Campbell_Book One

Chapter 14




April 2002

Los Angeles



Nothing would have prepared Tal for the disgust he felt at the sight of Connor Wilde’s pants around his ankles in his lavish office, the girl that he’d hired to star in their first movie, The Right Way using her mouth in a way that wasn’t conducive to her learning her lines better. The Right Way was a dirty piece of shit, but that seemed to be what kids wanted to see. All the things that they should have seen a bit of at a time under normal circumstances were wide open for consumption.

Tal was no exception. He’d watched hundreds of hours of pornography in the last few months, some of it alone, some of it with friends some of it with Leah. He knew his parents wouldn’t have approved. It made him feel aroused and guilty, uncomfortable, and excited, all at the same time. Tal didn’t know much about sex before, and after watching people have sex in every depraved way possible he understood the logistics, but the dynamics that he saw in those movies didn’t match his memories of his parents, or grandparents, or anyone he’d known before. It stirred odd feelings in him. That, combined with the raging hard on that he ended up with at the most inconvenient times had left him confused about his thoughts, and irritable.

“F*ck, you f*cking idiot,” Tal snapped, shaking his head before he slammed the door to the prop room. He stomped down the stairs and outside, stopping when he reached a bench about thirty minutes later.

They were paying her. Connor was paying her for sex. It wasn’t right. Tal didn’t know much about being an adult, about morals and values but he knew that much.

“I quit,” Tal said, slamming his key to the studio on Connor’s desk a couple of hours later. “You can find someone else to do whatever the f*ck it is I’m doing, because I’m done, Connor.”

Connor pulled his feet off his desk and furrowed his brow. “Because of that? Come on, man, you’ve done it too.”

“With a girlfriend, at my house, who I wasn’t paying to do it,” Tal lied. He hadn’t done anything beyond heavy petting with anyone. “Connor, she’s supposed to be working.”

“Why are we so concerned with working? Working is for adults.”

“You’re giving her money.”

“I’m a nice guy,” he said, with a nonchalant shrug. “She’s not a very good actor.”

“Whatever,” Tal muttered. “I quit, whatever the f*ck it is we’re doing.”

“Why don’t you go home, to your nice, big house, and think this over,” Connor said smugly. “Why don’t you think about how you’re going to fix things, and feed Leah and Rachel, and how you’re going to make a life for yourself?”

“Pretty sure I’ll figure it out,” Tal replied, slamming the office door behind him.

Two days later, an unopened Mac laptop with a stack of games and an apologetic Connor landed on Tal’s door. Leah regarded him with a frown when she answered the door.

“We’re done with you,” she said curtly, crossing her arms. “Tal doesn’t want to see you.”

“Leah, it’s fine,” Tal said, smiling at his cousin. “I got this.”



September 2012

Grove, Old Oklahoma



“I’ve never taken drugs,” Tal said quietly, glancing around the circle as the bag headed in his direction. “Have you tried these?”

Lucy smiled knowingly, relaxing for the first time after a day spent thrashing wildly in her head, after she finally resolved to just do what felt right until she had to go back to her life. “I’ve tried all sorts of things. Only natural things though.”

“What's it like?”

“Like moving past drunk with no upset stomach or hangover.” She took a handful and passed him the bag. “You'll be fine. Better than fine.”

“You sure we're safe here?”

Lucy glanced around at the kids settling in, laughing, without a care in the world and did her best to follow their lead, although she knew it would take her out of her comfort zone. “Bull is family. If he says we're good, we're good. Besides, everyone here is too f*cked up to mess with us.”

Tal peered into the bag and pulled out a similar quantity as to what Lucy had in her hand. “I hope you're right.”

“You know I'm always right, most of the time,” her eyes twinkled as they met his. “It’s like a little vacation, a trip. We deserve a little vacation, Tallie.”

Truth was, Lucy needed to get away from the mess in her head, and she knew this had the potential to be either a wonderful or a terrible way to do that.

“Well, if you're saying that, it must be true,” he replied dryly, popping one in his mouth. “Okay, I can eat these. They’re…they kind of taste like dirt.”

