Reclaim - Aly Martinez Page 0,97
have a girlfriend, Nora.”
“What? Yes, you do.”
His brows popped up. “You know something I don’t?”
“You told me last night you have a girlfriend.”
“Uh, no. I told you I wasn’t available. You assumed I had a girlfriend and I didn’t correct you. Big difference.”
For the way my jaw dropped, I probably looked like Wile E. Coyote. “So you lied to me instead of just telling me you weren’t interested.”
“No. I told you the truth. If I had told you I wasn’t interested, it would have been a lie.”
I prided myself in being a smart woman. Growing up the way I had, I’d been a critical thinker since I’d exited the womb. But I could honestly say I had not one fucking idea what the hell Camden was talking about.
“That makes zero sense.”
“Says the person who clearly hasn’t spent five years waiting for the woman they love to actually show up or reach out.”
“What?” I gasped, the pain obvious even to my own ears.
He waved me off. “Wipe that look off your face. It’s fine. I’m not trying to make this a big deal. It’s a self-preservation thing. You’re gorgeous. Of course I’m interested, but I can’t go down this road with you again, knowing it only leads in one direction. We’re friends. I’ve accepted it. It’s not like I’m sitting around, beating myself up over it anymore.”
I shot to my feet. “Oh, so it’s just me, then?”
His whole body blanched. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“I cried myself to sleep last night because I finally got a chance to see you again and I thought you were already taken.”
It was the wrong thing to say.
So, so, so the wrong thing to say.
“You finally got the chance?” he snapped, and from the way it sounded, so did his patience. “You’ve had five years of chances to see me. Every fucking day has been a chance for you to see me. But you took none of them.”
What in the actual fuck was happening?
Camden did not have a girlfriend.
Camden was interested.
Yet Camden was currently yelling at me because I hadn’t reached out to him in five years.
I cocked my head to the side. “Oh, I’m sorry. I must have missed all five years' worth of phone calls where you took the chance to see me.”
“I was giving you space. The last thing you told me was you were working on yourself and healing your head and your heart. You said you were too selfish to let me off your hook. Well, guess what? I fucking suffocated on the hook.”
“You told me not to let you go!”
“Because I thought you’d come back!” He thrust a hand into the top of his hair, his chest heaving. He let out a loud groan and tipped his head back to stare at the ceiling. “Maybe I was just young and dumb, but when you left that day, I thought it was temporary. I loved you. You loved me. The timing was wrong. I understood. We both needed to get our shit taken care of so we could be together. But I thought we were the end game, Nora.”
“We are,” I breathed, reaching out to rest a hand on his chest, but he backed away.
“When?” he thundered, staring me right in the eye, the most agonizing heartbreak carved into his face. “Five years of my life have passed by without you. I graduated from college, law school, started a career, celebrated birthdays and holidays. I went to weddings and watched my friends vow to spend forever with the ones they loved. I took up running, Nora. Come to find out I actually love it. For two years, I gave up meat. Just cold turkey became a vegetarian. Then, on year three, I remembered I really fucking love steak, so that flew out the window. I watched movies and read books I loved and had a six-month showdown with my neighbor because they always vacuumed at three in the morning and it drove me insane. And you weren’t there for any of it.”
My nose stung, and tears welled in my eyes. “I was trying get better for you—for us. I’m still trying to get there.”
“And that’s the problem. You think that a there exists, Nora. Some mythical final destination where we can be together. Meanwhile, our entire lives are passing us by.”
I wrung my hands in front of me. “You deserve someone who’s perfect, Cam.”
“Perfect doesn’t exist! What I deserve is someone who wants to be with me.