Becoming His Ch. 02

Then -- nothing.

She sucked in her breath, coming back to herself. The cherry blossom smell that had permeated the car for several minutes was fading, and with it her memories, like petals scattered by the wind. She glanced at Cameron, unsure if he had spoken during her extended silence.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I spaced out, didn't I?"

"It's all right," he said, casting her a single look. "It's painful for you, I can tell."

They were on the highway now, but he hadn't put the windows back up. Wind whipped in, stirring her hair off her neck. She had curled it for the occasion, something she rarely did, and now it was falling back into its usual limp waves.

"About what we were talking about earlier," Cameron said, breaking the silence. It had been four or five minutes. He exited the highway, and the car swung down the ramp onto a main road through the side of town opposite where Lila lived. "I broke it off with Jennifer. She didn't take it well, but it's for the best. I don't intend to see anyone else for the time being."

"Is that normal for you?" Lila inquired timidly.

"No," he said, his tone blunt.

He left it at that, and she didn't dare question him further. It seemed like a prickly point, and she could pretty well understand why -- what kind of certified bachelor would be pleased to give up his usual lifestyle to court an inexperienced teenage girl? She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes and relived her first kiss.

When he pulled into the same parking lot where they'd first practiced driving a week ago, she would have asked him to kiss her again, there and then, if it hadn't struck her as an unladylike request to make. Instead she sat in the dark and waited for him to let her out, then went around and took the driver's seat. He waited while she adjusted the chair herself this time before handing her the keys.

"She's all yours, princess," he said.

"Why do you call me that?" Lila blurted out, turning the key in the ignition. The car came back to life.

He shrugged.

"You don't think it fits?"

"I don't know," she said, guarding herself. "I'm not generally spoiled."

"But I spoil you, don't I?"

She blushed and forgot to put her foot down on the brake before trying to shift into drive. The shift refused to give, and she realized her mistake a moment later. Cameron was quiet beside her, letting her take things in her own time. She circled the lot a few times before he suggested attempting a long straight reverse. She completed the maneuver, bringing the car to a halt beneath some pines planted at even intervals at the edge of the lot.

He reached across and shut off the engine, and they sat for a moment in the still darkness.

"I think you're ready for the road," he said, breaking the silence. "You steer just fine, and I'm sure you'll obey traffic laws. What do you think?"

"I don't know," Lila said, still gripping the wheel. Her knuckles whitened. "Maybe."

His teeth flashed in the streetlight coming through the window. He was smiling. Then he leaned in, drawing tantalizingly nearer. At last moment she caught his wrist as his hand came to her face, perhaps in a futile and psychologically paradoxical attempt to stop him, but then she fell still. His eyes studied her face, half-lit in the darkness. She studied their reflections in the rearview mirror, reading them like a painting. His visage was dark.

"God, you don't even know what you do to me," he breathed. He pressed his lips to her jaw, his breath fluttering up her cheek.

She let out a nervous, shaky laugh, sitting completely still beneath the veil of his arms.

"What I do to you?" she blurted out. "It's what you do to me. At least you've felt this way before."

"Oh, no." He shook his head, his mouth moving against her skin. His stubble pressed against her like sandpaper, a delicious sting. "No, I've never felt this way before."

She tilted her chin up, studying his face. She was torn between two minds. Could it be true? Or was it something he said to each of his paramours in turn, to ensnare them, to make them believe they were something special? In his grasp, she felt like something special. She wondered how exactly it was that she made him feel. As for her, she felt like a train hurtling down a track at full speed.

She sank her teeth into her bottom lip. He let out a sound like a muffled groan and kissed her suddenly, sharply, harder than he had kissed her before. She thought he might suffocate her beneath the weight of his passion, and she would have happily died in his arms. His mouth moved on hers with bruising force, tasting of wine, and he insinuated the tip of his tongue between her lips, which she unconsciously parted, her body turning to jelly below her waist. If she had been standing, she would have swooned.

"I want you so bad," he breathed, tickling the shell of her ear with kisses. She giggled and tried to squirm away, but he held her fast against him. "I wish I could bring you home. But it isn't so easy."

Something like regret rose in her throat, and she pulled away for real this time, jerking herself toward the mirror. Her mother and Robert had been nasty enough to her that night. What would it have been like to abandon them to their drunken tirades and go with Cameron? Her mind ran wild with possibilities, but her heart sank. No, it couldn't be done. She couldn't burn bridges to be with this man.

"I'm sorry," she said softly, her hand creeping into his. "I need to go back. But I'll drive."

"You're brave," he said, his face shadowed.

She didn't know what he meant. But she reversed the car before taking it out of the lot. It was well past ten, and there were few other vehicles on the road. She stopped at all the stop signs and braked on yellow lights, and pulled up outside Robert's house five minutes later, her heart beating hard.

"See?" Cameron said. "You did perfect."

"Yeah," she said softly. She turned toward him. Robert's car was in the drive, so she knew that her parents had come home, but she didn't see any lights on in the house. "When will I see you again?"

He sighed, running a hand through his hair.

"Not very soon, I'm afraid," he said. "I fly to New York tomorrow for business. I won't be back until next weekend at the soonest."

