Sick Day

by Morgan Parker

  “Just overnight,” I said, groaning.

  She peeked out of the closet. “Exactly.”

  Confused, I joined her in the closet, a room with fancy wooden panels, an ironing board, mannequin-like hangers, a television, steamer, enclosed shoe wardrobe, pretty much a dry-cleaner’s wet dream.

  “You have a really nice place, Hope. But what did you mean by ‘exactly’?”

  “You’re here overnight, Cameron,” she explained. “That’s what I meant by ‘exactly.’”

  “What the fuck does that mean?” I asked, a little annoyed.

  She shoved a few more items into her bag. “You don’t want me to say goodbye, you want me to drop my entire life here and run off with someone who’s in Miami ‘overnight’?” She chuckled and shook her head at me. “I know how stories like this turn out, Cameron.”

  I leaned against the staging table. She stepped up to the other side and leaned against that end. We were facing off in her walk-in closet that seemed straight out of Oz.

  “Tell me, Hope,” I encouraged her. “Please. How do these stories turn out?”

  A confrontational frown wafted across her face, and she tapped the edge of the staging area with her fingers. “Did you read that email a few weeks ago? The story?”

  I nodded. “It’s not us, Hope. We’re not these two characters. You leave that old fucktart you’re living with, and I’ll walk away from Riley. I swear—”

  She cut me off. “You won’t.”

  “I will,” I promised, throwing my arms into the air before reaching out for her, but she stopped me. Shaking her head, she gave me a sideways glance.

  “Uh-uh, no way. You’ve got a wedding in three weeks, Cameron. You have a future and a past. Both of which are filled with memories of which you won’t ever let go. And do you think, for one second, that I’m sitting here and believing that you’ll abandon all of that history? For me? For a girl you fucked in high school?”

  I breathed heavily, afraid to respond because she had a bit of a point.

  She gave a sly wink. “I know how this turns out for us.”

  “I will let go, Hope.” I drop to a knee.

  “I know you will. Now get up, goob.”

  “Not you, though. I’m never letting go of you again.”

  She bit down on her lower lip. I could almost hear the gears turning in her head as she contemplated my big-man talk. At last, she tapped the top of the staging area and stood straight. Conversation over.

  “If you want to spend the night with me, we need to leave.” She grabbed her bag and started to leave, but turned back at the door. “Now, Cameron. Matt will be home, and I guarantee you don’t want to be around when he shows up. Not after last weekend.”

  } i {

  Present Day

  Chapter 48

  2:18 PM

  Out on the Lake Michigan with the sun beating down on us, I stare across the small table at Hope. Behind her, I only see the emptiness of the lake meeting up with the promising sky on the horizon. Behind me, the Chicago skyline looms, and I know Hope likes that view because it’s something I would enjoy. I see the city’s reflection in her big sunglasses, the ones that hide her face and lend her an air of confidence. She picks up her champagne flute and takes a sip before reaching into a small bowl of fresh fruit that the catering company provided.

  Up on the captain’s deck, slightly up and behind me, Gordon sits with his chair rotated so that he can chaperone us. When I glance over at him, I find a distrustful semi-smile on his face. We share a brief stare before he points his two fingers at his eyes, then aims those fingers at me, the international sign for I’m watching you. Almost like a threat.

  “It’s not Miami,” I admit, turning my attention back to Hope. “But I never wanted this to be Miami. I only ever wanted this to be us.”

  “Cameron,” she sighs, “I don’t know what you really thought today would achieve, but—”

  “But nothing,” I argued. “What have you thought about today? So far?”

  She shrugs, but a smile slips onto her face. She doesn’t fight it away, either. She lets it live, and I see that as a sign of promise.

  “For me,” I tell her, feeling the history between us, “today reminded me of something that I seemed to have lost track of.”

  Her eyebrows raise halfway up her forehead. “And what was that? Your GPS?” She laughs at her own weak joke.

