Be Mine Forever (14 page)

“I was a jerk, Jo. I know that.”

“But you know what? I skipped out of the dance and went to drown my sorrows in a Chunky Monkey sundae at that old ice-cream shop on Fifth. And there he was.”

Cam closed his eyes and ran a hand over the back of his neck.

“With another girl. Not the guys.” The laugh in her throat rattled, and it felt like she was back in that ice-cream shop staring at Cam and some girl who had more than a few cup sizes on Jo. “He could have just told me. We were friends.”

“I wanted us to stay friends,” Cam said. “By the time I was fifteen I was already fucking everything that blinked, and I wouldn’t have changed for you or anyone else.”

“I wouldn’t have asked you to change for me.” Jo licked her lips and tasted bitterness. “I just wanted one night.”

“Baby, I’m so sorry.”

“That was years ago, Cam.” Jo reached for his hand, squeezing to reassure him that reliving that moment hadn’t damaged what they had started building over the last few days. “It was a low moment, but here we are.”

She held on to his stare, not letting him look away. They needed to acknowledge that she had spent half her life in love with him, and he had run from it, avoided it, ignored it. For whatever reason. Maybe she’d find out tonight, but before they went any further, she wanted him to know she forgave him.

“Cam, it’s okay. You were not responsible for how I felt.”

“I could have dealt with things better. Explained things better. How I was feeling.”

“How did you feel?”

“The way I feel now.” He looked down at their hands clasped together. “Like you deserve better.”

“Why?” Jo dipped her head, trying to catch the eyes he had shifted. “Why did I deserve better?”

Cam gave a quick shake of his head, releasing her hand to pick up his jar with its flickering lights and roll it between his hands.

“Last one, I promise.” She swallowed her trepidation. “This is current. Real time. Not even a week ago.”

Cam’s fingers slowed on the jar and he looked at her. The fireflies strobed the concern on his face.

“What happened?”

“I know Aunt Kris’s death has been hard for everyone.” Jo pulled a clump of grass from the ground. “Especially you and Walsh and Daddy, but it’s been a little different for me.”

How to put this? Jo had never tried to articulate how Aunt Kris’s death had leveled her.

“It was like losing my mom again. That’s what she was to me, but she was also my bestie. My partner in crime. My mentor. She prepared me in every way she could to do the things she did.”

Jo had been afraid to voice this to anyone else in case they thought she couldn’t handle the responsibility. Wasn’t ready. Wasn’t capable. Wasn’t enough.

“But I’m not her, and some days it is so obvious to me that I never will be. And I know everyone else knows it, too. And kids all over the world depend on the foundation. On me. They’re the ones I don’t want to let down.”

Jo paused, glancing back at Cam so there was nothing hiding the rare vulnerability she wanted to gift to him.

“And sometimes I feel the weight of it, and it’s like I’m having an anxiety attack but nobody knows, so nobody helps. From the outside, it looks like I’m breathing and smiling and in control, but inside my head is spinning and I can’t breathe. And I just want to scream. I want someone to know that it’s too much, but there’s no one to tell.”

Cam reached around and set his hands on either side of her face.

“Tell me. You are brilliant and ambitious in all the right ways and passionate about what you do. Don’t let other people convince you what you do isn’t enough.”

“Some days it’s other people, and some days it’s just…well, it’s just me.” Jo pulled away, hunching forward until her chest touched her knees. “And when it’s too much, I do the stupidest thing, but it makes me feel a little better.”

She let the quiet simmer for a few seconds before he gave her side a gentle finger poke.

“What do you do?”

“I know this seems unrelated, but follow me for a minute. On my sixteenth birthday, Aunt Kris and I went to—”

“Paris.” She couldn’t see him, but she heard Cam’s grin.

“Yeah, Paris. We flew on the Walsh Foods jet for the weekend. We went to the Louboutin flagship store and sipped champagne. I was so adult.”

“Walsh and I were mad you guys didn’t take us with you.”