Lila stared at him. After everything, the conversation, the kisses, the assurances, she didn't know how she could bear to be separated from him for more than a day, let alone a week. But it was the way of things, of course. He was a big-shot businessman. He probably traveled all the time.

Her heart sank at the thought.

"But we can text, right?" she squeaked.

"We can do more than text," Cameron said. He pressed a kiss to her cheek. "I'll call you during every spare moment. That's not to say that there will be many. But I'll do my best."

"Thank you," she breathed, and threw her arms around his neck and breathed in the smell of him. She didn't know how she would survive a week apart, not with her fragile heart, but it had to be done.

"And perhaps there will be surprises." He winked at her, drawing away. "Watch your mailbox, baby girl."

She didn't know what he meant by that, but she let him let her out of the car. She got her roses, and they went up the walk together to the front door, where she immediately tried the knob only to find it locked. Then incredulous giggles escaped her throat.

"Uh oh," she said.

"What? You have a key, don't you?" Cameron asked.

"Heck no. I don't stay out late enough to have a key. Besides, Robert doesn't trust me like that," she said, and began pressing the doorbell and hammering on the door.

"I'll call Robert. They're not going to hear, they were dead drunk," Cameron said, pulling out his phone.

The first call went to voicemail. He tried again, only to achieve the same result.

"Fuck," he said, and then glanced at her. "Pardon my French. Any back door to this place? Any alarm system?"

"There's a back door," Lila said. She led the way toward the garden gate and glanced back at the ADT flag flying on the lawn. "There's also an alarm system, but Robert never sets it. He just got it for show, to deter thieves. I'm sorry, this has probably ruined your night."

"Jesus, no. Why would you think that?" Cameron asked, looking at her as if she were crazy. He followed her through the garden gate into the backyard and up onto the raised patio. "It's not as if I had any other plans. Show me the back door."

Lila, reaching it, tried the knob, but found it similarly locked. He gave it a shake and grimaced, as if in anticipation of pain to come. She watched him strip out of his suit jacket and wrap it around hand and arm. Too late to stop him, she suddenly realized his plan. His fist smashed through the lowest pane of glass on the door, and reaching through his fingers must have found the lock, because a moment later the door swung open. The jacket hung from his arm, and drops of blood dripped onto the patio tiles and the threshold.

"You're cut!" she said.

He checked his arm and found the source of the blood, a shallow gash.

"Nothing a band-aid won't fix," he said. "Tell your stepfather he can bill me for the replacement door. It looks about ten years out of date, anyway. Careful of the glass."

She followed him inside, stepping gingerly around broken pieces in her heels, and set her roses down on the kitchen counter. Right away she saw her mother passed out on the couch; the break-in hadn't woken her. In the first floor bathroom Lila turned on the light and got alcohol prep pads and band-aids from the medicine cabinet. Cameron reached over her shoulder to grab a pair of tweezers, and she watched him extract a thin shard of glass from the cut on his forearm that she hadn't noticed before.

"Thank you," she said shakily. "You didn't need to do that for me."

"It was either that, or you would've come home with me. To Weston, not to the apartment." His tone was brusque. He swiped an alcohol prep pad across his cut and slapped a band-aid on it. "And then maybe to New York as well. But we couldn't have that, could we?"

She let the thought hang, at a loss for words. He looked at her from the doorway, his face half-lit by the bathroom light.

"I want to see your paintings," he said.

One of her hands shot up to the locket around her throat.

"My room's a mess," she said automatically. "Next time, maybe."

"Next time, for certain. So clean it up," he said, his voice seeming to hold a warning. He cast his eyes over at her mother and, certifying her asleep, turned back and took Lila by the shoulders and kissed her tenderly on the mouth. "I'll miss you, princess. Now let me help you clean up that broken glass before you go to bed, otherwise your mother might cut her feet in the morning when she wakes up."

Lila, mute, fetched the dustpan and brush and a broom from the closet, and they set to the task. It took five minutes, and then she saw him out the broken door and onto the patio. When he kissed her for the last time, she clung to him, not wanting to let go. But he gently extricated himself from her grasp, his ruined suit jacket slung over his shoulder.

"I'll be back before you know it," he said, giving her a lopsided smile.

She nodded, unable to find words, and watched him walk off into the night. Then she went back in and, kicking off her heels, hurried to the front door just in time to watch him get into his car. The headlights flicked on, and momentarily the white Mercedes pulled off the curb and away into the night. She fought tears and went back into the kitchen and filled her mother's largest vase with water for her yellow roses, roses from Cameron.

Upstairs, in the bathroom, she stared at her reflection in the mirror for a long time and decided that it was true, what she had been told about looking different after certain milestones in your life. She thought she did look different than she had before her first kiss. She had been changed in some way, indelibly marked, and she would never be the same again.

Thank you so much for reading to the end of this chapter! I hope you've enjoyed it. Please vote to let me know how I'm doing, and as always I appreciate any and all feedback in the comments! I will be getting to work on the next chapter right away, so will hopefully have it out in a timely manner. Until next time. ❤️