Page 37 of Feels Like Coming Home

“…in love with you.” She looked at me, her eyes wide and her lips pursed together like a fish. I hate when she made this face at me, it made me feel like a child.

I rolled my eyes at her and picked up my laptop, walking away towards the office but she continued to follow me.

“We need to get to work. It’s already almost eleven and we still need to go grocery shopping for food so we don’t spend all our money on takeout.” I took a seat at the long, white-washed desk and opened our conference planning spreadsheet on my computer. Piper planted her hand in front of my laptop, cutting me off from doing any work. I looked up at her where she stood next to my chair, her other hand on her hip.

“Hays, don’t you think we need to talk about this? Camden, CAM, the boy who you were supposedly in love with all throughout high school and our freshman year in college ishere. To check on you. To make sure you’re okay. Don’t you think that’s something worth talking about?”

She started pacing around the room in circles as she spoke. “I mean, did youseehis muscles, oh my god! He’s a giant tool for treating you how he did, but holy shit, would I let him catch me if I fell out of a window. How are you not the least bit interested in exploring this?” Her words came out excited and I could tell she was getting riled up.

It was all too much for me though, and I snapped.

“I don’t wanna talk about it, Piper. Just drop it, okay?!” Her face fell at my words, and I watched as her shoulders shrank.

Sucking on her bottom lip, she walked out of the room for a moment and returned quickly with a fresh notepad, a pen, and her laptop at the bottom of a stack of papers. She pulled up a chair across from me, opened her laptop, and started to write things down on the notepad. I could tell her feelings were hurt and I felt bad for shutting her down. She was only trying to be excited for me.

It was just too much to handle right now with losing Connor and now suddenly Cam returning to my life. I shouldn’t have snapped at Piper though; she was only trying to be my friend. I reached across the desk and gave her right index finger a squeeze, our silent signal to say that we were sorry.

“It’s just too much to talk about right now,” I said quietly, chewing on my bottom lip.

She nodded her head, not needing to say anything else. She understood. Best friends like Piper always understood.

“Wanna talk about the seating arrangements?” she asked, pulling out a piece of paper with a million little squares and circles on it.

I smiled and for once, found comfort in her incessant need to have everything written down on paper. The predictability of the habit was comforting.

Piper and I worked on conference plans for a few hours before deciding to take a break to make a grocery list for the food we desperately needed. Thankfully for me, Piper loved to cook, so she handled all the meal planning for the week while I made sure we had enough easy foods on the list to grab and go.

Connor always made sure I was fed because I despised cooking. If it wasn’t something I could make in a toaster or a microwave, I wasn’t making it. He loved cooking though and would always bring me lunch when he worked from home. A wave of grief hit me as I thought about our lunchtime routines, and I had to blink away the tears that pricked my eyelids. Piper caught on to my energy shift and knew something was up, so she offered to go do the shopping for us so I could stay home.

Once she left, I made myself some coffee with what had been left behind by previous renters and took my mug out to the back porch. I’ve grown to love coming out here to sit on the porch swing that faced the water. I curled my feet under myself and held the mug in my hands as if it were a lifeline. That if I let it go, I would completely drift off into a sea of nothingness.

Looking out at the ocean, I started to think about my life and how I had ended up where I am today.

Up until six months ago, I’d had it all.

A business that I loved and built on my own, a house that felt like home, and a happy marriage to a man I was obsessed with.

Now?

Well now, I had lost one of those things and none of the other stuff seemed to matter that much. Now, I was sitting on the back porch of a beach house I rented because my therapist told me I needed to get out more and because my house was making me feel like it was slowly trying to suffocate me.

And then there was the Cam thing.

The ‘Cam thing’ being the fully grown Camden Johnson tracking me down and following me to a known-by-no-one beach town just to see if I was okay. Okay? Am I okay? My gut reaction told me no, but when Cam was around, I almost felt human again. It almost felt as if the giant hole inside me was starting to be filled in again, but with soil instead of cement, allowing for new and beautiful things to grow from it.

I shifted where I sat because of the nagging sense of guilt and shame that was growing inside of me. Ishouldn’tfeel this way so quickly after losing Connor—it’s not right. If I did, it would mean that I didn’t love him enough while he was around, when I did. I loved him with my whole self.

Thinking back to Cam, and how he came here to check on me, caused other feelings to stir inside of me.

The more I thought about him, the more an internal heat I hadn’t felt in months started to grow. Suddenly, the feeling of Cam’s strong arms around me was front and center in my mind from when I ran into him today at Coastal Brews. I hadn’t meant to slam into him like I did, but when it happened and my hands touched his torso to catch myself, I felt every single one of his abs through his shirt.

And his muscles—oh my god, his muscles.I would never tell Piper this, but she was right when she said it would be okay if he caught you when you fell.

The thing that got me the most though were his eyes; his deep, emerald green eyes that I could see even with my eyes closed. The eyes that I would look for in the hallways, in the cafeteria, and that one sacred night where everything finally fell into place until Cam shattered it to pieces. I was almost mad thinking about that night until the image of Cam’s cocky smile flashed in my mind.

Then I was just warm all over and I suddenly needed to put my mug down.

I sat outsideon the porch, sipping my coffee and letting my mind bounce from one thought to another like a super bouncy ball until I heard the front door open and Piper call out to me from the entryway. We tag-teamed carrying in the groceries and were starting to find a home for everything when Piper locked her eyes on me. She watched as I put the milk away in the fridge and started to pull the salad from the grocery bag.

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