Jo jerked around, rolling her eyes in the dark.

“Like we wanted to hear you complaining while we shopped.”

“Oh, we would have gone our separate ways for sure.”

Jo narrowed her eyes at him even though he probably couldn’t see her.

“I just bet we’d have gone our separate ways. You two would have been in some strip club.”

“That’s neither here nor there.” Cam cleared a laugh from his throat and pulled her head down to his shoulder. “You were saying.”

“So Aunt Kris told me to choose my first pair of Louboutins. Any shoes in the whole store, and I chose chartreuse glittery crazy red bottoms that I have worn only once or twice in my whole life in public. They were the price of a small island, but Aunt Kris didn’t mind.”

“I’ll have to look for those the next time I nose around in your closet.”

“I don’t actually keep them there anymore.” Jo paused to make room for her next words. “They’re in Aunt Kris’s closet.”

She felt his eyes on her face.

“When my days suck balls, like a lot of them have lately working on this adoption initiative, I go into Aunt Kris’s closet and put on those shoes, and I talk to her.”

Jo laughed, leaning deeper into Cam’s warmth and strength.

“I know she won’t answer, and I’m not sure she can hear me, but I feel closer to her. Closer to her wisdom and guidance. And I need that so bad. It’s kind of the only place I allow myself to be hurt and angry and scared. I don’t know if it’s a magical closet or what, but it always works. When I come out of there, things are better.”

Cam pulled her into his lap, tracing a soothing line over her bent knee with a finger and pushing the hair back over her shoulder.

“Maybe the next time you feel that way, you can come to me.” He used his index finger to turn her chin until their eyes met. “Maybe I can be your closet.”

“I’d like that.” Jo covered his hand on her knee, entwining their fingers. “And maybe I can be yours.”

When he didn’t respond with anything other than the tension stiffening his body, Jo cupped the strength of his jaw, feeling the muscles go rigid beneath her palm.

“Cam, look at me.”

He did look at her, but the door she had so carefully pushed open over the last few minutes slammed in her face. Padlocked. The guard was back up, every feature protecting his mysteries and secreting away his thoughts.

“I know that nothing I shared with you could even match whatever it is you don’t want to tell me.” Jo bit her lip, refusing to indulge the uncertainty urging her to let this go. “I haven’t had a rough life. I’ve had it made in so many ways most people only dream of.”

“Jo, I—”

“And I know. I’m privileged and spoiled, and you probably think I can’t relate to whatever you have gone through.”

“It’s not that—”

“And no matter what it is, you have to know the way I feel is never going to change. Not when I saw you in that ice-cream shop. Not when you chose those other girls over me.” Jo looked down at their hands joined in her lap. “Not on your wedding day.”

“Baby.” His breath misted her ear and she felt his lips in her hair. “God, I really don’t deserve you, Jo.”

“You have me.” She turned her head, locking their eyes together, making this moment a conduit for all the acceptance and forgiveness, and though he wasn’t ready to hear it, all the love she had for him. “You’ve always had all of me. Please, please, please don’t ask me to settle for less than all of you.”

He dropped his eyes, the flickering fireflies in the nearby jar showing the struggle on his face in flashes of light. Jo leaned in, pushing her fingers into the silky hair at the base of his neck and fluttering kisses across the sharply defined cheekbones.

“You have me,” she whispered across his lips.

He angled his head until their foreheads met, cupping the back of her neck. He gave a small shake of his head.

“You have me,” she repeated insistently. “Nothing will change that. Not what you tell me or what you choose to hold back, but please don’t hold back because I want to know everything.”

“Jo, everything in me wants to keep this from you. Has
always
wanted to keep this from you.”

“Why? You can trust me.”

“Of course I trust you. Trust isn’t the issue.”

“Then just say it.” Jo rubbed her hand up and down his arm, pulling him inches closer. “Once it leaves your mouth, it’s in the light. It’s not just yours. It’s ours. I want to help.”

