Chapter Ten - Passionate Provolone

"NOT THAT I'M concerned, but how much farther until we reach your destination?" Cam tightens his hold on my arm and peers around the buildings as if he's hunting for a sign of the sun.

While it's still dark out, the lights are bright enough to mimic dawn. I point across the street already filling with people on their way to work. "It's just past this park."

On our walk, Cam would peer up at the buildings and tell me what business used to be there. The Apple store in particular confused him. "An entire shop devoted to a single fruit? What will they think of next?"

As we reach the other side of the road, I turn to travel around the dark, scary woods, but Cam pauses. "Why don't we take a little shortcut? I assume your room is in one of those glittering buildings past the trees?"

I nod but grit my teeth as he pulls me past a sign saying the park is closed from sundown to sunup. What if someone catches us? What if the cops try to arrest a man who turns into cheese in the jail cell?

What if they put Cam in an evidence bin, and the cops get hungry and, they slice him up for sandwiches because it's the Lieutenant's birthday?

Okay, that might be a stretch.

"I'm glad you're here," I say, flinching as each syllable hits a tree that could be hiding a murderer. I've been here nearly a week and I still have all of my organs. It seems like it's just a matter of time before I lose my tonsils or pancreas.

"And I am delighted to be by your side," Cam says. "Though, if I may confess, I originally believed you would be sleeping in the old apartment atop the shop."

"Oh." God, that makes sense. Why would someone like him waste his time walking me home? Stupid. "I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to—"

"Please." He places a finger on my flustering lips. "I am not worthy of your sorrow. Besides, it is delightful to canvas the city streets and escape those ever-confining walls."

We wind up on a trail circling a large pond. Two white swans bob on the surface, drying the city orders as they hunt for an early breakfast. "Can you not leave the store?" I ask.

"No. There was a time when Cheddy and I would make a loop around the slumbering city, perhaps happen upon a night market that'd sprung up unexpectedly."

"What about Brie?"

"Oh, he'd toddle along, but at the sight of a long spine and fine fluttering pages, he was off. We wouldn't find him until it was nearing dawn usually spent upon a pile of pleasing literature."

I smile at the idea of Brie tumbling face-first into a mess of books.

"But for now we are ‘quarantined' according to the killjoy in pelo azul. Alas, no sanctioned long strolls down a winding road with a beautiful woman on my arm on his watch."

I gulp hard at not just his words, but the way he says them, and how he stares at me like there's no one else in the world. My heart can't take it. "Please…" I whisper, my teeth chattering. "Don't do that."

Cam shoots up rod straight. "Do what?"

"Flatter me. It's… I get it. You…you were trapped for a while, a long while. There's no one else around. You're killing time until—"

All of the words I'd kept clenched on my tongue for the past week spill out. The only thing that can stop them is a finger against my lips. "Does it bother you that I say you are beautiful?"

I fight to focus on him and his worrying face, but my eyes keep trying to cross to see his finger just below my nose. Even with him having a single eye and no nose, he's still Netflix-hero handsome. Meanwhile, I'm… "Yes," I confess.

I thought it'd free him. He wouldn't have to keep at this game of buttering me up. He could find someone men actually want instead of a bucket of stale popcorn with gum on the bottom. But Cam's cocksure smile bows into a gut punch of a frown. I feel awful.

"It's not you. I mean… I know it's a cliché, but it isn't. It's—"

"You have a beau, of course. A, no-doubt, mountain of a man prone to fits of jealousy."

Sure. Why not? I've got a huge boyfriend, a pack of ‘em, waiting for me back home. And they're all supermodel doctors who foster puppies on the side.

I want to laugh at the absurd idea, but Cam's silence is deafening. He doesn't release my arm as we cross a bridge arcing over the pond, though his touch has lightened. Instead of peering over at me, he's looking up at the night sky void of stars.

My heart pounds harder, his pain chewing my brain into tiny pieces. I don't do well when others around me are hurt. It's my job to help them. Screwing my eyes up tight, I say, "I'm not the girl you pick."

"What?" He jerks on his feet as we both freeze in our tracks.

"I'm not that girl. I'm not beautiful. I'm awkward, and quiet, and weird. I'm at the back of the crowd, at the end of the table, out of the circle. Only invited because…because they feel sorry for me. I don't get the best friend necklace, the promposal, the ring."

Oh fuck, am I crying? I don't want to check. That'll give me away. Hopefully, the darkness hides the tracks. Swallowing down the tears in my voice, I face him. "I'm not the girl people…want."

Cam's face scrunches in thought. "I don't understand what half of those things are, but I am disheartened to hear you have suffered such fools who fell into your path." He cups his palm to my cheek and I hope I don't burn it with my awkward blushing.

