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Paul lifted his eyebrows.
“Commitment,” she said.
“YOU DO NOT BELIEVE one single thing you said in that song,” Cameron chided Paul on the way home, remembering the song he’d created on the spot to satisfy the groupie.
“I beg to differ. I believe commitment is a beautiful thing, and I said that. And you almost blew our cover flirting with your old flame.”
“He was never a flame. We were first and foremost friends—not unlike you and I.” And she’d made love with each of them once. But there was a certain spice and bittersweet pain to the memory of the long-ago Halloween night she’d spent with Paul. With Sean—nothing, really, though he had been her first. “Anyway,” she told Paul, “you believe commitment is a beautiful thing for everyone else.”
“May I beg to point out that I do have commitment in my life? I’m committed to my job and to my music. I’m just not committed to a house on Stratton Street, a wife and three kids and a golden retriever.”
He pulled up outside the cabin where she lived. Two dogs got up from the porch. Wolfie was feral and didn’t let anyone, even Cameron, touch him, but he sometimes walked in and out of her house and had been known to steal her stuffed animals and bury them in the yard. Mariah was Wolfie’s daughter and was as well-trained as was possible under the corrupting influence of her father, who really did look like a wolf, a black wolf with gray under his muzzle. An old guy who, after being attacked by coyotes, had been darted, castrated and stitched up by the zoo veterinarian, then released to Cameron’s backyard. After that, Wolfie had decided he sort of trusted Cameron.
“Whatever,” Cameron muttered, pushing open the passenger door of Paul’s pickup truck, an old Toyota 4Runner with camper shell. “Thanks for the ride.” She slammed the door and trod up her flagstone path, a rustic path interspersed with dirt and growing things, wilted away this time of year.
A moment later, another door slammed. Cameron glanced back. She was greeting Mariah, petting her affectionate dog, while Wolfie kept his distance, still managing to look envious, yearning yet unwilling to be touched. She said, “Hi, Wolfie,” then noticed Paul coming toward her in the moonlight.
Oh.
He was coming in.
She moved toward the door. “Want some tea?”
“No grass clippings.”
“I can’t believe your own mother is an herbalist and you talk about nettles that way.”
“It’s because she’s an herbalist. As a child, I decided that in my adult life I’d never drink anything that tasted like lawn shavings.”
“You have no adult life.”
He ignored the jibe. They were walking through the dark hallway and had almost reached the kitchen when he said, “You look like you’ve lost your best friend, and there’s definitely no need. Sean Devlin has arrived, looking romantic, to sweep you off your feet. I remember him as one of the sharper crayons in the box, so your children won’t be cretins.”
“I will never have children,” Cameron told him sharply, “unless I adopt.”
“Ah, yes. I’d forgotten your morbid fear of pregnancy and birth.” Cameron had witnessed her older sister, Beatrice, in what she described as “extreme suffering, life-threatening suffering, the screaming-for-hours kind of suffering.” Cameron was convinced that no child could pass through her small hips. Paul kept to the original subject. “What’s making you so miserable tonight?”
“Never mind. Don’t trouble yourself about it.”
“Let me guess—you have lost your best friend. You’ve lost Mary Anne to Graham Corbett.”
“Very funny.” She took two mugs out of the cabinet, checked that there was water in the kettle and switched on the burner.
“It’s inevitable that your cousin will marry someone.”
Cameron’s throat knotted. Her eyes felt hot. She wasn’t upset because everything was going to change with Mary Anne, that her being married would change everything. That wasn’t it at all. Anyhow, Mary Anne and Graham weren’t actually engaged.
Not yet.
“You okay?”
The question was far from Paul’s usual joking tone.
It increased the swelling in her throat. She nodded, jaw taut.
From her Salvation Army kitchen table, where he’d pulled out a chair, Paul watched her back. His tomboy friend with her two long golden-brown braids was dressed up, for her, wearing high clogs and some kind of longish, lacy tunic-top over her jeans. She’d been at a family dinner when he’d called her and begged her to come to The Last Resort.
He’d used the groupie as an excuse, but that wasn’t it. He’d known something was up with Cameron, something that had to do with Mary Anne. He also knew that Cameron, for reasons that made no sense to him, was ever so slightly envious of her cousin. She’s got cheekbones! She’s tall! Things like that. He saw no reason Cameron should envy anyone. She was the best-looking and most enjoyable woman he knew, that was certain. If there had been a Best Body category in their high school yearbook, she’d have won, hands down. All his classmates had carried fantasies about her.
Now, she sounded as if she were about to cry.
She spun away from the stove and said, “If you tell anyone what I’m going to tell you, I will never speak to you again and I’ll tell that groupie that you want to marry her so she can have your babies.”
Some small voice in the back of Cameron’s head whispered, Reckless…reckless…don’t do it.