“You can’t help, Jo. Don’t try to fix this. This can’t be fixed.” Cam pulled back and looked at her. “I don’t want your pity. I don’t want to be some project or some freak. Or worse, some victim.”

“Victim?” Jo squinted into the dim light, straining not just against the dark, but also against the shade he’d just pulled over his eyes. “Why would I think of you as a victim?”

Cam pulled in a breath that seemed to start at his feet and crawled up his long frame before making its way heavily past his lips. She silently begged him not to hide from her. She wasn’t sure if he’d been shielding her or himself, but whatever had been between them, she wanted it gone. And in an instant, like her heart had tugged on his, like her soul had whispered to his and it heard and obeyed, the shade lifted. And what she saw in his eyes sent icy tendrils across her skin. Was it bitterness or hatred, terror or regret? Or some conspiracy of horrors? Whatever emotions converged in his eyes, it looked like hell. Hell in his eyes. And then she had to know. She had to press. She had to help. Oh, God, she had to help.

“Cam, why would I think of you as a victim?”

Everything about him seemed to drop, and Jo’s mind went back to that field earlier today where nothing weighed anything. Where on a lazy day with an audience of bees and flowers she contemplated love and gravity. Right before her eyes, the one she loved most was falling. His eyes fell to their hands. His shoulders slumped. His mouth turned down at the corners. Before he spoke the words, she somehow knew it was much too late to catch him because Cam had fallen long ago.

“Jo, I was molested.”

C
am had dragged those words out, and they’d left behind a sunken wake, a heavy trail as deep as a ditch. He had known this moment would come, that Jo would dig until she hit the truth at the very bottom of him. She must feel now like she had fallen into a dark, empty well with no way out.

Okay, maybe that was just him.

He wanted to escape. He wanted to run from the pity and the disgust he expected in her eyes, but he couldn’t move. The fireflies bumping against the mason jar hypnotized him, mesmerizing in the summer night. What was so great about light? Light exposed. It hurt your eyes. It showed your flaws.

And your scars.

“Cam, what’d you say?” Jo’s eyebrows snapped together. Shock pulled her mouth open. “I thought you said you were—”

“Molested.” Cam almost had to stick his finger down his throat to get the word to come back up, a shameful regurgitation.

“But…when? I don’t…I don’t understand.”

“Before I met you.”

“Before you met me? But I…I would have known.”

“Not if I didn’t tell you.”

“What happened?”

“I can’t go through everything tonight, Jo.”

Cam’s heart pummeled his chest like a punching bag. The night had cooled some, but sweat gathered on the back of his neck, on his forehead, on his scalp, dampening his hair. It was like waking up from one of his nightmares, but with Jo standing by the bed, a witness to his pathetic fear.

“No, you don’t have to tell me everything, but who did it?”

“A guy in my old neighborhood. My mom’s pimp.”

“Did she know? Your mom, did she find out?”

Cam remembered that day when Mama had finally come home to find him on the kitchen floor, pants still around his ankles, blood on his thighs. Mac only had to smack her around a little and give her that rock to make her turn a blind eye. That day and the days that followed.

“Yeah, she knew.”

“But how could she let it happen? Did she report it? Did anyone intervene? How long did this go on?”

Jo’s questions whizzed past his head like a flurry of bullets.

“I can’t do this.”

Cam stood up, grabbing his jar of fireflies and using it to guide him back up the riverbank. He heard Jo following with swift steps, but he deliberately used his longer stride to pull ahead. When he reached the patio, he unscrewed the mason jar lid and watched the fireflies go free, dispersing splotches of brightness in the dense night. He envied their freedom. He envied their light.

When he reached the patio door, the motion sensor light triggered, illuminating Jo a few feet away, staring at her jar. She met his eyes, and there was no disgust. No pity. Just questions and sadness painfully interlocked like a barbed wire fence.

Cam grabbed the bowl of neglected peaches and headed back into the house, covering the fruit and putting them in the refrigerator. He pulled their dinner dishes off the counter and started rinsing them. Anything to occupy him, to block out the quiet woman waiting at his back.

