The Paid Bridesmaid(59)

“Why not tell her I was here?” he asked, and it was more than just simple curiosity. He was asking me something that I couldn’t answer, because I had feelings about him that I wasn’t ready to share, so I kept things light.

“Because she would have flown here to hog-tie you and force you to marry me.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

I knew he was kidding, and maybe it was because I was in this wedding environment, or just because of how attractive he was, but there was a superdumb part of me that wanted to believe such a thing was possible.

When I didn’t argue with him, he added, “You totally lied to your mom.”

I wished I could shrug it off, but he wasn’t wrong. “It was necessary. Sometimes, in my life, I have to do that to protect people I care about.” It felt like a major confession, the closest I’d come to telling him the truth.

We finished up the rest of the food, and he did indeed allow me to have some of his fries. They were a little cold, but I didn’t even care. Camden cleared the trays and plates from the bed and he lay down on his side, facing me. “Let’s play a game,” he said.

“What kind of game?” I asked. I lay down across from him.

“The kind where you tell me something.”

“Like what?”

“Something about you that I don’t know,” he said, and then added, “I don’t want to know about how much you can bench-press, either. Something real. Something you haven’t told someone else. Maybe what you were going to tell me earlier before the food arrived.”

“I can’t even bench-press the bar, so there’s nothing to tell you about that,” I said, aiming for lightness when all I felt was a slight sense of dread. Would Camden think less of me if I told him why I didn’t trust men?

“In our game we can trade truths,” he said. “You tell me something, I’ll tell you something.”

Why? I wanted to ask him, but wasn’t sure I was ready for the answer. Because deep down, I knew why. “How will we know if we’re actually saying the truth?”

“We’re going to have to trust each other.”

It was a big ask, even if he didn’t know that.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll play.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE


I took in a centering breath, then spoke. “Right after I graduated from college, I was offered a job in one of the most prestigious brokerages in New York. There were ten of us hired at the same time, and I was the only woman. I loved everything about it. Including my thirty-five-year-old boss, who took a liking to me.”

Grabbing one of the pillows from under my head, I moved it against my chest so that I could hold on to it. “I’d been so eager to please, wanting everyone’s approval, because I was determined to succeed. To make my parents happy, I suppose. He took advantage of that. Lots of late nights and things that I now understand were entirely inappropriate and we had an affair. He preyed on my inexperience. It was such a cliché that it feels ridiculous that it happened to me.”

It was the first time I’d ever seen Camden look truly angry. That it was on my behalf was a little thrilling. “Did he get fired?”

“No, I did. He was married, something I didn’t know. And when evidence of our relationship came to light, he threw me under the bus. He’d been very careful the entire time. He told the firm that I was harassing him. When the partners reviewed the footage, it was me going into his office, sitting on the edge of his desk. They didn’t know that he was the one who called me in. They didn’t see our emails, which he got someone in IT to destroy. There were no texts or anything that I could use to prove my innocence. I looked like the aggressor, and they fired me.”

Camden somehow managed to look even angrier, but he stayed quiet.

“It just about destroyed me. I had spent four years in college working toward this goal, getting internships every summer, and one man’s lies made everything go away. There were a rough couple of months, but then I decided that I was never going to let someone else dictate my career. I wanted to go into business for myself. Some friends had asked me to do events for them and I realized that I had a talent for it. I had a high demand right from the beginning and was worried that I couldn’t do it all alone. I had started doing volunteer work, because my mom was always saying that the best way to get over your problems is to help others, and that’s where I met—” I had very nearly said Krista’s name, which would have been so bad. He had no idea she worked for me. “My first employee. She had just gotten out of an abusive marriage and couldn’t find work. I hired her and now, here I am.”

“That must have been really hard, but good for you for finding a way forward,” he said, and I appreciated that he hadn’t jumped into my story with all the things I should have done differently, like my father had. I knew my dad had been trying to help me, but the situation couldn’t be retroactively fixed.

“I also promised myself that I’d never date anyone from my workplace. It was such a stupid mistake and I wanted to make sure that I’d never make it again.”

“And since you mostly work weddings, that’s why you don’t date wedding guests,” he correctly surmised, even if my reasons why were a little bit different than what he imagined.