up, honey, I’m not gonna last.”
Needless to say, I kept it up. And he sure as hell didn’t last.
Okay, maybe I was some type of nympho. Or, maybe I’d just been sex starved for a long time. Good grief. No need to trundle someone off to sex therapy yet.
I held up the bag of food and set it on his desk. “Delivery. I take tips and I don’t have change for any big bills.”
He chuckled. “I didn’t expect to see you today.”
I bet. He was methodically spacing out our time together, and I was trying to play by his rules. Some days it took everything in me not to just show up at his front door. My ideas for excuses ran the gamut from unoriginal to criminal—borrowing a cup of sugar to pilfering his mail—so I could pretend they delivered it to the wrong house. In the end, I did nothing. I had no choice but to let him set the pace. This was his show, and he wasn’t afraid to let me know it.
“Where’s Kona?” I asked.
“She’s been temporarily banned.” He made a face. “She tried to play with Bailey’s foster squirrels. It wasn’t like she was trying to eat them or anything. But to hear Bailey tell it, Kona was all but sprinkling them with lemon pepper.”
I laughed. “Not my Kona.”
“Exactly.”
Had his eyes gotten greener since the last time I saw him? Was that even possible? They were a little red-rimmed, though, and I had a feeling it wasn’t from lack of sleep. The tip of his nose was a little pink as well.
“What’s wrong?” I asked quietly.
He didn’t look surprised because he knew me as well as I knew him. If there was something wrong with me, he’d know it with just a look, too. “It’s just been—”
“One of those days,” I said dryly. “I heard. Don’t bullshit me, Cam.” Then it hit me. “It was a black-coat day, wasn’t it?”
He gave me a short nod, and I felt his pain in my heart. He called them that because euthanasia was always the hardest thing for him to handle.
“I had to put down a long-time patient of mine. Socks, the cat. His owner, Tessa, was devastated. She’s had him since she was a kid.” He sighed, running both hands down his face. “All these years in practice, and it’s still the hardest thing.”
His stepmother, with a wealth of experience under her belt, had told him that it was the kindest thing they could do as veterinarians, and they’d fallen out for a week. Eventually, he came around to her way of thinking, but I knew he still struggled with it. Someone with a heart as big as Cam’s always would.
I hesitated before coming closer because I wasn’t sure where physical comfort fell on his taboo list. Then I decided I didn’t give a fuck. I had to touch him right then. I took both of his hands in mine.
“You remember what you told me about euthanasia. Sometimes doing the best thing is the hardest thing.” I rubbed the back of his hands with my thumbs. “It allows you to focus on the quality of life. They don’t have to suffer like we do.”
“You remember that?”
I remember everything.
I sidestepped the question. “How old was Socks?”
“Fifteen. And Tessa didn’t name him Socks because he had white paws or anything like that. He got his name because he kept stealing her socks.”
I chuckled. “What the hell was he doing with all those socks?”
“Hell if I know. He would hide them in the couch cushions and shit. He was the funniest little cat.” Cameron looked vaguely embarrassed. “Look at me carrying on. I have a roomful of patients waiting.”
I didn’t bother to address that nonsense. “It brings you back to Bear, doesn’t it?”
He smiled faintly. “A little bit.”
“I should’ve been there for you when that happened.” I should’ve been there for a lot of things. “I’m sorry.”
“This isn’t about that.”
“Cam—”
“I don’t want to go there, Journey.” His voice was serious as he pulled his hands out of my grasp. I felt the loss immediately. “I mean it.”
Of course he didn’t want to go there. Because there included talking about our feelings, and the past, and we’d said we wouldn’t do that. There meant going beyond the boundaries of just having sex into the realm of talking about something that mattered. There meant talking about a future between us, not just the right now.
To go there, I’d have to break past this