Panting, he collapsed onto the bed beside me, pulling me into him so my head rested on his chest. His heart was pounding. I waited ‘til he had gotten his breath back to talk to him, running my fingers over his chest. Yeah, he was back, but for how long?
"Are you going back?" I asked.
"I have to, to get my stuff, but no. After that, I'm staying."
"Does that mean you're coming back to work?"
"Work and other stuff too," he said. His arm tightened around me a little as he said that. I raised my head off his chest so I could look at him.
"I'm happy that you're here," I said.
"I am too, baby," he said, brushing my hair back behind my ear. He kissed my head as I rested it back on his chest. I hadn't been looking, but I'd found Cameron. It wasn't hasty or misplaced. It was right, and it felt good. He had made his choice and picked me. I couldn’t deny the slight pride that came with that. He spent the night. After we made love a second time, we emerged to finally feed ourselves.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Cameron
I had only left Natalie's house twice over the weekend, the first being back to the cabin to move all my stuff into my parents' house. I had thought about it and decided not to take my place in Provo off the market. I wanted to be close to Natalie, and I could still do that from Holladay. My parents had built their home with their family in mind. I hadn't been in enough of a hurry to introduce them to any grandkids, but I felt that if that was in the cards for me, I wanted to do that in the family home.
Natalie had come with me, and it had been a little painful bringing her to my parents' house without any parents she could meet. My father had known her, which comforted me a little. I wanted to think that he liked her too since apparently, he had talked to her and asked her to help him speak to me about taking over the company. She had told me the story as she helped me go through my parents' stuff at the house. All my mom's jewelry, their art, clothes, cars, some of it had to go. Not all of it; I didn't think I'd be able to say goodbye to everything, but some of it definitely would have been better going to someone who could use it.
We had been in the great room downstairs; I had been giving Natalie a tour of the place. She loved it. It was starkly different from the interior decoration of her home, but she loved looking at all the collections my parents owned: their antiques, the china, the furniture, and the books; I felt a little proud showing it all to her. It had become mine though tragedy, but it made me think, recklessly that she wouldn't mind that much living there with me. I wasn't going to ask her, of course. Not yet, but it made me hopeful for a time that I maybe could.
There was a family portrait on the wall of the three of us with portraits of the extended family covering the rest of the wall, all the way back to my great-great-grandfather and his family who had emigrated from Scotland. She told me that he had come to her and asked her to talk to me for him.
"What had he expected you to say?" I had asked her.
"I don't know. He kept talking about you and me being peers, almost the same age and what not so maybe my opinion would be easier to swallow for you than his."
"I guess he was kind of right?"
"I don't know. I think he overestimated how much clout anything I say has with you."
"I think he might have seen something I hadn't," I had told her.
I would never get to introduce my parents to another woman again, and being with Natalie after a while of not being involved with anyone, that sucked. I was proud of Natalie. A corporate lawyer as a girlfriend who looked like that? Hell yeah, I was proud, but there was this loss that I didn't think I'd be able to get over. This feeling that I could have listened to my mom's nagging and done the wife and kids thing early enough for them to have gotten to see. On the other hand. I knew they wouldn't have wanted me to rush into anything and end up unhappy, so it was a weird place to be.
The second place I had gone, without Natalie that time, had been the cemetery where my parents were buried. I had been back since the funeral, but it had felt necessary to visit them since once again, things were changing for me. I was back and staying this time. All the shit they had tried to drum into me for the past almost thirty years had finally crystallized. Better late than never, I guessed. I was here now, and since this had been the destination all along, I was going to chalk the bumps in the road up to lessons learned.
Natalie spent the night with me at my parents’ place Sunday night so we could go to work together Monday morning. The staff at the house had been happy to hear that there would be someone living there again, and honestly, I had, too. The house was big, and the grounds were bigger; I didn't need all that space to myself, but it gave me that solitude I sometimes craved without being totally out of the way in isolation. I had been in enough relationships to know that it was like being on drugs when everything was new and fresh. The possibilities felt infinite. I knew how easy it was to get carried away thinking about Natalie, but it didn't feel like a fantasy with her. Maybe one day, I'd fill the house up so it wasn't just me and the staff, and I could say that if that future was for me, I could see myself sharing it with Natalie.
In the whirlwind of the past weeks, I felt level again. Walking into work with Natalie, I realized that not everyone felt the same way. It took forever to
get from the ground floor lobby up to the top floor because there had apparently been more questions about me than anyone had been available to answer.
"We have to talk to Brett," Natalie said, as we came out of the elevator. We walked fast to discourage anyone slowing us down to talk to me.
"Have you talked to him this weekend?"
"No. Nothing," she said. So he doesn't know I'm back yet, I thought. How would he react to that? I wanted to say well, but I had pretty much hung the guy out to dry while I ran away to a mountain sanctuary with no way of anyone contacting me. If him seeing me again was the catalyst that made him walk out the door, then I couldn't be mad about it or even blame him. We went to his office and found out from Hope, who had stayed on and been assisting him after my dad's death, that he was heading a stockholder meeting.
"I didn't realize it would all happen so fast," Natalie said as we made our way to the conference room where the meeting was already in progress. "I don't have to be here for this, right?"
"The hell you don't," I said, taking her hand before she got any ideas. I pushed the door open, and we walked in without knocking. Brett was standing at the head of the table. Four men, vaguely familiar but whom I wouldn't be able to name if my life depended on it, were around the table with two others I had never seen. I got to see the exact moment when everyone realized what was happening.
"Gentlemen," I said when nobody else said anything.
"Cameron." Brett looked... he looked good. I mean he looked the same. It had only been a few weeks, so I wasn't sure what I had been expecting exactly. What I was getting was nothing. He recovered from his lapse and quickly turned back to the men, introducing me. I reluctantly let go of Natalie's hand when she pulled it out of my grasp. It wasn't the time or the place. I had been away from work for a long time, and if everything I had heard was true, none of the men around that table had a very high opinion of me.