Page 63 of Brenna, Brat

“Which other rooms are available?” Campbell asked. He, apparently, didn’t want to open every door to do the meet-and-greet, and luckily, Dion already had the answer.

“That one,” he said, pointing.

Well, there was a problem, which we confirmed by knocking on all the doors again. Due to the over-abundance of guests, there really wasn’t enough space. There were two rooms available for the three of us, two rooms and two beds total.

“I can bunk with Dion,” Campbell told me.

“Sure, I don’t mind sharing,” Dion said. “I snore, and I kick. Also, I may sleepwalk, but that hasn’t been confirmed. And I need a lot of snacks at night, and water, and I use the bathroom more than other people. So I’ve been told.”

Between those things and Campbell talking in his sleep, neither of them would get any rest. And we were here for him to relax and unwind, not get kicked and hear toilets flushing all night. “I don’t care if you and I share,” I announced to our host.

“We were fine after the wedding,” he recalled.

“It was fine,” I agreed, and went into the remaining bedroom. I may have looked calm and stoic, but inside, I was wondering how I could do this. It was bad enough to be close to him and not touch him, not kiss him and do all the other things I’d been imagining—but to be in the same bed and not do them? And it was humiliating to know that he would be lying next to me and not thinking about anything except sleep. Like the men who had come before him, he just wasn’t interested.

The first thing for me to do was to stop focusing on the bed situation, something that I couldn’t immediately change, and the next was to clean up the shared living spaces, which needed immediate changes. Campbell and I accomplished that with Dion’s assistance—yes, Dion. He was remarkably helpful and that shocked me enough that I found myself standing stock-still and staring, several times, as he performed mundane tasks like wiping the counters without whining and taking out a bag of overflowing trash without complaint.

“I also didn’t invite you here to clean,” Campbell told me, but I said again that I didn’t care. I really didn’t, except that it made me angry how Carrington and her posse had treated a beautiful home. Yes, the rug in the living room was slightly undersized and no, I wouldn’t have chosen that particular hardware for the kitchen cabinetry, but there was no reason to mistreat everything.

The women who had caused the damage wandered through, singly and in small bunches, and they said hello to Campbell, eyed Dion, and ignored me before heading toward the beach. They certainly didn’t say anything about how the condition of the residence had improved since we’d been working on it, so I let them know that the words they should have said were “looks great” and especially “thank you!” They ignored that, too.

“Do your sister and her friends always act like this? So thoughtless?” I asked as I picked up a handful of large pills, ones that wouldn’t have fit in the birth control case. I didn’t care what they were and how valuable Dion claimed they might have been. They were going in the trash.

“Yes,” Campbell answered. “Yes, this is exactly how they act, and this is how our parents act, too. It’s like they can do anything they want and they don’t give a shit about the people who come after to fix it.”

Like, they could commit fraud and not even blink at the damage they caused, I thought, but I didn’t say that part aloud. He always defended Carrington, and I would have done the same thing for someone in my family. Except, in private I would have given them a piece of my mind. Maybe something neededto happen to make him mad enough to do that, like striking a match or like throwing a firebomb into a pile of rags and flammable chemicals.

Their argument did happen later that same night, but I wasn’t sure what sparked it. The three of us, Campbell, Dion, and I, first went out to get dinner. Dion’s stomach was calm enough to eat because he’d insisted on sitting in the front seat, yelling, “Shotgun!” and pushing me out of the way just like he was one of my actual siblings. He took down three burgers, a side of fries, and a chocolate shake while I picked at my meal and thought about myself on the beach the next day, wearing my bikini.

Campbell was unnaturally quiet throughout the dinner and also as he took us on a ride to show us around. It was as dark as I remembered from when I’d visited this area before with my family, without the lights of the city and with only the moon above us. Up here, that had always seemed bigger.

Dion was entranced. “I love it,” he kept repeating. “The air smells so good!”

Campbell didn’t say much on the way back to his vacation house, either. Then he stayed inside, explaining that he needed to talk to his sister, but Dion and I went out to sit on the raised deck, admiring the moonlight view of the water and getting more of that fresh air. We chatted for a while, mostly gossiping about the girls that he had intruded on while he’d searched for his bedroom, but suddenly we heard shouting. It was Campbell, and I’d never known him to raise his voice like that. He sounded furious.

“Whoa,” Dion said, his eyes wide. “What’s happening?” We stared at each other for another moment and then in silent consensus, we went inside in order to eavesdrop better.

“Treat her well or you’ll deal with me, and she’s no pushover either!” Campbell yelled. They had gone into what he’d said what his dad’s office and closed the door, but the words were perfectly clear outside it. “What are you doing, Carington? You came up here without letting anyone know and you invited those same women. You know I think that they’re—”

She cut him off, so we didn’t get to hear his opinion of her friends. I felt that it couldn’t have been good because Carrington immediately jumped in to defend them. “Fuck you, Campbell! I’m lucky that they’re even talking to me after everything that happened!”

“They’re only talking to you because they’re using you for a vacation party pad.”

“No, they’re my friends! You know, all of this is your fault, right?” she asked him. “Our family wouldn’t be in this position if it weren’t for you!”

Uh, no. If any law enforcement ears happened to be listening, I wanted to make it clear that Campbell had nothing to do with any illegal activity. I opened my mouth to yell that, but they made the point for me.

“You weren’t in on the fraud, but you knew what Dad was capable of!” she told him.

“I had no idea at all that he was a criminal, not like this,” he said. His voice was lower, but Dion and I could still understand sincewe had crept forward several paces and leaned our heads toward the door. We definitely heard him add, “I didn’t know, but I think that I should have.”

“Yeah, you should have been the one watching! You should have been smart enough to see! This should never have gotten so bad. We could have hushed it up—”

“Hushed it up? It’s a hundred sixty million dollars, Carrington. There’s no escaping or pretending when that much is on the line.”

“We could have handled it better. It’s so fucking awful, all of it.” She sounded disgusted, and also sad.

There was a short silence, then even more quietly, he said, “It’s been hard how you stopped talking to me.”

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