Lucy shifted out of the circle, which was now lopsided and half missing as people went off on their own adventures, and turned to face him, crossing her legs at the ankles as she chewed a few of her own. “The last time I did these was with Zoey when we were eighteen, and we ended up passing out on the kitchen floor. Cole had to put us to bed.”

“Do you still think it was her that ratted you out?”

Lucy shrugged, her eyes heavy. “Less than before, after hearing what Bull had to say, and thinking about it. I wouldn't bet the farm on it though.”

“Do you miss her?”

Lucy ate the last of her mushrooms and lay back in the grass, and tried to push Zoey’s sad eyes out of her mind. “I don't know,” she remarked thoughtfully. “Not in the ways that I thought I would.”

“What ways did you think you would?”

“I just think there have been bigger things that have made what we…well, they’ve made what we had seem fairly insignificant, and that’s not how I should be thinking about the person I’m supposed to be in love with. I mean, I’ll miss talking with her, and having someone who knows me well to share things with, but in terms of romantic love, I think I'm over it. Maybe.”

“And you did sleep with that other girl—”

“Eh,” she shrugged. For as long as she’d known Zoey, she’d understood that, no matter how many guys she’d slept with, she’d be insecure until she admitted to herself that she was a lesbian. She needed a label, something Lucy was discovering more and more that she didn’t have much of an interest in. “We’ve never had the most monogamous of relationships. That's why I didn't castrate you when you told me about you and her. She’s had a hard time embracing the fact that she’s attracted to women. She likes to tell people it’s just me, but it isn’t. I know it isn’t.”

“Strange relationships are strange,” Tal said, blinking up at the sky, which had taken on a beautiful orange glow with the setting sun. “I’m in love with the wrong person. Have been for years.”

Lucy looked at him curiously, since he’d never mentioned anyone before. “Are you still?”

“I’ll always love her. Maybe even the way I'm supposed to someday,” he mumbled, as they watched the colours swirl together in the sky. “These are nice.”


“Who is she?” Lucy asked curiously. “I didn’t know you had someone.”

“It’s…it’s not that I have someone. I mean, I do, but not in a normal sense. She’s….”

“She’s what?” Lucy asked with expectation in her voice as his pause dragged out. Her mind raced with a series of sordid possibilities, none of which made any sense from what she knew about Tal so far. “What is she?”

“It’s Leah, okay?” Tal muttered. “Go on, make fun.”

Lucy laid back in the grass, her hair fanned out behind her. “Oh,” she said, unfazed, watching the sky move around her. “I…didn’t think you were going to say that. I thought it would be much worse.”

He waved his hand with finality. “I’m done. I mean, we’re done. I decided before I left for Campbell last week. No more. I mean, can you imagine what would happen if...” he trailed off with a sigh. “I can’t go down that road, and it’s just very inappropriate in so many ways, and—”

Lucy pulled him down beside her and grabbed his hand, lacing her fingers with his as she squeezed tightly. She smiled at him, and within a couple of seconds, his mouth was twitching at the corners too. It felt good to touch him, she decided. Not scary at all.

“This is supposed to be fun. If you let yourself go in that direction, it can get scary. Only think of the positive.”

“What’s positive?” Tal said, his eyes locking with hers. “Tell me something that’s good. Something nice.”

“You’re not what I expected,” she whispered, her heart pounding. “How’s that?”

“I’m not sure,” he replied, rolling onto his side, as she did the same, their bodies aligned in the grass. “Depends on what you mean.”

“Come a little closer,” she said, as she tried to push the spider webs that were forming in her brain aside long enough to say what she wanted to say. “Closer.”

He obliged and scooted towards her, their noses an inch apart. “You’re not as intimidating as you used to be, Lucy Campbell. You better watch out.”

She blinked away the lights flashing in the back of her mind. “And you’re not as much of a waste of life as I thought you were.”

“Flatterer.”

There, in the grass, all constructs fell, and Lucy and Tal were left really and truly alone for the first time, without the interference of themselves or anyone else. She knew it was the drugs, but Lucy found herself overwhelmed, being with him. She did her best not to let it show.