"Violette, you are more striking than your namesake. These past few days without your cheery presence have been a dark chasm in my life. I do not regret drenching you in my flirtatious compliments, and I hate that I cannot give you enough to make up for the wounds the world's caused you."

I laugh and cry at once, then slap a hand over my mouth to keep more from coming out. "Really?" I eke out from below my palm.

Cam smiles patiently and pulls away my hand. "If I were lying, would I have brought you to a romantic bridge over an indigo pond in order to do this?"

Do what?

His fingers slip back, teasing my hair, before they fall flush to my skin. Cam guides my hand to his hip and leaves it there so he can curl a tendril of pink hair behind my ear. "Miss Violette." He cups under my chin, lifting my face until all I can see are his dark eyes glittering with stars. "You are beautiful."

My entire body quakes in anticipation and a partial urge to leap into the pond full of swan poop. But the second my lips can sense his, they still. I close my eyes so tight my forehead hurts and lean up.

First kisses are supposed to be awkward. All those lips, and noses, and tongues, and teeth trying to figure out where they go without biting something. But as Cam teases my hair at the nape of my neck and circles his thumb over my chin, I fall into paradise.

Fireworks. Those huge, expensive ones they shoot off at ballparks explode in my eyes. My fingers tighten around his hip, somehow locking around his belt loop as I try to pull him in. The way his bottom lip teases while his juicy top one flutters between both of mine is magnifuckingcent.

"Wowza."

Cam breaks the kiss and I moan at the loss. Opening my eyes, I find a laugh on his pink, flushed lips and it hits me. "Did I just say…? Oh, goodness."

"A compliment of the highest order. Now, shall I accompany you to your room?"

"Yeah. Yes. We should… We should hurry."

He pats my hand as I pick up the pace alongside him. "The sweetest words I've ever heard."

It doesn't take us long to get through the lobby, up the elevator, and to my door. "This is me," I say, doing my best to unlock it without beaming ‘I'm gonna fuck this guy' energy down the hall. Yeah, it's not working.

Cringing, I shove it open and rush inside to drop my bag. Cam strolls in with his impossible, nonchalant swagger. "Not quite the penthouse suite." He eyes up the old box TV on a crumbling dresser and the water stain on the ceiling. "Ah, but here is all that matters." Cam extends his hand toward the bed that hasn't been slept in for nearly twenty-four hours.

I shove the door closed and slide in the chain. Then I touch the deadlock.

They'll slit your throat if you don't do it. Pull out your intestines. Use your lungs as pool floaties.

The gremlin's louder than ever. With my back turned to Cam, I shift the lock fast back and forth until hitting number five. Whew, that'll keep us safe.

"Better?" he asks.

I laugh, about to tell him that it worked when I glance over my shoulder. Unforgiving motel light shimmies down his naked chest. Tight. Taut. Ooh, I want to squeeze those so bad.

I stare directly at his hips, and my brain shorts out. I want to trail down that deadly V and nibble on his hip.

Okay. Calm down. One step at a time.

Smiling, I try to glide over to him sexily. The first step works well, my hips rolling like an ocean. Then I take the second and slam my toe into a table leg. Damn it.

Cam chuckles. In one fell move, he swoops me up into his arms and carries me to the bed. "Allow me."

I fall to my knees on the mattress and he joins me, extending his legs wide as he reaches for my cheek. I part my lips in anticipation of another mind-bending kiss.

"First, if you don't mind…" Cam toys with the knotted twine around my waist.

"Oh, yeah. Of course." I'm wearing Roq's shirt. That's gotta be awkward. I tug on the twine, certain it'll give up but the knot only tightens. "This is, um... It's tricky." I try the other side, but it too tightens the knot.

"If I may." Cam caresses a hand across my belly. I hold my breath, uncertain what he's going to do. He grips the twine and, with just his hands, rips it in half. My makeshift belt tumbles away.

"My delightful little pixie," Cam whispers in my ear. He doesn't wrench the shirt off, but cups around my waist. "We shall make sweet, filthy love until your bones turn to jelly. Then once more for luck." As luck leaves his mouth, he bites my earlobe and I shiver. At the same time, he slides his hands up my chest until they rest just below my tits.

"Part those succulent lips for me." Cam brushes his nose against my cheek. I close my eyes tight and lean forward to kiss him.

My body's buzzing in anticipation of his hands curling over my breasts, of his tongue parting through my mouth, of his knee widening my thighs. A second passes, then two more. When I reach fifteen, I risk a peek.

Instead of a handsome man about to tear my clothes off, a wheel of Camembert sits on the bed beside me. Dawn's light streams through the window for one final knife to my gut.

Sighing, I lean back and have to laugh.

"This is what I get for taking a cheese man to bed."