Just For You (9 page)

"I'm not hungry."

"You're going to eat."

"I'm not paying for this."

"Oh, God." Imogen smacked an open palm on the table top and slid forward. "Would you stop being such a princess for one minute?"

Without missing a beat, Cameron glanced at his watch. "59. 58. 57."

Imogen shook her head. "Sometimes I don't even know why I try."

"Me either."

At that moment, Imogen was asking her why she put herself through the hassle. She could come up with a thousand things at the top of her head that might be infinitely more interesting than basically forcing an unwilling participant to spend a little time with her. She wanted to slap Todd the next time she saw him, too, if she was being honest with herself, for leaving her all alone with Eternal Pessimist over there, who was still glaring at her.

Grinding her teeth, she pulled her cell phone out from her purse and checked for any messages. There weren't any at all, and she didn't want to wait anymore.

"Where. Are. You?" She typed, sending the text message to Todd's phone number.

Cameron cleared his throat and slid back, resting one arm across the top of the booth. He studied Imogen through squinted eyes, trying to see if the answer was written on her face. "Seriously. Why do you keep trying?"

A smile played on the edges of Imogen's mouth. "Because I've been watching you for years now and I've fallen so madly, deeply in love with you that I've planned this entire thing. You were always supposed to twist my ankle so that I could finally get close to you, bind your hands together, gag you, and take you away to Vegas, where we'd enjoy a luxuriously speedy marriage and I could take you back to my underground lair somewhere off the Californian coast and keep you as a love slave until death do us part."

"I said 'seriously.'"

Imogen shook and dropped her head, a long curtain of hair falling over her face. The smile disappeared from her lips and her attention was focused on her hands, folded in front of her. After a moment of silence she swallowed and caught his eye again.

"Doesn't it bother you that maybe one day you'll wake up and realize that your life has passed you by?"

Cameron scoffed. "Actually, I wish it would."

Imogen's brows pulled together. "That's terrible, Cameron."

The delicacy and quietness with which she muttered the words made Cameron's stomach twist into a thousand tiny knots. He swallowed and looked out the window to his left.

"Do you really wish that?"

He turned his head and came face-to-face with that pathetic, sad little puppy look she was wearing.

Did he? Did he really wish for his life to just be… done?

The waitress came back with their food. Cold tea sloshed and spilled onto the table but no one moved to clean it up.

Cameron bit his bottom lip and focused his attention on anything that wasn't Imogen. He picked up his burger, already falling apart, and before taking a colossal bite out of it, muttered, "No."

The words left his mouth but he pondered how large the part in him was that didn't want to be alone and how large the part of him was that told Imogen what she wanted to hear.

She seemed appeased, anyway. For the moment.

"What?" he snapped, his mouth full of food. She watched him with eager eyes as he ate.

She shrugged at him and smiled. "I just wanted to see if the food was any good."

"So why don't you find out for yourself?"

"I thought you said you weren't hungry."

He glared. "I changed my mind."

"Don't you have any other moods besides annoyed and angry?" She cocked her head to the side and studied him.

Cameron rolled his eyes and took another bite out of the burger. "Do you do anything else besides pester people?"

Imogen laughed and took a sip of her tea. It was cold and made her throat constrict. "Depends on what your philosophy in life is. See, you call it pestering, but someone like Todd, for example, might call it being friendly."

"How many times are we going to establish that Todd is a madman? He's on your level. Of course he's going to call you friendly. Crazy people don't know they're crazy and crazy people don't know when other people are crazy."

"You speak highly of your friends. Perhaps that's why you have so many of them."

Cameron's face dropped. Ouch. She pinned him.

Not for long.

"Something about me is charming. I can't seem to get you away from me. Tell me what it is you see in me so that I might change it."

"I wish I knew."

She knew exactly why, but Imogen would be damned if she was going to tell Cameron just yet.

"Yeah, well I wish you knew, too."

Cameron's long, slim fingers wrapped around the dark red plastic cup and brought it to his mouth, where he took a long gulp of iced tea. Condensation fell from its sides and settled into a small pool on the table.

Hostility seemed to roll off of him in waves, even in his most simple of actions.

"What do your parents do, Cameron?"

He set his glass down and shook his head. "It doesn't matter," he laughed. "Just like it doesn't matter what I do, or what you do, or what that waitress over there does," he pointed. "All of it is pointless."

"Come on," Imogen kicked him on the shin under the table. "Tell me."

"Um,
ow
." He made a face and kicked her back.

"Ow!" She pealed, grabbing hold of her aching shin and banging her knee on the table as she brought her leg up. "Come on, tell me. Tell me. Tell. Me."