She ignored the voice. She couldn’t stop, now that she’d started. “I just don’t see why I can’t have a normal relationship with a nice man who is actually an adult—someone who knows his own psyche and doesn’t project his demons onto me.”
Paul squinted. “Didn’t Sean Devlin beg your phone number tonight, or am I imagining that? Is this going to be another salvo in the Great Crusade for All Men to Have Therapy?”
“Forget it!” She spun away again.
Cameron, he knew, didn’t actually believe all men should have therapy. But she seemed to want some kind of fantasy relationship where she and the man in her life talked about everything, had no secrets from each other, constantly shared every emotion. Sometimes he wanted to point out to her that, in a strictly intellectual sense, she didn’t want a boyfriend, she wanted a girlfriend.
But now Paul suddenly saw, suddenly understood. She wasn’t crying about her friendship with Mary Anne, and she wasn’t crying about the general lack of the uninteresting kind of love relationship she thought she wanted; she was crying because she wanted Graham Corbett. The radio guy who looked like an extra on Sex and the City. Talk about someone totally wrong for tomboy Cameron. And Cameron could have virtually any guy she wanted.
Paul knew it would be a mistake to say anything. Especially anything on the subject. But he had to try. “Graham Corbett’s just not…” he said inarticulately, unable to say exactly what Corbett wasn’t.
He thought Cameron might turn around and shout at him.
Instead, she turned to face him again, dragging her sleeve across her eyes. She said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m getting over him. Bridget gave me something so I wouldn’t like him.”
All the hair on Paul’s body stood up. Bridget, his sister, was not someone you should accept funny drinks from. She and his mother had uncanny powers which Paul, who had grown up with these females, could not pretend away. He had seen too much to be complacent on the subject. “You drank something Bridget gave you?”
“A s-s-specific—” Cameron sniffed. “For emotional healing.”
Paul supposed it could be true. But he also knew that his sister was mad at him. She hadn’t been watching her son beside the duck pond at the zoo. It was dangerous, and he’d told her so. Not tactfully, maybe, but come on! Nick could have fallen in and drowned while Bridget was talking meditation techniques with another mom.
Cameron moved away from the counter and picked up her purse, which she’d slung onto the table. From within she retrieved a small vial that she skidded across the table to Paul.
Paul didn’t want to touch the thing. Bridget could be really treacherous.
Cameron noticed that he didn’t pick up the vial. It was empty but for any last drops that might remain. Abruptly, she laughed.
“What?” said Paul.
“You. You’re so afraid. Everybody in the world laughs at love potions and thinks they don’t work.” Though Cameron also believed in the efficacy of the potions, she didn’t find them to be a big deal.
“Everybody in the world didn’t grow up with two witches,” said Paul emphatically.
“It’s not even a love potion,” Cameron needled him, unable to resist. “Maybe you should see if there are a few drops in there for your emotional equilibrium.”
“I’m not the one bursting into tears over a—” He stopped.
Cameron’s eyebrows drew together. “A what?”
“He’s so—preening. He belongs on cable. With his girl curls, that Jim Morrison do. It’s hilarious.”
Cameron pursed her lips briefly at this unfair description of Graham. She was beginning to enjoy herself. “You sound jealous.”
“Of Graham Corbett?” To Paul’s dismay, his voice cracked.
Cameron picked up the vial and carried it over to the stove. “What if I just put the last drop in your tea?”
“I won’t drink it,” he said, shaking his head.
Cameron rolled her eyes and set the vial near the sink to rinse and reuse for an herbal tincture. A pity that such an attractive man—and Paul was downright handsome—should be hopeless as a mate for anyone. Not because of anything to do with his faith in love potions. Just because he was so determinedly unattached. Which was childish.
A little catch in her heart warned her, cautioned her. But she had nothing to fear from Paul. Not emotionally. Not in any way.
She vividly remembered four or so things about their Halloween encounter back in college. One—her own costume. Two—surprising tenderness, or maybe a tender surprise. Three—the glitter in his bed in the morning. Four—his announcing upon awakening that the sex would wreck their friendship. She knew that excuse was covered extensively in the useful book He’s Just Not That Into You. Because it was a lie. It meant, I don’t want to have sex with you again. Period.
Paul had rejected her. This permanently eliminated him from her pool of men with whom she might have an intimate relationship in the future.
As she was thinking this, he said, “You know what the Chinese remedy for lovesickness is?”
“What?” said Cameron without interest. There was no remedy.
“To make love with someone other than the object of your attraction.”
Cameron eyed him suspiciously. “You’re not propositioning me, are you?”
Paul hadn’t been. He had been trying to goad her as she was goading him about the love potion. As far as he knew, Cameron hadn’t been on a real date in years, and he’d been planning to suggest Sean Devlin as a possible choice. But now they’d entered murky waters. Possibly deep waters.