  I feel something hit me in the shoulder and glance back to find Gordo flinging grapes at me.

  “Let it go, Cameron,” he says, chuckling. “Today will not turn out like you want.” He nods at Hope. “I think everyone’s on the same page here. Everyone but you.”

  I face Hope again, determined. He was worth the distraction. “I’ve decided that I’m never letting go again. I’ve chased you across this godforsaken country. I’ve sacrificed everything. Everything I’ve ever done, somehow and some way, was because of you.”

  She removes her sunglasses so I can see her clear, unflinching eyes. “There’s something romantic about goodbyes, Cameron. Even though I’ve never been able to bring myself to say that one word to you, if nothing else, today has made it clear that I need to set my personal rules and superstitions about goodbyes aside. Because this isn’t fair to you. You’ve put your life on hold because of me, and it’s not supposed to be like that.”

  I glance back at Gordo on the captain’s deck, but he has turned his back to me, to my conversation. Intuitive as always, he must’ve detected the heavy tone in our conversation and decided to give us a bit of privacy at last.

  “I’m sorry, Cameron,” she says, her voice soft. When I turn back to her, the sunglasses have been pulled back over her eyes, hiding them once again. Her granite-like face tells me something isn’t quite right. Or maybe, I realize for the first time since this delusion of a day began, everything is right, and I’m only seeing that for the first time, right now.

  “Let me paint a picture for you,” I say, keeping my voice quiet and leaning in to get a little closer. “I’m not quitting you. It’s not that I don’t want to, Hope. It’s that I can’t. I simply cannot walk away from you.” I lean back in my chair, reclining as best as I can and trying to hide the nervous sweat threatening to soak through my armpits. “After you showed up three years ago, I realized something. You can’t bury people alive. And that’s what I tried to do through college and in the years that followed. I was trying to bury you because I didn’t want to admit to myself that I could never exist without you. I couldn’t handle it. And ever since that day? You’ve consumed my thoughts. My dreams. My every breathing moment.”

  I watch her face for what feels like an eternity, and then I see it. A small twitch at the corner of her lips.

  “Cameron…” she says with a tone of disappointment, but instead of finishing her thought, she lets my name linger.

  I shake my head. “You showed up for a reason. And you win. You were right. Whatever you were trying to prove, you were right, Hope.”

  She wipes at her face, the first sign of emotion.

  “You were right,” I tell her again, even softer.

  “Cameron, I’m not looking for ‘right,’” she admits, a little frustrated despite the previous show of emotion. “I’m looking for you to let me go, to say the word that I’ve never been able to say. That’s what you promised, remember? If I spent the day with you, you said this morning in that doorway, you promised you’d let me go, you’d say goodbye.”

  A sailboat moves across the background, so I watch it to add a little silence to our conversation. “I’m not looking for right either.”

  “Then what are you looking for?”

  I give her a half-shrug. “I’m looking for happy. I’m looking for the smiles you’ve given me every day I’ve seen you, every morning when I wake up thinking that I’ll possibly see you, take you in, admire you. I’m looking for you in everything I do. Just you, and nothing else.”

  Her silence speaks more than any words she could give me. She
’s thinking about it. Again, I feel those wheels of hers turning. I can feel her eyes on me through those tinted, large sunglasses, and for a second, I want to take a deep breath and try to read her mind because it seems to me that I can do exactly that.

  “Hope, it’s always been you.”

  “Cameron…”

  “Okay, okay,” I say, raising my hands in a peace offering. “It’s not ‘just you.’”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “It’s you when you’re with me.” I smile, but she doesn’t return the gesture. “What? I thought that was sweet. Why are you such a downer?”

  “It was sweet,” she admits, picking at her fingernails. “It’s one of the sweetest things anyone has ever said to me. But that’s the problem with this, Cameron. This sweetness? The way you love me. I mean, the way you love me so perfectly?” She shakes her head. “It can’t happen, it can’t be. I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry, but you and I…?”