Cameron looked around hastily, afraid they were being watched. A scene would be just what he needed right now. "Okay, okay. Jesus. My mother's a sex therapist and my dad is a psychologist. Now would you shut up?"

"Interesting."

"Not really." Cameron stabbed his fork into his french fries and Imogen drew her brow. "When you're thirteen and your mother catches you…" His voice quieted and he made a loose fist with his hand at the same time he made eye contact with her. Imogen watched as his face reddened ever so slightly. Realization hit her and she was caught between amusement and sorrow for him.

"Well," he continued, "it's not a fun experience having to memorize both male and female anatomy afterward only to be followed up with a mature and responsible," he air-quoted, "conversation about sexual intercourse. Top that off with my father trying to talk to me about how it made me feel to be caught and how it made me feel to have a sex therapist for a mom and blah blah blah. It made me feel like shit, is what it did."

Imogen's jaw dropped. It wasn't at the fact that Cameron's story was a bit embarrassing, though entertaining, in a way, for her that surprised her, but rather that Cameron, knowing it or not, had actually shared something with her. And she didn't even have to twist his arm to pry it out of him.

Cameron looked up and saw Imogen with her mouth opened and obviously trying to stifle a laugh to be polite. He shook his head. "Go ahead and laugh. I can handle it."

She licked her lips. "No, I--- that had to be pretty embarrassing," she said, folding her hands in her lap.

"Yeah, well, my mother didn't quite understand that. It's her business, it's what she does for a living. Talking about it all day every day made her immune to it but she forgets what it's like for the rest of us. It's still private, but to her, it's nothing to be ashamed of, she says."

Imogen made a face. "I think she's right. In a way." She could feel the blood surging to her own cheeks. Was it hot in there, or was it just her? She pressed her cool fingers to her forehead.

"Tell that to the rest of the thirteen-year-olds I was forced to be around. Almost daily I got some sort of crack about whether or not I would be angry if the others called my mom up and asked for sex advice."

Imogen winced.

Cameron closed his eyes to rid himself of the flashes of vivid memories which were rushing back to him. Cruel laughter invaded his mind and he tapped his knuckles on the table to get rid of it.

Suddenly not hungry anymore, Imogen dropped the french fry she was about to eat back onto her plate. She sighed, and when Cameron looked at her with an expectant expression, she raised an eyebrow and gazed steadily right back at him.

They continued their staring contest for only a few moments before Imogen decided to be out with it.

"Cameron, would things be any easier between us if we just slept together?"

Cameron nearly choked. He coughed and sputtered, hitting himself three times in the chest before he could breathe again. The way she suggested that they… So nonchalantly… Oh, God, it was repulsing.

He was frozen where he sat after his coughing fit, listening to the sounds of reality continue on all around him. Forks and knives clanked against glass plates. The hum of a chord of voices played in his ears. The hissing of a grill in the restaurant kitchen added to the dissonance. He cleared his throat in time with the banging of his fist on the table.

Cameron was sure his eyes were wide and full of horror. "What did you just propose?"

Imogen laughed. "Well, that certainly didn't make you uncomfortable at all. I take that as a no."

"What did you--- where did you--- why did you---?"

"Oh, for goodness sakes, calm down." Imogen unraveled the napkin from her silverware and went to cleaning up the tea Cameron spilled while he was gasping for air. "Apparently you don't feel the unbearable sexual tension between us."

Cameron tilted his head and blinked in rapid waves. "There's sexual---" His voice rose an octave on the last word before he cleared his throat and used a whisper. "Sexual tension between us now?"

Imogen laughed again. "God, I'm joking. Lighten up, would you? Funny! That's what I was trying to be."

"Well you're not funny."

"I don't know, I think it was pretty funny."

He settled back into his seat and cleared his throat, looking tentatively at her under a thick fringe of lashes. As always, she was wearing that infuriatingly innocent smile.

"You don't want to actually. You know?"

This time she laughed loud- loud enough to get the people in their general proximity to turn in their chairs and look at her, wondering what the private little joke was. Cameron felt his cheeks grow hot and he ground his teeth together.

"No! No, no. Don't worry, Cameron. My feelings for you are strictly platonic. I will keep my hands all to myself." More or less, it was the answer he wanted to hear, but something bit at him. Even though he wanted her gone (though at this point, he was seriously entertaining giving up all hope of ever being relieved of her), he couldn't help but feel slight resentment at the sting of rejection that settled in his belly.

"So why bring it up?" he sneered.

Imogen swallowed and the sound of it replayed over and over in Cameron's head. "Maybe it would make you like me." Her goofy, wide grin told Cameron that she was joking again.

"In case you haven't realized, sex works differently for men and women. It doesn't make men like women any better."

"You like me, I know you do."

"And where are you getting this absurd notion?"