“I like your alternative reality more than mine. The one where you’re in university. Tell me about that.”

“It’s not so great,” he chuckled. “I live at home, and my mother is menopausal and crazy.”

“It’s still nicer than anything I could imagine.” She squeezed his hand and adjusted her fingers around his. “I wish I could dream up nicer things.”

Tal smiled over at her as her head began to swim. “Come with me.”

“To university? To your fantasy?”

He nodded with a silly grin. “I’ll sneak you into my house and you can stay with me until you get on your feet. In your own fantasy.”

Lucy liked that idea, she decided, unable to control her smile. “How would we meet?”

Tal thought about it for a minute, his face screwed up in concentration. “We’d take a comparative politics class together. My mom used to lecture part time at UCLA, and there’s this auditorium there that she used to teach in and I used to go to sometimes…after,” he swallowed. “Because I’d imagined I’d find her there, and it would be so busy, and she’d drive me home and we’d have tea like we did sometimes before Dad and my brothers were home, and she’d answer all my adult questions. We’d meet there.”

Lucy gave a decisive nod. “That’s the where. What’s the how?”

His eyes settled on hers and stayed there, for the first time really lingering. She looked at his lashes, and his eyes, almost black in the dusk.

“The how is embarrassing,” he said, leaving her eyes to trace the apples of her cheeks.

“Tell me,” she insisted curiously.

“It’s a big auditorium. New. High tech. There are laptops. I’m sitting above you, three or four rows up, and you’re wearing this grey t-shirt, a lot like the one you’re wearing now, and I look down, and I can see…I can see down your shirt. The edges of your bra. It’s black, I’m twenty-one going on fourteen, so I look, and of course you don’t imagine that someone rows up is looking at your breasts, so you go on with your business, and you’re chewing your pen, and you cross your legs, and it’s…it’s a lot. It’s distracting.”

“Do we have a test that day?”

He shook his head. “No, so I’m free to ignore the beardy professor at the front. He’s old, close to retirement, but he’s sharp, and he has this question that he asks every year on the first day of class, and the person that answers it in a way he likes always gets an A. He doesn’t give them the A, but they always get it anyway. For the last twenty years.”

“What’s the question?”

“I don’t know,” Tal said with a shrug. “It’s his question, not mine.”

“So how do we meet?”

“You answer it better than anyone has, ever, and everything just stops. I stop looking at your breasts. Kids stop typing on their laptops, they stop ignoring the old man at the front of the class and they look at you.”

“And I hate that. I would hate that.”

“But you don’t show it.” Tal’s thumb instinctively stroked her palm. “You make everyone think, me included. I pay for your coffee at Starbucks after class. It pisses you off.”

And just like that, she was there too. “But it doesn’t really.”

“No?” His eyes joined hers again. “You sure seemed mad.”

“I was flustered after class, and I was already having a hard time fitting in, and I just wanted to fade to the background, but I couldn’t, and you were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“Then what happens?” Tal asked, nodding at her.

She bit her lip thoughtfully. “We end up doing a group project together, and I decide you’re smart, and we both like reading pretentious things, so we talk about those a lot. I insist that you read the Communist Manifesto and we talk about it late into the night until they kick us out of the stacks at the library for being too loud. I tease you for enjoying Atlas Shrugged.”

“But you respect me for introducing you to The Watchmen, after I make you read it.”

“I haven’t read that.”

“You have, in this world.” Tal visibly relaxed, and she felt familiarity wash over her. “And you really liked it.”

“What happens next?”

“We become friends. Your girlfriend hates me, because I’m funnier than she is.”

Lucy shook her head, and she furrowed her brow as Stacy from the night before flashed in front of her eyes, in a weirdly familiar dorm room. “No. She hates you because we spend so much time together.”

“You touch my face, one night at this dive bar that you always make me go to because the people are interesting.” Tal reached over, and his fingers ghosted her cheek. “Like that.”


“It’s heavy, after that, because there are a lot of things you don’t know, and that I can’t pretend they aren’t scratched into me. I don’t call you for a while.” A tear ran down her cheek. “But I miss you.”

Tal nodded solemnly. “But do you remember what happened next?”

