, there you go and throw me off again." Imogen noticed the way his shirt pulled across his chest when he stuck his left hand in the corresponding pocket of his pants. The top two buttons were left undone, leaving exposed a sliver of flesh she never took notice of before. She gulped down a sip of the alcohol, focusing on the burn it left down her throat as a way to forget the bare skin in front of her hungry eyes.

  Before he knew it, something cold was placed against Cameron's chest. He realized that it was Sylvia, holding a dripping beer against him.

  "Loosen up, Cameron. Have some fun tonight."

  Imogen laughed. "You should, you know. This was supposed to be about getting your mom to have fun and you're the one who ends up needing to be unwound."

  "In more ways than one," Sylvia joked. "See any ladies around here, Cameron?"

  He rolled his eyes, taking the beer from her, gripping it with three fingers around the top of the bottle. He lifted it to his mouth, reveling for a split second in the way its crisp coolness felt against his lips. "No," he said finally, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Don't go there, please. This is no place for work."

  Sylvia laughed. "Fine, tonight I'll be on my best behavior then, just for you."

  "I appreciate the effort."

  "It's only because you're my son and I love you." Sylvia drew her arm around his neck and pulled Cameron down and toward her. She wasted no time placing a wet kiss on his cheek.

  Cameron gave his mom a fake smile once he escaped from her and took another drink. He figured he was going to need quite a few tonight.

  He was right.

  After Imogen and Sylvia had their turn with the karaoke machine, having managed to somehow get the rest of the bar moving and singing along with them, they decided it was time to enact Operation: Torture Cameron Moody.