“Your way isn’t working. It never did.”
“So now I’ve got to change because you think it’s best for me?” She writhed on the edge of his words, as if his voice were a string attached to her limbs. “Cameron says dance, and I dance. Cameron says find a killer, and I look for one. Cameron says don’t love this man, love that one. Fuck this one, not that one. You can’t tell me what to do anymore. I’ll have sex when I want and with whom I want. I’m in control, do you hear that?”
“Sex isn’t about power and control. It’s about making love.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, bit her lip until she tasted blood. “I’ve forgotten how to make love.”
“You never really knew how.” The words were just a whisper in the air.
They sliced her to the bone. “You were a lot of things, Cameron, but cruel never used to be one of them.”
“Cruelty is the only weapon I have left, my love.”
Anything she might have said would put her dangerously close to tears.
He was silent a moment. “I don’t like what we’re doing to each other. But I don’t know how to stop it.”
She rocked back and forth on her toes, eyes squeezed tight.
She felt him at her back, his lips at her nape, his arms curved beneath her breasts. “I will always love you,” he whispered next to her ear, his voice filled with real tears that seemed to fall against her own cheeks. “Forgive me for everything I’ve done to you, for all the mistakes I’ve made.”
Then the swirl of peppermint and aftershave vanished like vapor in sunlight, leaving only the echo of his final words, “Good-bye, my love.
She closed her eyes to the smell of rain on concrete, the tang of wet cat fur, frying bacon in a downstairs apartment. She sniffed the air, there wasn’t a trace of his scent.
“Cameron?”
She felt the silence like the sudden snap of the tether that bound him to her. He’d never said good-bye before.
“Don’t you dare walk out when we’re fighting.”
No answer. She bit her already abused bottom lip.
“This disappearing act doesn’t mean you’ve won.”
Nothing. She started to shake.
“Filthy bastard.”
It was a word meant to rouse his ire, a bone he couldn’t pass on, a gauntlet he’d never refused to pick up. It had always worked in the past.
She shivered even though the rain hadn’t completely eased the heat. “Please don’t leave me,” she whispered into the darkened room.
She focused on all her pain, all her anger, all her fear, then sent it out into the universe for Cameron to find, to feel, to despair over, knowing he’d have to come back if only to hold her in his arms one more time.
“I need you.”
A car honked a block away, across the street a mother called her son in for the night, and somewhere, a door slammed.
But there was not a sound in Max’s room except the jerky intake of her own breath.
Cameron was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Since the day she’d met Cameron, there’d never been a time Max was truly alone. Or wanted to be. Sure there were the usual married couple fights, but she always knew he’d come back. He’d never actually said good-bye. She always knew eventually, after he cooled down, she’d hear his key in the door.
She sagged onto the bed beneath the weight of the silence in the little room. Buzzard leaped onto the coverlet, curled into a tight ball beside her. His bony spine jabbed her thigh. Within seconds, the cat was purring. The rain beat lazily against the siding. All other sound had died away.
“He’ll be back, I know he will.” Except that his words had seemed so full of anguish, so hopeless, so unlike Cameron who’d always been the one with all the answers.
So...final. Good-bye, my love.
She shivered again, rubbed her hands up and down her arms. Her chest hurt as if she’d run a long distance. Her eyes burned. She rubbed the ache, and her fingers came away wet.
God, she couldn’t be crying.
She never cried.
Not the day she’d watched them put her mother in the ground when she was eight years old.
Not the day she was forced to live in her uncle’s house, nor the day she managed to leave it for good.
Not the day she first touched Cameron, nor the day she laid him to rest.
Because she’d never laid him to rest, she’d never let him go, never thought she’d have to say good-bye. Or hear him say it.
The cat rolled over, stretched, then sank his claws into her leg. He regarded her with wide yellow eyes; the little buzzard had done it on purpose. She pulled the needles out of her skin and rose. Dropping her sweatshirt, pants, and nylons in a line as she walked to the bathroom, she took her robe off the door. The lights were still out. She left them that way; she didn’t think she could stand to see her face in the mirror.
The red numbers on her bedside clock were slightly blurred. She wiped a hand across her cheeks. They were still wet, as if her eyes had watered involuntarily.