Lucy thought about it, but couldn’t know with certainty. “Kind of?”

“I buy you a coffee a few weeks later, and you’re wearing that grey t-shirt again, and you invite me back to your dorm room to give me a copy of The Magus from your first year English class because you wanted someone to talk about it with. Your room is really small.”

Nodding thoughtfully, Lucy picked up when he stopped. “And I sit on the bed, and you sit in the chair, and you ask me what changed.”

“Because I missed you too.”

“So I start talking, and I tell you about my grandfather, and I won’t look at you, but I tell you. I want you to know, even though I decided a long time before not to tell anyone since I was starting fresh.”

“I don’t understand at all, and I find myself angry.” She lay her hand on her chest and Tal’s heart beat rapidly. She could almost see it thudding through his hoodie. “With no one to be angry at.”

Tal closed his eyes, and Lucy’s hand detached from his and moved to his cheek, rubbing it gently. “I’m not really sure what to do with that.”

He nodded against her hand. “We part ways for the summer. You have this job tree planting with your brother in British Columbia and I do a bunch of volunteering with places I think will look good on my law school applications. I start seeing this girl, but….”

“You tell me that a lot more meant a lot less when you were with her,” Lucy replied. “After you stop by my tiny, tiny apartment when I’m back in town with a case of beer, and I insist we go out because I’m terrified at the idea of being alone with you.”

“So we’re back at the cheek-touching bar, and I can’t think of anything but the way your hand felt on my face, and you tell me about all the bears that almost ate you when you were tree planting over the summer, and I imagine I’m one of those bears, and I’m not a p-ssy chicken shit that can’t even tell the girl I’m very much in love with that I am, even if it doesn’t mean anything because I knows she’s a lesbian.”

“Only I never told you I was a lesbian, and if you’d asked me, I probably would have told you that it wasn’t as easy as that, even in the fantasy life you loaned me.” Lucy stroked his cheek, the barely-there stubble exactly the interesting contrast of smooth and rough under her fingers that she’d imagined. “So we both just look at each other and you sip your Guinness and I drink my gin and tonic.We’re pathetic.”

“It goes on for months, like that. My brother marries a Jewish girl the following February. Everyone is thrilled. I invite you to the wedding as my date because I’m not seeing anyone, but you decline.”

She nodded. “Because it’s too much like a real date and I know people will make assumptions.”

“You agree to meet me at the hotel bar, after I send you a few rambling drunken text messages. You’re in a dress. It’s the first time I’ve seen you in one. It’s blue, and your eyes look like the sea, and your hair is up, off your neck.”

“I feel entirely out of my element at the hotel, because I’m in a dress and I’m sure I’m parked where I’m going to get a ticket, but I order a drink that costs what I could get three for at the usual dive bar I go to, and when you slide up beside me in your suit and yarmulke, I’m glad I came although I’m not sure why.”

“You ask me if this is what I have planned, a wedding like this at a ridiculously expensive hotel, but you ask it with a knowing smile because you already know my answer, which is no, at twenty-two, because it’s all a lot of show, and I’m not into that. I’m not sure it won’t be what I want at twenty-nine though, especially if I decided to marry someone that wanted it.”

“I order another drink and you comp it to the wedding, ignoring my weak protests. Your uncle sees us together and gives you a weird nod of approval, knowing nothing of our history, and likely imagining that I’m some girl you just met. I tell you I need to go home because I’m driving and my piece of shit car is going to get ticketed or towed. You nab my keys, vanish for a minute and come back with a valet slip for me and explain that even though I’d said no, I was still a guest at the wedding. I have another drink, this one with a parasol, and then we do a shot of tequila.” Lucy wrinkled her nose. “Even though I hate tequila.”

“Since it is a wedding, after all,” Tal laughed.

“Your parents were rich, huh?”

“Less rich than some, but richer than others. I threaten to introduce you to my mother, and then I mention that I’m staying here for the night, which is ridiculous because I live twenty minutes away, but there’s some breakfast thing in the morning and the bride’s parents think it’s important that everyone stays, and they’re richer than my parents so they’ve booked a block of rooms.”

