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Being proved right isn’t satisfactory. It’s the opposite. Like he’s been slapped around the head and his ears are ringing. A bitter laugh passes his lips. He was so desperate to stop history repeating, yet here he is, feeling like he had after things with Braden ended. Actually, scratch that. He feels even worse. Dried up and achy. Karma getting him this time and he deserves every sharp twinge inside him.
He slowly closes the car boot, then slides into the passenger seat, pulling the door shut behind him before clicking his seatbelt in and turning the engine on. The radio blares and his hand snaps out to shut it off.
Silence rings.
The car is quiet without Jules beside him.
She may not be there in person, but she lives in his head and in his chest. His hands wrap around the steering wheel, quickly turning white-knuckled. The reasons for keeping his distance, ones that made sense five days ago, hell, five hours ago, now feel like frail excuses he needed to convince himself of.
Taking a long inhale, he releases the steering wheel and pulls out his phone. His text message with Jules is still open, and he stares at the words she sent a few minutes ago, confirming she wanted to be away from him so desperately she’s likely gone and paid for her own train ticket to Canberra.
His body figures it out a fraction of a second before his brain does, arm reaching to shut off the ignition before the thought fully clarifies.
She sent this a few minutes ago. Jules is still here, in the hotel. He can say all of this to her face.
He bursts out of the car, fumbling the door closed before racing to the lifts and pressing the up button. The taunting red numbers descend in slow-motion. Fucking hell, why won’t they go faster? Each second is precious. Jules could be leaving her room at any moment.
Finally, the doors open and he throws himself inside the lift, only for the ascent to drag too. The tightness in his chest constricts with every breath, every stride in the confined space, back and forth, floor by floor. He needs to catch her so he can explain, finish digging the emotions out of his bones for her so she knows it did mean something to him. It’ll hurt like a gut-punch doing it and will she even want him still? But fuck, he needs to try. He can’t leave this be, like when he ran from her after she complimented his personality. Did he learn nothing from that?
Memories of the past week play like a highlights reel in his head, now with a filter of this-woman-is-falling-for-you overlayed onto them. It doesn’t take long to understand with his entire cowardly, unworthy heart, that although he denied it at the time, she was telling the truth. She wanted him for more than a body. She wants more now, like she apparently did when they started the fling anyway. She wants him as a boyfriend. She fell for him.
And he’s fallen for her too. Plummeted. And he’s yet to land.
He’s hoping Jules will catch him.
The lift arrives on the right floor and he squeezes himself sideways through the still-opening doors. No-one is around to witness his desperate run, but he’d still do it even if there was.
Without hesitation, he knocks twice on Jules’s door, then steps back to wait, heart hammering inside his chest.
A few seconds pass. Then another few.
Her door remains shut.
‘Jules? I need to talk to you.’ He knocks again, then presses his ear to the door, but there’s no sound coming from inside.
A chill moves over his skin. It steals the air from his lungs and halts his heart.
She’s gone. She’s left.
He twists his head, pressing his forehead against the door and letting his eyes shut.
Well, he’s finally landed and there’s no Jules to catch him. A shiver wracks his body as he drops not into calm ocean waters, but into iciness. Choppy seas, a roiling vastness of feelings that have been waiting for him for days. Weeks. Months. He’s caught in the white-water of his past and he’s flailing.
Time hovers as he stays pressed to the door, body shivering sporadically, processing emotions he’s been keeping at bay and barely started letting in this week with encouragement from Carrie and Chloe, Matteo, Jules. Letting these feelings in hurts like getting dumped by a wave, but he submits himself to the force of his emotions until he resurfaces, shaky and breathless. Alone.
He isn’t sure how long passes before his phone buzzes in his pocket.
Exhaling, Cameron levers himself from the door, feeling his bones ache. He’s got new texts from Matteo and Chloe. And a direct Instagram message from BookyBraden.
In self-flagellation at its finest—because why not make himself feel that much worse—Cameron opens Braden’s message. He reads it without taking the words in until his third time through.
BookyBraden: If it makes any difference coming from me, you’re a great marketing manager. Intelligent and perceptive. If your presentation at the conference was meant for Cable’s benefit, then thanks. It’ll help us launch book 2.
BookyBraden: Plus. So you know I meant my apology. My friend at Lin & Luther says their senior marketing manager is thinking about taking long service leave. They’ll be looking for someone to temp the role. I know you always wanted to work for them.
Cameron closes the app without replying. The news of a potential job in his dream company in Sydney should make him want to run around the block, but all he feels is a hollowness in his chest.
Because it’s clear now, standing in the corridor where everything intersects—outside Jules’s room, where Braden confronted him twice—that since Braden and Jules are different women with different motivations, then he’s the common denominator.
