He’d come close, but finally had to admit that the difference between what he could make and what Paanit had made for him was the magic that came from the experience and the person making it.
This powerful desire he felt for Josie was exactly like that. He’d spent years trying to feel for another woman what he felt for that girl he met when they were both too young.
And never came close.
His bag was at the base of the steps and he stopped beside it. How easy it would be to leave. He wanted to leave because there was no way to keep things separate with her. To keep it clean. Neat. His desire for her was a desire not just for her body—but for all of her. Her secrets and their past, who they’d been. If he stayed—with her—things were gonna get messy.
“Cameron!”
He whirled at the sound of her voice, the furious stomp of her feet.
Brace yourself, he thought. But what exactly he was bracing himself for he wasn’t sure. The sight of her, her red hair slipping out of that bun, falling in fat curls over her shoulders - her eyes narrowed, her cheeks pink -- it lit him up.
Oh, he thought. She’s so fucking amazing when she’s mad.
“I called you every day,” she said, coming to a stop a foot from him. He could see the pound of her heart right there in the fragile skin of her neck.
“For a month. I know.”
“I emailed. I messaged.”
“Everyone did.” He tried to smile. But she was not having it.
She shook her head. “Why? Why couldn’t you answer the phone? Send one text? One message from you and…”
“What?” he asked. “One message from me and what?”
“I would have moved on.”
“No.” He stepped forward, narrowing the distance between them. “One message from me and then it would have been another one. And then another. And then I’d call you some night from a hostel in who the hell knows where and you’d call me from New York and then we’d never move on. Never. I needed to cut all ties, Josie.”
She opened her mouth as if to blast him again, but Alice came shouting through the door from the kitchen.
“Cameron! Oh.” She lowered her voice. “There you are.”
He turned away from Josie, broke that connection between them, and sucked in a breath.
“Everything okay?” Alice asked, looking between them.
“Fine,” Josie snapped, and he nearly smiled. The woman with the fake smile and the eyes full of tears, those weren’t versions of Josie he was familiar with. But this version, angry and spitting fire…yeah, he knew that girl.
He loved that girl.
“I’ve got the focaccia dough rising,” Alice said.
“You want me to start assembling the lasagnas?” he asked, walking forward, eagerly ready to get away from this girl who made his skin burn and spine tingle. And made him remember…
“We’ve got some time,” Alice said. “But I need to run into town to Knapstein’s to get the turkeys and roast.”
“I’ll go,” he said.
Alice blinked. “Well, Mateo would love to see you.” She tossed the truck keys she had in her hand, and Cameron snagged them out of the air.
“And I’d love to see him.”
“You might…” Alice looked over his shoulder at Josie. “Need some help.”
“Absolutely,” Josie said, enunciating every part of that word. And he could feel her dark-eyed gaze like knives at his back.
“What about work?” he asked her, turning back around.
“It can wait.”
Alice made some kind of strangled, surprised laughing sound but swallowed it quickly.
“Let’s go,” Josie said.
The old truck smelled like a thousand school lunches and something else on top of it. Something funky.
“What is that smell?” he asked.
“Dom’s hockey stuff. Apparently, Max uses the truck to take him back and forth to practice.”
“Oh god, I’ve never been so glad not to play hockey,” he joked. She didn’t laugh.
Their breath made smoky plumes in the cold air of the truck. “I see the heater is still top notch,” he said, cranking the thing as high as it could go. Half the time the truck wouldn’t be warm until you got to you destination. “I can’t believe it’s still running,” he said to her silence, because he was a rambling fool at the moment. He put the truck in Drive and they were off down the road. Josie buckled into the passenger seat with her pink cheeks and the red knit hat she’d pulled on over her hair.
She was prickly with anger, and the perverse thing about him was…he liked it.
Sexual tension sat on the bench seat between them. Where it had waited since she turned sixteen and he could no longer pretend she was just some little kid following him around.
“Do you remember where to go?” she asked.
He nodded. Knapstein’s was the butcher in Athens who’d managed to survive all those years when no one went to a neighborhood butcher anymore, and instead picked up their meat in big cellophane-wrapped packages from Costco and marveled at the value without knowing— really—what they were eating.
Now the world wanted a bespoke butcher experience. And Mateo, like his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather before him, was there to provide it. “Do you?” he asked. “Alice said you haven’t been back in five years.”
He glanced over to see her lift her chin, her eyes on the road ahead of them.
“I remember,” she said. In the tone that said, I remember everything. And the problem was, so did he. And the tension in the truck was almost too much. And it wasn’t just the sexual tension or all the questions they were afraid to ask or the answers they were afraid to hear. He wanted to roll down the window just to breathe.
“Why?” she asked, popping the tension. “Why didn’t you ever pick up the phone? Just to let me know you were okay.”
They were doing this. Really doing it.
“I was mad.”
“At me?”
“No. God no. At Max. Alice. Myself, mostly.”
“Why?”
Oh god. He really didn’t want to talk about this. Bringing it up made it real. Made it now. And he liked all this stuff in the past.
“Because I’d waited a year, Josie, to tell you how I felt, and I let the whole night get away from me. I was sober. And older. It should have happened another way.”
She opened her mouth and he knew she was going to apologize again. And he didn’t need her being more sorry for something that he didn’t blame her for.
“And I was embarrassed,” he said before she could say anything. “And proud. And being a martyr.” He managed to smile at her very serious face, her auburn hair poking out from under that hat in the most endearing way. “I knew you would get over me.”
“You knew that, did you?”
“You were young, Jose. And beautiful and about to start school in New York. You had everything ahead of you. When I think about it now, it was ridiculous to think there was even a chance the two of us could work.”
He stopped, waiting, maybe, for her to argue. He wasn’t sure. But she turned her face away, looking out the window. And her silence said plenty. It had been ridiculous to think that what they’d felt for each other would have survived. He’d been a sixteen-year-old kid inside a twenty-two-year-old body. He’d known nothing of the world or himself. And she’d been about to set the world on fire.