“After another shot, this time of J?egermeister, I ask to see the room, desperately trying to make sense of the chaos in my head, which is fuzzy from mixing drinks. Your room is a mess too, like my head.”

“It’s because I got dressed there, and my brother Rob and I spent most of the afternoon drinking, since I got the room with the balcony in the coin flip. There was always a coin flip in my family.”

“I sit on the bed,” Lucy whispered. “And my heart’s beating so loud I can hear it in my ears.”

“I sit beside you, and I fight the urge to just make you say how you feel so I don’t have to guess anymore, but then I’ve grown used to the uncertainty.”

“It keeps you on your toes.”

“It does,” Tal nodded, back on the grass in Oklahoma instead of an ornate room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “So what happens then?” he asked with hesitation thick in his voice.

Lucy’s hand was unwavering on his cheek. “You flop back on the bed, and I join you, and we’re both terrifyingly horizontal, but I’m not so scared anymore. You ask, after a long silence, if you can kiss me.”

“What do you say?”

Lucy landed back on the grass as well, and opened her eyes to find Tal’s looking back at her. “Ask me.”

Their noses brushed.

“I don’t think I’d ask here,” he whispered. “We’re a lot more civilized there.”

He caught her breath in his mouth as she exhaled, and he moved so their noses were parallel and he could almost feel the static from her mouth. Her eyes issued an invitation, and fantasy and reality blended into one as he pressed his mouth against hers. He took the lead, and she eagerly followed suit, allowing him past her teeth and smiling against his mouth as their tongues met. Her hand moved from his cheek to his neck and she used it to steady herself, unaware that it was possible to be so affected by a kiss as her heart pulsed and her senses became overloaded.

It felt like a kiss a long time in the making, even though it hadn’t been.

“I’d still think you were the most beautiful girl, even if there were millions of other people in that reality,” Tal said breathlessly, when they inched apart.


“You think I’m beautiful?” Lucy asked, her mind raking over his words, gathering them into a pile like leaves.

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “How many times have you caught me looking at you?”

“You scare the shit out of me,” Lucy admitted, her voice wavering. “Because this isn’t me.”

Tal reached out and stroked the underside of her chin. “Your skin’s so soft. I’d never want you to be someone else.”

“We’re so f*cking stoned,” Lucy reminded herself. “But it’s like you’ve been listening in on my head.”

“You slept on my chest. You’re not afraid of me.”

“I should be afraid of you.” She sat up and ran her fingers through her hair, dislodging some of the leaves that had stuck in the back. “You have the potential to destroy everything I’ve worked for.”

“I won’t,” he simply said. “And I think you’re smart enough to know that, or you wouldn’t let me in.”

“I’m good at reading people,” she said, more to herself than him. “At least I hope I am. I’ve been questioning that lately.”

Tal blinked at the colours all around them. The leaves were more vibrant than Lucy could imagine, and they almost hurt her head to look at. The people around her seemed sad and pitiful. It was getting dark.

“I’m going to go back to the tent,” he decided, carefully rising to his feet. “I need to get out of here.”

Lucy held her hand up to him and he helped her to her feet. “Let’s go then.”

The zipper on the tent sounded like a freight train and Tal cringed as he opened it, letting Lucy in first. She felt like everything would be fine, once she was away from everyone else, and the tension she was feeling dissipated when he zipped the tent closed. It was mostly dark, and the barely-there light seemed perfect.

Lucy lay back down, once inside, spread herself out and imagined she was a starfish. She’d read somewhere that they didn’t have brains and functioned simply by sensing light, so she gave that a try, and followed the flashlights and candles outside the tent for a while. Thoughts itched at her brain, but she pushed them aside, knowing she’d have to go back to them soon enough.

When she woke up the next morning, she was alone in a giant sleeping bag made up of two zipped together, and the spot next to her was warm. Moments later, she froze as the tent opened and she was met with a familiar face, albeit not the one she’d been expecting.

“You were smiling in your sleep,” Bull said as he climbed inside and stretched out beside her, pulling her into his embrace. “Goose, you worried me.”

