Starting Over (15 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY

T
he rest of dinner went smoothly, but that might have something to do with me being able to keep one nosy sister-in-law in check for the remainder of the evening. Since it is a school night, Josie went to bed about an hour ago, leaving Cameron and me on the couch, alone for the very first time all day.

My feet are in his lap, and he’s rubbing them with the right amount of pressure. It feels heavenly, and if he’s to keep this up, I
may fall asleep right here.

“So your family is something else,” he says in the silence between us.

I open my eyes and start to laugh. “That’s putting it mildly.”

“You’re lucky. I don’t get to see my family as often as I’d like.”

“What about your sister, Natalie? I thought she lived in Miami.”

“She was just visiting me that weekend when you met her at the art fair. She lives back in Port St. Lucie,” he says, smiling. “I try to make it up that way a couple of times during the summer break, and if not, Thanksgiving, but definitely every Christmas.”

“Do you regret coming to Sunday dinner?” I ask jokingly.

It’s his turn to laugh now. “Not at all, but . . .”

“But what?” I sit up and pull my feet off his lap. “Did someone say something to you?”

I will kill Julia if she let something slip, but he shakes his head while still laughing.

Then Cameron reaches up and brushes some of my hair off my shoulder. “But I’m hoping you’ll show me whatever it is you have for me.”

“What I have for you?” My mind goes back and forth so quickly, trying to think of exactly what he’s referring to, until it hits me with a bang. “Oh my God! I totally forgot about that.”

Jumping off the couch, I stand over him with a big smile on my face, suddenly feeling happy and excited and nervous at the same time. “Come on, follow me.”

With his hand in mine, he walks up the stairs behind me into my art studio. “Now you know you must be special,” I say to him. “Because I don’t let just anyone in here.”

“I’m honored,” he says while looking around the room. “Vanessa, these are amazing.”

I have several pieces that are in various states of completion tacked on the walls and leaning against the wall in small stacks. In the far left corner of the room is my stool, which faces an easel with a blank canvas. My charcoal pencils and oil paints are strewn in organized chaos on the table next to it.

“Why is it blank?” he asks, pointing to the canvas on the easel.

I run my fingers across the slightly ribbed surface and close my eyes. When I open them, Cameron is next to me and waiting for me to explain. “Whenever I leave this room after working in it—even if it’s just for a couple of hours or all day and night—I have to leave a blank canvas up on this easel.”

He moves to take a seat on the stool behind me. Then his arms wrap around my waist and pull my back to his chest while I explain the reason behind my idiosyncrasy.

“You know how they say life can be like a blank slate, an empty canvas?” I ask him and turn in his arms a bit.

“Yeah.”

“It’s kind of like that.”

“How do you mean?” he asks.

“Well, a blank canvas really isn’t blank to me at all.” I face the easel. “I look at this and see endless possibilities. I see it becoming something even if it doesn’t know what it is just yet. No matter what I do with it, it can always be changed; it can even be painted over to be a blank canvas all over again, so it has a second chance. And sometimes I leave it blank for a bit longer because I need some time to figure out what it wants to be, and a fresh start is the best way to go about accomplishing that. In the end though, it doesn’t matter what colors are on it, or if I go outside the lines . . . what matters is the journey it took to get me there.”

His finger tilts my chin to look at him again, then he kisses me softly. “You’re gorgeous and that was remarkable. Thank you for telling me that.” Pressing another kiss on the tip of my nose, then quickly on the lips, he asks, “So what do you see there now?”

“I don’t know,” I admit with a chuckle. “But yesterday, I saw you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.” I bring my hand up to cup his jaw and kiss him. Pulling back with a smile, I notice his eyes are still closed. I ask him, “Do you want to see?”

Cameron opens his eyes and excitedly says yes. So I extract myself from his arms and pick up one of my many portfolios. This one in particular has mostly charcoal drawings. Thumbing past other works, I find the two I’m looking for.

“I really hope you like them,” I say and then ask him to close his eyes. “No peeking until I say so.”

I tack them up on the opposite wall, and without further ado, I tell him to open his eyes and see for himself.

“Are you kidding me right now?” he asks with a huge grin on his face. “Seriously, this is a joke, right?”

I shake my head. “No, I did these yesterday. They’re for you, only if you want them, of course. I mean, art truly is subjective, so I get it if you don’t want them, and I wouldn’t be offended or anything.”

“They’re awesome!” He stands up and takes the few steps over to where I am so he can look closer. His eyes roam over the first one and then the second. Then, as if something caught his attention, he goes back to staring at the first one. “Wait a second. Is that me?”

“Yes.”

