He shrugged. “I don’t think that would be so bad.”
“You’re probably the only man on earth who thinks that. Trust me, it’s no day at the beach.” Which made me think of our romantic moonlit walk that hadn’t actually been romantic—the “romantic” part had only been a figment of my alcohol-addled brain—and I wanted to escape. I went back to my keycard search, and it was like it didn’t want me to find it. As if it were hiding. My fingers brushed against it and I let out a sigh of relief. I inserted it into the lock and when the light turned green, I turned the handle and pushed open the door.
I stood in my doorway, facing him, ready to make a mighty speech. About how I didn’t even need him. And I didn’t like him. That despite my ovaries throwing a party every time I saw him, I did not want him to be the father of my hypothetical children.
My stomach roiled and lurched suddenly, and it was as if a bunch of warning lights went off inside me, all at once—eject! Eject! Like I was a pilot whose plane had just been shot down. One second I was a bit dizzy but relatively fine and angry, and in the next I was going to do a real-life reenactment of that scene from The Exorcist. I made a choking noise, put my hand over my mouth, and ran for the bathroom.
“Rachel? Are you okay?”
I threw open the door and knelt down in front of the toilet. I had just gotten the toilet seat up when everything that had once been inside my body started to come out of my face.
Camden turned on the light, and that made everything worse. “What can I do?” he asked, hovering behind me.
“Go away,” I told him. What did he think he was going to do? My hair was already up and I didn’t need a spectator.
He closed the door behind him and once I heard it catch, I continued to empty out my internal organs. I had one of those marathon vomiting sessions, where you kept throwing up even though you had nothing left inside you. It was like my stomach was a clown car.
When my gut stopped clenching, my throat loosened, and that nauseous feeling passed, I flushed the toilet. I brushed away the tears from my eyes, grabbed some toilet paper to wipe off my mouth, and threw it into the bowl. I closed the lid and rested my head against it, the porcelain cool and refreshing.
I knew I should get up, but I felt too weak to move.
There was a knock at the door, causing me to lift my head. He’d stayed? After I’d told him to leave? He’d just been standing there, listening to me retch over and over again?
“Are you done?” he asked.
When I didn’t answer, he opened the door and I saw a look of relief. I could feel that my face was all flushed but I didn’t know if that was from the straining I’d done while puking or the utter mortification I was currently feeling.
I must have looked like such a mess. I knew I had sounded awful.
Well, if I’d harbored any secret hopes that we might start to like each other, I’d just flushed all of those down this toilet.
“Didn’t I tell you to go away?” I asked.
“I did go away.”
“No, you’re still here.”
“I went away from the bathroom. Technically I did what you asked,” he said. “But I thought you might need me.”
“For what?”
Camden finally looked unsure of himself, a state of being he probably didn’t experience very often. “I could, I don’t know, help you get into bed.”
“I don’t need your help for that. I’m fine. I can . . .” I tried to stand up and it didn’t work because my legs gave out.
He rushed forward to catch me before I hit the ground. He hefted me up, very carefully cradling me against his chest as he carried me back into the bedroom. It was so nice. I never would have told him that, but I loved being curled up against him, relying on his strength to help me because I currently had none of my own.
It was like that same feeling I’d had when he’d held my hand—that reassurance that I was safe and everything would be fine.
He’d already pulled down the covers and laid me against the cool sheets, which felt amazing. He gently put the blankets around me once I’d settled in and then he walked out of the room.
My hazy brain thought maybe he’d finally left, but he came back into the bedroom a second later carrying a large glass of water and some aspirin. He put them on the nightstand next to me.
“You’re really dehydrated, so drink when you can,” he instructed me.
I nodded to show him I’d heard.
“One more thing,” he said, running back to the bathroom. He returned with a hand towel that he folded up. He placed it against my forehead and I realized that he’d run it under cool water and it felt amazing.