“I’m okay,” she said, hugging him back, her heart light at the sight of her old friend. “I can’t believe you sent me here.”

“It was close and you need to loosen up. Harvest Week is a good time.” He gave her a half grin. “Maybe I just wanted to come to Harvest Week.”

“I should have known,” she replied sarcastically, poking his chest. “Last night was mushroom night.”

“I’m sorry I missed that.” He scanned her face. “You’re okay?”

She nodded. “Where’s—”

“West is out at the food table. Red Cloud introduced us.” Bull frowned, and his dark brows moved together as he noticed the giant sleeping bag. “What’s going on there?”

“Nothing,” Lucy was quick to say, wary about Bull’s reaction to anything but that. “We’re just here together, and—”

“I don’t trust him.”

Lucy sat up, still fully dressed in her clothes from the night before. “Why?”

“Because everyone from that f*cking area is nuts. You know how they are. They’re like East, but more superficial.”

A minute later, the tent zipped open and Tal carefully balancing two plates of breakfast, slid back in, before pausing to take in the huge man with the shaved head sitting in his spot. He sized Bull up as he handed Lucy a stacked plate full of eggs and various breakfast meats. It was more than she would eat, but she appreciated him overcompensating after the confusing night they’d shared.

The tent couldn’t have been tenser.

“You should leave, man,” Bull said, raising his eyebrows at Tal. “Me and Goose…Lucy, we’ve got some things to talk about.”

Lucy looked at Tal sadly, realizing that any break she’d had from her life as a result of her kidnapping was over. “Thanks, for breakfast. Do you mind?”

It wasn’t really a question.

“Yeah, I guess I’ll just…” He backed out of the tent. “I’ll see you.”

Lucy listened to Bull for a while as he recapped the last week. They’d found a few spies from East, and a few from West. They had them locked away and Bull, in a moment of weakness in Lucy’s opinion, had left her brother Andrew in charge of them. There was no mention of Cole. Zoey was miserable. Bull was convinced of her innocence.

“If you were curious, there would have been a million better ways to satisfy that.” Bull’s dark eyes bore into hers. “A million better ways. Look at you. You’re somewhere else.”

“Oh, stop making assumptions,” Lucy groaned. “We’ve…I’ve been through a lot. You really have no idea what you’re talking about.”

The problem of course, was that Bull knew exactly what she was talking about, and from his perturbed expression, he knew it. “Zoey told me about that guy and her.”

“Zoey threw herself at him to piss me off. She told me about it too.”

“If he was any sort of statesman, he would have said no.”

“He saved my life. It would have been easier for him not to.” Her hands went to her face and traced the faded bruises. “He’s not Connor Wilde.”

“What happens now?” Bull said, his calm tone masking his anger at his best friend. Anger that Lucy felt was unjustified after so long. “Since I have no idea what I’m talking about. Why don’t you fill me in?”

“Nothing happens. Things go back to the way they were a week ago. I go back to Campbell, he goes back to West, and I work with them as it suits me as a means to get my brother back.”

Her heart felt heavy at things going back to the way they were in some ways, but not in others. She’d feel safer at her house, surrounded by her people than in some god-awful strange land, and she needed to see about Cole. The thing was, she’d acknowledged a few things about herself in the past few days as well. She’d learned she wasn’t as evolved as she thought she was, and that, in fact, she was more complicated than she’d ever imagined. Part of her wondered if all of her new feelings weren’t a result of the very real possibility that she might lose Cole, and that it was now entirely up to her to develop her sense of self, whereas before, he could fill the gaps.

“We’ll leave in the morning,” Bull said with a nod. “I told Red Cloud that I’d reward him for—”

“Whatever he wants, from my end,” Lucy replied, picking at the eggs that had gone cold on the plate in her lap. “Thanks, for coming.”

“Thanks for not dying,” Bull joked, reaching for a piece of her bacon, which she begrudgingly handed over, irritated at him for being right about more than she’d ever admit. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”


“Ditto,” she murmured, linking her arm with his. “And nothing happened with Bauman. Nothing you have to worry about.”

“Good,” he muttered, eating more of her food. “I don’t want to have to kill him.”