You need to know that I’m not one of those people who constantly puts up gushing Facebook posts about my husband. You’ve seen those, I know you have. Probably talked shit about them to your friends.
Molly from high school, her arm around some dude named Rushton, lips smushed against his cheek, a long caption about how happy she is to be “doing life” with “this guy.”
That’s never been me.
For one, Cam doesn’t even have social media, and for another, there’s always been something about him––about us––that feels private.
Special, even.
It’s been that way from the moment we met.
You don’t expect to meet the love of your life at 25 Cent Wing Night at a college bar. Or hell, maybe you’re more optimistic than I am, and so you go to every “BOGO Beer Wednesday” and “No Cover Charge For 36C and Up This Weekend!” special that’s advertised assuming you’re going to meet the One.
Me, I just really wanted some cheap wings. I’d moved to California from Florida after three semesters of community college for the usual reason pretty girls leave small towns and head west—to be a star. Thing was, the only person I knew out there was an acquaintance from high school, Emma, and since she’d lived in San Bernardino, I’d landed there first.
Bloom where you’re planted, people like to say, but they ignore the fact that planted is sometimes just a nice way of saying stuck, and I’d definitely fallen into that category.
So I was juggling two jobs back then, waiting tables at one of those nightmare chain places that makes you wear a lot of buttons on your black apron while also spending a few afternoons every week watching a couple of kids who lived in my apartment complex. I didn’t charge their mom much, given that she was working just as hard as I was. Sometimes when I watched her come in with greasy sacks of fast food, already cold from her long drive over from the next town, I wished I were able to say, “Hey, it’s fine, you don’t need to pay me.”
But that wasn’t my life.
So I took her twenty bucks and tried to make it last, and that was why I was at Senor Pollo’s on a Thursday night when I was just twenty-one, the same night that Camden was tending bar.
I’d ordered a water—couldn’t afford wings and a beer, even when the wings were cheap—but from the way my gaze had followed a couple of pints of Stella he pulled for another table, he must’ve known what I really wanted.
A few seconds later, a frosty and perfectly poured glass was sitting in front of me, and he’d flashed me that little smile I would come to know so well, the one that could almost be a smirk on another guy. “On the house,” he’d said quietly. I’d noticed then, as he’d looked over at me, that his eyes were two different colors.
One was gray-blue, the other a clear golden brown that made me think of high-end bourbon. It’s a genetic thing, heterochromia, and because Camden was adopted, he has no idea if he got it from his mother or his father. Sometimes I wonder if any children we might have will inherit it, too, will look at me with that same patchwork gaze that always seems to see everything.
That first night, I noticed more than his eyes, of course. He was tall, a little too thin back then, brown hair longer and shaggier than he wears it now, and I liked the way he moved behind the bar, liked how his hands looked when they held a glass or opened a bottle.
He was cute, yes, but it was more than that. There had been something about him that was so calm, so still. So sure of himself, even though he was just barely twenty-two and, as I’d later learn, going through his own shit.
We kissed later that night beside my shitty car. He spent the next night in my even shittier apartment.
And that had been that.
I don’t know why I’m telling you this part now. I mean, it probably doesn’t even seem all that romantic to you. Cheap college bar, my heart won forever by a free beer and a cute smile, sex on a mattress I’d gotten from Goodwill and suspected someone had died on.
But it was romantic. More than that, it was real.
And I guess I just want you to know that, before you hear the rest of it.
I’m getting ahead of myself, though.
For now, we’re here, in our little rental in Golden, Colorado, a place we’ve lived for the past five years, where Camden teaches ninth-and eleventh-grade English at an all-boys prep school and I churn butter on a make-believe farm. We’re happy with each other, if not exactly with the lives we’re leading, and later, I’ll realize it’s because we knew eventually this moment would come.