Slim arms wrapped around his chest from behind, stilling his motions. Jo laid her head against his shoulder. Her scent, the stroke of her fingers across his abs under his T-shirt, the sweet kisses she feathered across the back of his neck—all coaxed each wound-tight muscle to go lax. He covered her hands with his, dropped his head forward, and sank back into her softness.

“Talk to me,” she whispered, stroking his hand with her thumbs.

“I can’t.”
I don’t want to.

When he’d escaped that hell, he had promised himself he’d never be that weak, helpless prey again. That victim. Having Jo in the same room as those memories made him feel like a fraction of himself. Made him feel even less worthy of her than he usually did.

Jo left his back and squeezed into the small space between his body and the kitchen sink. She hooked her elbows under his arms and pressed their chests together, holding his eyes captive.

“Cam, we don’t have a shot if you won’t talk to me, and I want this.”

She laid her palm against his chest, a defibrillator jolting his heart, stuttering its rhythm. Did she know she did that to him with her touch? With her smile? Walking into a room? Probably not, and he wasn’t sure he should tell her. If Jo ever knew how much she really meant to him, she’d never let him get away. And one day he might need to get away, for her sake.

“I want this so badly.” She pressed her lips against her teeth, like there was more she could say. “I have for a long time, and I had given up all hope of it ever happening. If you won’t open up, we don’t stand a chance. So I repeat, do you want this?”

The warm, damp air by the river had caused a chaos of curls and waves around Jo’s pretty face and down past her shoulders. Despite the rest he’d forced on her over the last two days, weariness still painted shadows under her eyes. She hadn’t bothered with makeup, and Cam was grateful. He loved seeing her naked skin. Taut and golden and healthy and sleek. Her bare lips were pouty and the exact hue of pink in the sunrise he painted this morning. Did he want this? With her? More than anything. In this moment and before he had even admitted it to himself, more than anything.

So what was he going to do about it?

“Let’s talk.” He tucked as much of the crazy hair as would fit behind her ears.

Relief lit her eyes before she narrowed them.

“That isn’t a direct answer to a direct question.” She leaned up on her toes until their eyes were almost on level. “Do you want this?”

She was so badass. Even on the threshold of such a pivotal conversation, she was determined to get her way. It always made him want to break her down, to muddle her. She brought these things on herself really.

He reached out and tipped up her chin, holding her head still and snaring her eyes with his. He ran his tongue around her lips, never letting her eyes go. She moaned, and he licked into her mouth, eating the crumbs of that sound. Wanting to catch the last of it. God, she was sweet. Between the peaches and cream and whatever drug laced the inside of Jo’s mouth, Cam couldn’t stop if he’d wanted to. And he didn’t want to.

Both of his hands came up on either side of her face, his thumbs tugging at her chin, opening her mouth that much more so his tongue could delve that much deeper. Her hands dug into his hair, pulling him into the heated nectar of her mouth. She sucked on his lips and ran a hand down his back and cupped his butt. If he didn’t put a stop to this, he’d pop his load in his pants and they’d never talk. And he’d never get to answer her question properly.

He pulled back, filling the space between them with panting breath. Jo blinked several times, and he could see the passion ebb as she remembered the gravity of their conversation. He almost wished he hadn’t stopped. He’d much rather fuck Jo against the kitchen sink than talk about his past.

“Do you want this?” she asked, her breathing as unsteady as his.

“I want
you
, Jo.” He dropped that guard he’d conditioned himself to pull over his eyes so she could see how much he wanted her. “I’ll do anything to prove that to you, even talk about my screwed-up childhood.”

Jo stepped back, putting enough distance between them to cool off their bodies.

“Then let’s talk.”

“I think we’ll need a third party.”

“A third party?” Jo frowned. “Like a mediator? At this time of night?”

“My guy’s on standby.” Cam reached over their heads to the cabinet, pulling down a bottle of liquor. “Meet my third party. Dr. Jack Daniel’s.”