He didn’t know Cameron’s entire sexual history, but knew she’d done more than her share of fending off unwelcome advances on dates. He thought of her, in a brief unspoken second, more like a breath, of someone innocent and vulnerable, the girl he used to surf with, kick Hacky Sack with, toss a Frisbee with. One night she’d been in his bed, full-breasted, so sexual, so different. Now, suddenly, she was both those things. And he felt protective toward her.
He tried to answer and couldn’t. Sleeping with Cameron… He liked the idea and also thought it was a mistake, not part of his plans. But he felt a curiosity, curiosity about who she was now, what they might be together. And his mouth said, “It’s an idea.”
Cameron almost gasped with the shock of it.
It was unthinkable.
She and Paul were friends, just friends. In any case, she liked sex, but she wasn’t much into the sport of it, and what he was suggesting sounded like sport. Suppose she did it, would this Chinese cure work? She wasn’t in any danger of falling in love with Paul.
A shudder swept over her with her next thought, a thought she tried to suppress.
Cameron was terrified of pregnancy. There were good reasons for this, several. And she knew her fear was irrational. But it was a fear that had many times made her decide not to go home with someone she might otherwise have accepted. Which was crazy. Birth control did work. And she and Paul would use condoms. It would be fine.
That’s always what you think, Cameron, and then the next day you freak out.
But it was nonsense. She’d talked about it in therapy. She could handle that fear. Because it wasn’t rational, and she was a very rational woman. Which left only the question of sex as sport. “I’m not the kind of woman who does things like that,” she said emphatically. She took honey from the cupboard, leaving the door open.
Paul noticed that she had considered.
She said, “Want some toast?”
“Sure. Things like what?”
“Casual sex.” She popped two slices of rye bread into the toaster.
“I wasn’t thinking casual,” Paul said. Though he’d accepted his share of invitations from eager women, the idea of “friends with benefits” slightly offended him. Sex was sex, friends were friends, lovers were rare. “More of a—” he sought for the right words, and found some he thought would appeal to her pro-therapy, talk-everything-through outlook “—healing experience.”
“Like last time,” she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “when you rejected me in the morning? I haven’t forgotten, you know.”
“Rejected you?” He frowned, eyebrows drawing together.
“You said it would ruin our friendship or something like that.”
Paul considered. “I do kind of remember that.” What had been in his head? he wondered now. Probably his inherent dislike of denigrating friends to “friends with benefits.” But why hadn’t he wanted more with Cameron, a real relationship? At the time, she would have made an excellent girlfriend.
Now, since the subject had come up, it was beginning to occur to him that he wanted to know Cameron as a lover. Again. He had some memories of the night they’d spent together, but they were mostly visual. “I think it would make you feel better,” he said, unable to keep from smiling. Feeling mischief sweep over him. “If it doesn’t work the first time, we’ll do it again. We’ll do it until we cure—” he found he couldn’t utter Graham Corbett’s name “—your affliction.”
“I’m not afflicted.” Spinning back toward the toaster, she banged into the open cabinet door and cried out. She swore, it hurt so much.
She heard Paul get up from the table and bit down tears.
He turned her around and said, “Let’s get you some ice. Looks like you’re going to have a shiner.”
“Great,” she gasped through the pain.
Spontaneously, he kissed the tip of her nose. But then his lips drifted to her cheek, down to her mouth.
At first, she did not respond, and he was about to move away when she began kissing him back.
He could smell the bread toasting, but he’d lost all interest in food.
She kissed him. She felt his mouth open slightly, and so did hers. She felt the tip of his tongue caress her lips. She whispered, “Okay.”
Paul let her body settle against his, touch everywhere, let her feel what was happening to him because of her. His mind spun, seeing the teenage tomboy she’d been, the vulnerable person she still was inside, the lover he didn’t really know.
I SHOULDN’T BE doing this, she thought minutes later in the bedroom. Abandoning the toast which had popped up, they had gone straight to her bed.
What if this wrecked her relationship with Paul?
Well, maybe that would be for the best. It would be better if Cameron had nothing more to do with any member of the Cureux family—not midwife and love-potion brewer Clare, not her antiseptically skeptical obstetrician ex-husband David, not witch-in-waiting Bridget and not Paul.
But Cameron liked Paul. And he was a friend, a friend who didn’t mind if she woke him in the middle of night to drive Mariah to the vet because she’d eaten a tampon. She sometimes thought Paul would do anything for her. When she someday had a relationship with a man, she wanted it to be someone who would open up to her, talk to her about everything. But that wasn’t Paul. Their friendship wasn’t the talking kind but the being-together kind.
And sometimes she really wished she knew what went on in his head, what he really felt, the unspoken things.
