Jennifer Greene - Wild in the Field

And Camille had sunk down on the cement curb, arms wrapped around her knees, just kind of rocking herself with her eyes squeezed closed. She never opened her eyes or looked back, yet before he said a single word, she piped up, “Pete, I’m fine. Go back inside with the boys. I’ll come back in. I just needed some air.”

Okay. So Camille had easily guessed that he’d follow her-but he should have easily guessed how the movie was likely to affect her. The kids had pushed for going, said it was a comedy. But he hadn’t asked a single question-or he’d have known it was going to be about cops and city crime.

“Go back in,” she repeated, and motioned him with her hand, sounding aggravated now.

He came closer instead. In a split second-faster than a second-he realized he’d fallen so deep and so hard in love with her that he couldn’t think straight.

Of course he’d realized he was increasingly miserable around her-but not that he was hooked this hard. It was the look of her. That stupid, butchered, chopped off hair-but damn, it framed her face pixie-fashion, made her soft brown eyes look huge. Right now those eyes held an ocean of pain and her skin was whiter than chalk. Her hands were clenched in a clear effort to control their shaking, and her frail shoulders were hunched, making her look more fragile, more beaten-and it killed him. Frustrated him. Enraged him. Too see his Camille this over her head, this whipped by anything.

“You’re having an anxiety attack.”

“Yup. If you’ve never seen one before, don’t get your liver in an uproar. I do this a few times a week. Just to keep in practice. It’ll pass in a minute.”

Her effort to treat it lightly made him sick. He hunkered down on the cement stoop next to her. “This one was brought on by the movie?”

“Who knows. Anything can set one off. I hear a strange sound-even if it’d be an innocuous sound to anybody else-and shazam , just like that, I’m suddenly sweating and acting like a complete idiot. It’s really annoying. Would you just go back inside? Please. It’s embarrassing enough to be such a wuss without having someone else see it. And it’ll pass. In fact, it’ll pass faster if you leave me alone. Other people can’t help. It just takes me a few minutes of concentration to pull myself together.”

He wanted to pull her in his arms so bad he could taste it, but some internal instinct stopped him. He’d pulled her into his arms before. It hadn’t brought them closer together; it seemed to make her even warier. Camille treated concern as if it were a poison she could choke on. Still, he wanted-needed-to understand more of what she was dealing with. “The movie. I didn’t realize. I thought it was just a comedy-”

“I know. Don’t waste guilt on me, Pete. You didn’t do anything wrong. I knew better than to come into town.”

“Well, that sounds pretty unfair. Unless you were planning on staying home forever?”

“No, of course not. I need to make a living. Have to find work again. And I will. I just need a little more time to get past this.” Her head shot up. “Do me a favor and don’t suggest going to a shrink.”

“I wasn’t going to.” He might not be brilliant with women, but Pete knew when to shut up or risk being strangled.

“I don’t need any damn shrink to tell me I’m acting like an idiot. Or why. I’m not stupid.”

“Did I say you were?” Oh, man. That belligerent chin. That fierce well of pain in her eyes. That soft skin. A mantra kept whispering through his mind with the same old refrain: Let me love you. Let me help you. Let me protect you and make sure no one ever hurts you again. But of course he couldn’t make those promises-he didn’t have the power. Or the right.

“I can handle my own life, Pete. Just because I’m having trouble doesn’t mean I’m incapable of fixing it.”

Sheesh. Somehow she seemed to feel he was attacking her-which he wasn’t, and he wanted to correct that impression, except that the show of belligerence seemed to be doing her good. Fresh color bloomed in her cheeks. Her hands had stopped shaking. And she was still talking.

“There’s a reason I’m taking so long to get my life back together. It’s about power.”

“Power,” he echoed, wanting to encourage her even if she wasn’t making a lick of sense.

She nodded. “Both my parents raised me to believe that I was powerful. Seriously. I grew up believing that I had power over my life, over what I could become, over what I could do. Most people complain about feeling insecure all the time. Not me. I wasn’t raised insecure, I was raised to believe I could conquer the world-if I just worked hard and kept my nose clean and stood up for the things that mattered.”

He hung his arms over his knees. “That sounds exactly like how I’m trying to raise my sons.”

“Well, don’t. Because then when something happens, like when I was attacked, it’s like a double blow. I’d never felt helpless before. I’d never felt…impotent. It was as if those three men took it all away. Not just Robert, not just life as I knew it, but me. They took away me .”

Again he wanted nothing more than to pull her in his arms, to love her. To shield her. The urge was so strong he almost couldn’t suck it back… But damnation, this wasn’t about him, and what he wanted to do. It was about her. About Camille believing she’d lost herself. And about a woman who spit back sympathy if you dared try to give it to her.

“So you’re just planning on hiding out on the farm rather than risk being any part of real life?” he asked.

“Pardon?” She turned to him with a flash of vulnerability in her eyes.

“That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? That even going to a movie is too much for you to handle.”

Her jaw almost dropped. “I can handle it-”

“Well, you’re out here shaking. I’d hardly call that ‘handling it.’” He saw the shocked look in her eyes, the sting of hurt. And pushed harder. “If you weren’t feeling so sorry for yourself, you’d be going back in the movie, proving it was no big deal.”

More hurt. But those shoulders stiffened like soldiers. “It isn’t any big deal. I’m going back in the movie right this minute. I told you. I just needed a few seconds to get some air.” She bolted to her feet. “And just because you caught me with my hands shaking for a second doesn’t mean I’m some needy little wimp. It happens. I admit that. But it’s happening tons less than it did. I’m perfectly fine.”

“So you say.”

“You’re damn right, so I say.”

She stomped to the door, discovered-no surprise-that the back exit door was locked from the outside, and then stomped all the way around the theater, into the lobby, and back into the darkened movie to the exact same seats they’d had before. She didn’t speak to him through the rest of the movie. Or during the drive home either.

The boys never sensed anything was wrong. The whole ride, they never quit talking, replaying every scene and chortling over the good parts the way they always did after a movie. As Pete drove, he realized he hadn’t seen how the boys related to Camille before.

He’d sensed that his sons had somehow accepted her, which was pretty darn astounding, since they hadn’t had a positive word to say about a woman since their mother took off. It was both fascinating and unnerving to see how different they were with Camille-partly, it seemed, because she made no attempt to mother them or correct them or “play adult” with them in any sense.

He noted their behavior with Cam. Noted her behavior with them. But mostly he noticed that the air between the adults could have frozen ice cubes in a rain forest.