  I take my champagne to hide my disappointment, noticing how I have a little more than half the flute left to drink. Although it’s probably warmer than piss by now, I swallow it in a single gulp, the bubbles burning the back of my throat. “If you get on the plane next week,” I tell her, my eyes digging through those big glasses, “I’ll be right behind you.”

  She shakes her head. “You can’t. That’s not part of this deal.”

  I quietly argue, “He can’t come close to offering you what I can.”

  “It’ll be goodbye, one way or another,” she mutters, almost sadly.

  I contemplate what to say next. I know I can’t sit back and watch her get on that plane, but I also know that, once the day is over, she will not come to me. The reality of that rips me apart because I was so convinced, earlier today, that she would say those four words—I’m leaving you—before the day ends. But now I know; goodbye will come, and Hope believes that goodbyes are forever.

  I take a deep breath. “Even if we never see each other again,” I admit as calmly as my raging disappointment will allow, “you’re in this as deep as I am, Hope. It’s inescapable.”

  She looks around like she’s planning a getaway, some way to avoid this conversation, some exit to this corner that I have backed her in to. Of course, she finds no escape, and the realization that she’s stuck here, on this boat in the middle of Lake Michigan with nothing but water around us, slowly settles over her. I don’t know if there is peace or fear behind those big glasses, but she eventually succumbs and listens to me, to what I say.

  “After what happened three years ago, I beat myself up for following you to Miami, because I would’ve gone with you wherever you wanted me to. I would’ve followed you to the edge of the universe, Hope. But it killed to leave you, it killed me to see you walk away with him.”

  “Cameron, why are we talking about this?” she asks, but I ignore her.

  “And with time, I dealt with that sadness. I dealt with it because I knew that I wasn’t suffering alone. I gave you the space you needed to come back for me.”

  She shakes her head. “I never came back for you.”

  I raise my eyebrows at her obvious denial. “But you did.”

  She crosses her arms.

  “And even if you hadn’t, we were still together. In spirit. In love. The silence between us killed me, it fucking ripped me apart, Hope. But I knew when you missed me, when that absence burned you up inside. And I knew when you forgot about me for a day or two.” I close my eyes and take an elaborate breath, inhaling my courage and letting it all out through my lips, yoga-style. With my eyes clamped shut, I tell her, “We’re connected, somehow and some way, I don’t know how or why, but we are.”

  When I open my eyes, I find her staring back just like I left her before I closed my eyes.

  “That’s the tragedy here,” I ramble on. “We both suffer, whether we’re together in each other’s arms, or we’re separated by thousands of miles.”

  I feel more grapes on my shoulder, but I refuse to take my eyes from her. I’m watching for that one sign. Some kind of acknowledgement that I’ve hit a nerve, or fear that I’ve completely lost my mind.

  At last, Hope speaks, but it’s not for me. “Gordon, will you just fuck off for a minute?”

  Gordo chuckles, but I detect his annoyance with Hope. He never liked her, always a Team Riley proponent. “Are you two ready to head back so you can return to your respective spouses?”

  I watch Hope, but she remains firmly focused on me. So I nod an affirmative.

  The boat’s deep, rumbling engines come to life, and the ripe aroma of gasoline infiltrates the air out here.

  Hope shakes her head at me. “Cameron, I never wrote any that stuff in Our Story. None of it. It’s not us because Emma knows nothing about us.”

  I don’t believe her. And as much as I want to continue with this conversation, any kind of exchange between us becomes impossible thanks to the sounds of the boat as it cut across the lake, back toward to the city.

  } i {

  Three Years Ago

  Chapter 49

  Late Friday morning, leaving the hotel with Hope’s hand locked in mine, I noticed Gordon and the other guys returning. The shadows underneath their eyes told some of the story of their fun in Nassau overnight, but the fatigue and whatever other pains they were dealing with did nothing to deter Gordon from spotting us and heading straight for us. I released her hand and stepped away, something that clearly annoyed her.