The drawing in question is of Darth Vader, but his mask is cracked and has fallen off half his face. Instead of sketching the face of the actor who played him in the movie, I drew half of Cameron’s face. I don’t know why I ended up doing it like that; maybe because I know how much of a fan he is of the movies, or maybe because I was just on a high from having spent the night with him for the first time. Either way, I thought it looked pretty cool.

The other is a sketch of Han Solo frozen in carbonite. That one I drew from memory, and also maybe because Harrison Ford reminds me a lot of Cameron.

“Vanessa, these are . . . this is . . . I am so blown away right now, I don’t even know what to say.”

“So you like them?” I ask him with a modest smile.

“I love them, and if they’re really mine, I’m immediately getting them professionally framed.” He stops and looks back at the drawings and then back to me, but with a sneaky smile on his face. “But only after you do one more thing.”

Cameron walks over to the table where I keep all my charcoal pencils and randomly picks one up. He comes back and hands it to me. “I want you to sign them for me.”

I do as he asks, and when I’m done, he grabs my face in his hands and brings his mouth over mine. With each brush of his lips and stroke of his tongue, I feel more breathless and utterly lost in him. In the back of my mind, I think that maybe true love’s kiss isn’t just something to read about or see in the movies. I
want
to believe in the fairy tale, as it turns out. And with the way he holds me so reverently, and the faintest skim of his fingers trailing down my neck, tracing the bared skin of my shoulders, then down the length of my arms until he captures my fingers in his, I find myself able to believe in it a little bit more.

When Cameron pulls away, he keeps our fingers entwined. “Thank you so much. I have no way of expressing how much it means to me that you drew those just for me.”

“You’re welcome,” I whisper, still a little breathless from that last kiss.

He searches my face for a second, as if trying to commit every single wrinkle, freckle, and beauty mark to memory. “It’s getting late.”

I’d be a liar if I didn’t feel a pang of disappointment that he has to go home, but this is what the whole dating a single parent comes with. Even though he seems to be okay with it all now and has told me as much, my fear is that it will get to be a hassle for him not having the freedom to do certain things whenever he, or I for that matter, wants. But I remind myself that we did agree to move forward and to take things one step at a time. So I’m willing to let go of the disappointment for now and try not to dwell on it.

“Yeah, it’s a school night,” I say with a small smile. “You have to wake up early and mold the minds of young children.”

He chuckles at that, then lets me go so I can untack the drawings from the wall. After I’ve put them in an old portfolio I have lying around, I hand it over to him.

When we reach the front door, he pulls me to him again, wrapping his arms around me in a big hug.

“I want to see you again, Vanessa. Soon.”

I smile into his chest before pulling back to look at him. “Me too. Soon.”

He laughs. “Would you be open to the idea of letting me take you and Josie out to dinner this week?”

“I think it’s very sweet of you to include her, and yes, I think that would be great,” I say and mean it, because it shows how seriously he is taking this and trying to make this work between us.

Then Cameron kisses me one more time before leaving for the night.

With my lips aching in bliss from his kiss and my heart thumping away with happiness and excitement, I watch him until his taillights are a distant memory in the darkness.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

S
ometimes I think to myself,
What if?

What if I never went away to college and met Matthew?

What if I had an abortion like he wanted me to, or what if I gave the baby away for adoption to a couple who couldn’t have children of their own?

What if I had decided to run away to Paris to live the life I had dreamed for myself ever since I was a little girl, before Matthew?

The answer is simple: Josie.

Because if I had never gone to college and met Matthew, if I had decided to run away to Paris to live out my dream, if I had had an abortion or given the baby up for adoption . . . there would be no Josie. I have a hard time picturing what my life would be like without her in it. She completes me in a way that I could never have imagined before her.

She is the one great thing I’ve accomplished in my life and was meant to do, and I’ll be damned if anyone or anything will ever hurt her in any way, shape, or form.

But . . . what if
I
am the person who hurts her? I never took into account that I could ever be the source of so much of her pain. I always believed that our bond was too strong to ever be shaken. I am finding out the hard way that the best of intentions are not necessarily the best way to handle things. That keeping things hidden from the ones you love most is almost a guarantee that the bond will shatter from the weight of those secrets.

And as with most things in life that damage your very fragile existence, you never see them coming.

A few days later, I take Cameron up on his offer to take Josie and me out to dinner. It has to be a little earlier than usual since it is another school night though. So I made plans to have him pick us up a little after five o’clock, which Josie thinks is hilarious since that’s just about making it early-bird senior-citizen dining hours, according to her.

I’m in my bedroom freshening up from the long workday when I hear the doorbell ring, signaling Cameron’s arrival. Josie’s muffled feet running across the living room lets me know that she’s letting him in, so I don’t have to go downstairs just yet. As silly and immature as it seems, the thought that I’m going to be seeing him again in a couple of minutes excites me; my stomach swirls and does mini somersaults as a result. I swear that if someone told me I’d be experiencing that feeling again in my lifetime, I would have called them a liar. Stranger still is the fact that I can admit to myself that I missed it to begin with, that I had been secretly wanting to experience the pull of attraction and strong feelings for someone else all these years.

