Billionaire, I Am Not Your Wife! novel Chapter 101

Chapter 92: Get A Love Life Cameron

Sedona’s POV

“You need to get married,” I told him, because it was the most effective redirect available and I needed him to stop teasing me about relationships when he was also terrible at relationships. At least I had a child that was turning seven, I doubt he had screwed someone in that long, he was still painfully single that my parents have probably agreed to themselves that Nick was the only grandson they might get.

“You need to find someone and settle down and direct all of this energy toward your own life instead of narrating mine because you have a way more worse love life than me which is saying something.”

The laughter didn’t stop immediately, but it changed-a slight shift in quality, a half-beat of something underneath it that altered the texture, as he stopped laughing as he looked contemplative for a moment that immediately told me that I had hit something.

“Yeah,” he said. “I should.”

And there it was. The same thing I’d noticed before, the dimming, the specific quality of enthusiasm going out of a sentence like a light being turned down rather than off. Not the response of someone who’d never thought about it. The response of someone who’d thought about it and arrived somewhere complicated. That he was not just not deciding not to have a relationship or a love life, but he had something that was complicated than a love life and he was dealing with that and it was taking a lot out of him.

“Cameron,” I said, differently than before.

“Hm.” He was looking somewhere past my shoulder, at the window or the wall behind me, not at my face.

“What is that?”

“What’s what?”

“That.” I watched him. “The way you just-when I said you should settle down. There’s something there.”

“There’s nothing there. You’re deflecting from the Dante conversation by trying to make this about me.”

“I’m not deflecting. I’m asking.” I kept my eyes on him, making sure that he doesn’t back down from this because I could see that there was something there and I was determined to get to the bottom of it, no matter what. “Is there someone?”

He looked at me then, quickly, a reflex look that he pulled back from almost immediately as he shook his head before giving me a oral response. “No,” he said. “There’s no one.”

It wasn’t a lie, exactly. I’d known Cameron my whole life and I could read the difference between his lies and his carefully constructed truths that he used when he did not want to say something awkward or complicated, and this was the latter-true in the specific way of a statement that was accurate on its precise terms while leaving something substantial unsaid, he had no one but there was also not a no one if you get what I mean.

He kissed the top of her head as he passed her, gave me a look that managed to be simultaneously fond and evasive-the Cameron equivalent of *I know what you’re doing and I’m choosing not to be available for it right now*-and then he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him with the quiet click of someone making a controlled exit.

I stared at the closed door.

Something at the company. Cameron’s default deflection, reliable as weather, deployed with the confidence of someone who’d been using it for years. He ran a company; it was always available. But the timing of it, the specific moment he’d reached for it, and the deflèction, I saw myself in him at that moment, when people asked about my marriage but it was a failure that it made me uneasy and fleeing rather than confronting it.

“He looked tired,” my mother said, shaking me from the thought. She was setting out the soup containers with the methodical care she applied to feeding people, the activity that was her primary language of love, as she turned all her attention on me. “He’s been here every day. He needs to rest.”

“He’s fine,” I said, though I was still looking at the door.

“He’s Cameron, which means he’ll say he’s fine until he isn’t and then he’ll figure out how to manage that alone too.” She looked at me over her shoulder. “You two are very similar.”

“We really aren’t.”