  “Hey, Gordo—” I started, but he cut me off, extending a hand to Hope and introducing himself.

  “And you must be Hope,” he said as they shook hands. “I’ve heard so much about you.” He shifted his attention to me, but only briefly enough for me to recognize his rage.

  “I’ve heard about you, as well,” Hope said. “I see unemployment has been good to you.”

  “Did Cam invite you to his wedding in a few weeks?” Gordon asked her, feigning confusion as he directed his next question at me. “Or do you think Riley would take exception to high school whores showing up out of the blue?”

  “Gordo—” I started between my clenched teeth, but Hope was not one to back down.

  She shifted her body sideways, scowling at me before facing Gordon dead-on. “It will be interesting to see if Cam himself shows up to that wedding, let alone whether the so-called ‘whore’ shows up.”

  I watched Gordo open his mouth to spew what would likely be the most childish rebuttal ever, but then he seemed to think better of it and asked me, “Are you having second thoughts about next month?”

  “Not just me,” I confessed, “but Riley, too.”

  He gave a rude sideways nod to Hope. “All because of this one?”

  I shook my head at him, mostly pissed off. “It’s complicated, Gordo…”

  Hope stepped forward and took his hand. “Actually, it’s not complicated. Cam and I made a promise.”

  “Hope,” I started, but Gordo cut me off.

  “So I’ve heard, some fucking promise.”

  Hope withdrew her hand, splitting her attention between Gordo and me. “We will always have that broken promise. Whether he gets married to some distraction for five minutes or fifty years, what we have is boundless, it’s never constrained. Even time itself couldn’t keep us apart.”

  “Wow, that’s super deep,” I said, breathless and meaning it.

  Gordon smirked. He nodded. He rolled his hand down the length of his face. And then something else caught his attention, his focus drifting past me at a man seated in one of the lobby chairs. He wore a hat, but there was no question—this was the same douche who had been eating lunch on the terrace with Hope last week.

  The geriatric fuck stood and started marching toward us once he realized that we had all seen him and were aware of his presence in the lobby. None of us flinched, not even Hope. She remained at my side.

  “Fuck, it’s Matt,” she whispered, her voice tight with anticipation. “This won’t be a happy moment.”

  In the time it took
him to take those dozen or so footsteps to reach me, I reminded myself of the few facts I knew about this grandpa. First, he was an accountant, and without his calculator the only weapon he had was, well, nothing. Second, he was older than Hope, obviously in his forties, so stamina and strength were not on his side. Third, Hope had just had a second consecutive weekend fucking me, so I obviously owned her, and he was the idiot whose lease was about to expire.

  Advantage: me.

  “What’s going on here?” he asked, his voice stern and his face red with the kind of rage that sits a mere hair’s width between you and a prison term. “Hope? Is this the guy?”

  I extended my hand, grinning. “Yes, I’m the one who is more her age.”

  He didn’t like that. He smacked my hand away, which got Gordo excited, as well as Josh and Landon and the other guy whose name I failed to remember at that moment. The four of them stepped forward. The hotel staff was also noticing the tension here, and I trusted that someone had picked up the phone to call for reinforcements.

  “I don’t fucking care if you’re the tooth fairy,” he growled at me. “You’re seven years too late, dickhead.”

  “Interesting,” I blurted, fully aware that my arrogance had turned off my internal filter or ability to think, “that’s not what your kitchen counter would say.”

  Matt took a swing at me, but Gordon lunged forward and gave him a shove, throwing him off balance and causing his balled fist to hit Gordo in the shoulder instead. No harm. Yet.

  “Cam, shut the fuck up,” Gordo warned me. Then to the old guy, “Get your whore of a wife out of here before someone gets beaten.” He tried to shove Hope away, but she slapped his hand back.

  Matt removed his hat and wiped the sleeve of his shirt along his forehead. He was clearly pissed. “If I see you near Hope again…” he threatened.