It may seem crazy given the short time we’ve been together, but the feelings I have for Cameron have gone beyond like and well into possibly love. I wouldn’t dare say it aloud to anyone—not even to myself—but I know that every part of me is aching for him, and not just in the physical sense.

“Mom, are you almost ready?” Josie yells up the stairs.

Checking myself in the mirror one more time before heading downstairs, I shout back, “I’ll be right there!”

Cameron is waiting for me at the foot of the steps. He runs a hand nervously through his jet-black hair as he takes me in from my head to my toes, making me worry that there’s something wrong.

Walking right up to him, I ask him quietly, “Is everything okay?”

“Yes, more than okay,” he says. “It’s just . . . it’s just that you’re so beautiful and amazing that every time I see you I wonder what a woman like you could ever be doing with a man like me.”

I loop my arms around his neck, bringing my face a breath away from his. “I ask myself the same exact question all the time . . . but the other way around.”

The corners of Cameron’s mouth curl up in a smile when I close the almost miniscule distance between our lips and press a kiss there.

“Ahem.” That comes from Josie, who is still in the room. For a moment, I’m mortified, but she quickly adds, “It’s okay, Mom, I was only joking. You guys are pretty cute together, even if Mr. Thomas is my science teacher.”

She’s got a huge grin on her face when I look at her over Cameron’s shoulder. When I notice that she’s right by my purse, which is sitting on the kitchen counter, I ask her to grab it for me so we can start heading out.

Leaning over the counter, Josie yanks the corner of my purse, and I watch as it slowly starts to tip and then falls completely over to the side as the contents spill out all over the kitchen floor.

“Sorry, Mom,” she says and gets on her knees with my now empty purse in her hand. “I’ll put everything back together for you.”

Cameron draws me closer and links my hands in his. “I know it’s only been a few days since . . .” He hesitates a second, searching my eyes. “But it’s different, right? You feel it too.”

The undercurrent of emotion is evident in his eyes and by the way his fingers grip mine lightly. I know that whatever it is between us is clear as day to both of us, and I don’t want to lose whatever it is. But I also don’t want to jinx myself either. That’s why he didn’t have to ask me if I feel it too, since I know exactly what he means.

“It’s good different, Cameron,” I say to him. “Really good different.”

“So you’re not scared off by it?”

“A little,” I admit with a small smile. “But it’s only because I’ve been alone for so long that it takes some getting used to.”

“I never thought I’d say this to someone so soon, but I think I’m—”

“Mom!” Josie yells.

I look over to the kitchen counter, where she’s standing again. “What’s the matter?”

“When were you going to tell me about this?!”

In her left hand she’s holding a piece of paper. Having no idea what it is and wanting to defuse an already awkward situation with Cameron present, I ask her calmly, “Josie, sweetie, what are you talking about?” I turn to Cameron and excuse myself. And then I realize what she’s holding: Matthew’s letter.

My heart sinks as tears well up in Josie’s eyes.

“Sweetie, I was going to tell you, I swear.” My voice quavers slightly.

“When? In between your dates with him?” Her voice drips with venom and raw anger as she points behind me to where Cameron is probably wondering what is going on. “When, Mom?”

Cameron looks extremely uncomfortable at what is playing out in front of him. He rubs the back of his neck with his hand and starts to say something, but I stop him. “Cameron, I’m so sorry, but can we reschedule for another night?”

“Sure, sure,” he says with a polite smile. “I’ll let myself out and I’ll call you later to make sure everything is okay.”

“Okay, thanks.” He leaves and I turn back around to Josie, who is still seething with anger.

She has every right to be upset. I have completely let her down. But how do I explain that it was only to protect her? That I thought it wasn’t the right time to tell her about what Matthew has been trying to do. She knows about him in the sense that she knows I didn’t have a miracle pregnancy, but she doesn’t know all the details of what happened then and obviously nothing of what’s happening now. Where do I even start?

“Listen, sweetie, let me explain.”

She waves the letter in the air. “I read in the letter that my dad wants to meet me! He sent it months ago! When were you planning to fit it in?!”

“Josie, I—”

“Forget it, I don’t want to hear it! It’s too late, Mom!”

She storms off, making a beeline to the stairs.

“Josie, wait, I need to talk to you about this!”

Turning around at the foot of the stairs, she wipes her eyes, then sounds and appears eerily calm when she says what she says next.

“I don’t ever want to talk to you again. Stay away from me.”

She continues up to her room, slamming the door behind her and leaving me wondering what I can possibly do or say to fix this.