He bit my neck, nuzzling, sucking. “Is this what you want? Do you want me, Camdyn?”
Yes, my body answered. Yes. My head fell back as his lips caressed my jaw. He pulled me tighter, snugly against him, and I throbbed. It felt so right; it felt like I had wanted this forever. This was what I had needed for my whole life.
And I remembered suddenly what his parents had said, about the house, about the marriage. I pulled away, yanking back. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, no.” I unhooked my ankles and slid down his body, putting out my hand and stepping away to put distance between us. My legs shook under me. “I don’t know why I did that. Maybe it was like what you said about kissing me before, I was still emotional.” I was so emotional that I was having trouble speaking. “I’m really sorry,” I told him.
César was breathing hard—he was hard, and I wanted to rub myself against him again, but he stepped back even further. “That was a really, really bad idea. That was what got us into trouble the first time. I’m not going to make another mistake.”
A sob bubbled up in my throat but I swallowed it down. “You’re right. No more mistakes. We can be parents together, but we can’t do this again, get caught up in emotion or whatever.”
He looked away from me, out over the ocean. “I’ll walk you back to my house.” We went down the beach together, but really, I felt very far apart from him.
The next morning, we flew back north, not saying much to each other besides when César told me to hurry because I was making us late again and we were going to miss our flight. He read, mostly, but I just stared out the window at the clouds, asking myself questions that I didn’t have the answers to. Like, why had I stopped? Why hadn’t I said yes?
I looked at César’s hand resting on the armrest and I wanted to grab it and hold on. Instead, I tapped my finger on his knuckle, and he pulled off his headphones and turned to me.
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” I told him. “I’ll do anything to make this ok between us.”
“Things are fine,” he said. He looked past me, out the window at the clouds.
“Do you want me to move out? I can find another place to live.” That would be a good idea, I told myself, even if I didn’t want to. “I think that would be a good idea,” I said aloud.
“No,” he answered. “No, I don’t want you to move out. You should stay. We’re roommates.” He shifted his eyes to me for just a moment, then he put the headphones back on, and we flew home in silence.
Chapter 9
I took a hopeful sip and gagged some. Nope, I still hated herbal tea. The taste reminded me of when Ellie and I had been little and a neighbor kid had dared me to eat bark, which Ellie had told me not to do and I had done anyway. I forced myself to take another sip of the tea, because the barista had said that this brew was excellent for calming anxiety, which I was currently feeling. Ugh, gross. I thought it might be tastier to just pour water over some of the bean sprouts that César was currently growing in a jar in our kitchen and forced me to eat at almost every meal. Actually, those didn’t bother me so much anymore—and it was pretty fun to watch him mess with them, checking on his tiny crop and then sprinkling them on our food so that the baby would be healthy and strong.
Oh, shit, here I went again. I grabbed a paper napkin and pretended to blow my nose, but I actually wiped away more tears. I had been a mess since we came back from Florida, and I knew it. Even my already poor performance at work was suffering as I came in later, left earlier, and generally behaved like an idiot. Yes, I knew I was doing it, but it was hard to stop when every single emotion I had was ratcheted up into overdrive. I also flipped from one feeling to the next like going from first to fifth and then back down. I focused myself on the two women I was sitting with, and the reason they had pretty much demanded that I come and meet them today.
“Ok, we’ve made a very convincing case. So what do you think?” Lindy asked me brightly. “We really want to throw you a baby shower.” She shifted around uncomfortably in the chair. She was so gigantic that she was uncomfortable in literally everything she did, as she had told me when she walked into the coffee shop a little while before. “Hi, Camdyn, I need to sit,” Lindy had greeted me. “I can’t even do that well right now. God, I’m about to burst. If this baby doesn’t come out soon, I’m going to reach up in there and—”
“Lindy, let’s go order our tea,” her friend Katie had interrupted her, tugging on her arm and pulling her along. “Pregnancy is really a beautiful thing,” she had assured me, as she dragged Lindy away.
But 15 minutes later, I still felt like I was going to run away screaming from this vision of my future. Actually, I wanted to bolt even more because of what the two of them were proposing: they wanted to throw a huge shower, with everyone I knew and all of César’s friends and
