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‘Not that kind of private.’ Matteo holds a hand up. ‘But pictures of him at the beach reading a Cable book, or like, after a run with an audiobook. She never asked his permission and the traffic on them was too good for them to be taken down.’
‘That’s terrible.’ Jules cringes, putting her coffee beside her. Her stomach is too unsettled to contemplate it.
‘No shit. Cameron wasn’t comfortable with that, but he liked her, so he let it slide. Too damn giving for his own good, sometimes. One of those moments where he talked himself into being fine with something he wasn’t actually fine with.’
Jules nods slowly, foreboding creeping like spiders up her spine.
‘Then a couple of months later, me and Cameron were in a meeting room hashing out—doesn’t matter.’ He shakes his head and rests one leg over the other, gripping his calf. ‘Point is, Braden was in the room next door on the phone with someone and those walls aren’t exactly soundproof. Meant Cameron heard every word of her explaining to her friend how he wasn’t the guy you settled down with. That he was the hot guy you had fun with before looking for that other guy.’
Jules’s skin goes icy, as cold as Matteo’s voice has become. ‘I had no idea.’
‘Neither did he. So hearing the woman he was dating tell her friend they weren’t serious, that he was just a bit of fun …’ Matteo’s eyes are hard. ‘Plus she also said he was dead weight in the marketing team and his best contribution was his abs. He couldn’t talk himself into being okay with that.’
Jules’s mouth hangs open.
There aren’t words. The insensitivity. The immorality. The—
She balls her hands and presses them to her stomach. ‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Neither does he. He doesn’t talk about it,’ Matteo says needlessly. ‘I’m ninety-five per cent sure if I hadn’t been with him at the time, he wouldn’t have told me the full story of what happened.’
‘And that’s why he left Cable? He said working there wasn’t good for him. But—That’s—’
‘Yeah.’ Matteo doesn’t seem to have the words either. ‘And that’s why I think he ended the fling. He’s mixing you and Braden up. He’s trying to protect himself from getting hurt again.’
Jules stares out at the water, trying to connect what Matteo’s told her with what she’s heard from Cameron himself. It’s worse than he let on. His sisters’ concern makes so much more sense now, how they talked about him being his old self around her, and how much they worried about what being around Braden would mean for him.
Then the realisation hits.
‘Oh god. Oh god.’ She turns to Matteo, the chill moving up her fingers to her heart. ‘He’s mixing us up? But that means … He agreed to a fling with me! He’s practically been reliving that whole situation, but with full awareness he was, and I’ve been letting him. Why would he do that? Put himself in a position that’s just like what he went through with Braden?’
Matteo raises his eyebrows. ‘You need me to spell it out? He likes you, Jules, even if he was pretending he didn’t. I could see it at the welcome drinks. That’s probably why he said yes in the first place.’
‘But I never would have said yes if I’d known.’
Matteo nods, eyes losing the last of their hardness. ‘Which is why I’m trusting you with this story. Cameron goes to great lengths to make sure no one knows it. He doesn’t like people thinking poorly of him.’
Jules’s hands itch. She reaches for her cold coffee, drinking it for something to do. It doesn’t sit right in her stomach.
‘So what now?’ she asks.
He shrugs. ‘Like I said, no pressure to act, but I thought you deserved to know where he was coming from, in case that changes your perspective on things. Do you still think he meant it when he said it was just sex to him? That he’d agree to be a bit of fun to someone again if there wasn’t something more behind it?’
‘I … I don’t want to believe he meant it.’ But the hard look in his eyes when he said it to her didn’t show anything but determination. The only way to test if Matteo is right is for her to be completely honest and hope the truth of how she feels will cut through the untruths he’s convinced himself about their relationship.
Matteo nods, standing up and throwing his coffee cup into a nearby bin. ‘If you’d met Cameron before he’d been with Braden … I think things would have worked out a lot differently between you two. And if you can get Cameron to pull his head out of the sand, I think he’d see that.’
Matteo departs with a nod, leaving her sitting on the bench with a million new thoughts and feelings to process. She stares at the harbour without really seeing it. People walk past her, birds flock, a busker plays guitar further along the path, but it’s all background noise to Cameron’s voice inside her head saying, ‘there is no us’, ‘it was just sex’, ‘mixing work and relationships never works.’
At least she’s got better context for that last one now.
She drains the last of her cold coffee. The fact that she’s had a part in piling on Cameron’s insecurities makes her stomach clench uncomfortably tight until she’s worried the coffee is going to come back up.
It’s obvious what she needs to do now. She needs to tell the truth, like she’d been planning to. Tell him she wants a proper relationship, not a conference fling. She wants the entire man, flaws and vulnerabilities and all. He’s given her the confidence this week to be honest about what she wants. With him, with James, with Samantha. With herself. She can’t hold back from him any longer, not if she wants the chance to be with him, and that means laying her emotions bare and hoping Matteo was right that Cameron does want to date her, despite what he told her last night.
But even if she doesn’t believe Matteo, even if Cameron did mean what he said, that she was just sex to him—Jules’s stomach lurches and she presses a fist to her lips—she has to make it up to him. Make him understand that for her at least, he’d been more than sex the entire time. That he offers so much more to someone beyond what happens in the bedroom.
She shudders as a legion of ants appear over her entire body. He’s already broken things off with her and this could make it all that much worse, completely kill her chance at a relationship with him. But she has to do it. Even if he doesn’t take back what he said, even if they don’t end up dating, he needs to know he’s more than a bit of fun to her. He’s more than that. Period.
