Shark Out of Water (Grab Your Pole, #3) (25 page)

“Look, Jeff, I appreciate the thanks and everything, but…” I blew out a breath, “Honestly, I don’t know what to say here, but you’re right, sometimes knowing what’s on Tristan’s mind is frightening. Seriously, are you aware of some of the outrageous shit he’s thought up let alone actually done?” I asked him with a laugh, trying to lighten Jeff’s mood a little. Really, I love Tristan and synching with him is an amazing experience every time it happens, but his head can be scary in more ways than one, and the guy has done some things that not only baffle the mind, but are also just down right life threatening. I mean really, carnival rides aren’t all that structurally sound…

“Oh dude, I know, huh? If other guys our age had any idea about
half
the shit he’s done, they’d cry themselves to sleep at night…I know Mike will never look at Saran Wrap the same way. Asparagus or figs either for that matter…Trist is right though, there’s some truth in that. Hey, speaking of food, I’m gettin’ hungry, you wanna go grab something to eat?”

“Yeah, food sounds good…dude, where do you think he comes up with some of that?” I asked as I followed Jeff out the door after I looked back at the web cam and mouthed “bye” to my girlfriend whom I’m sure is probably now Googling what someone might do with plastic wrap, asparagus, and figs outside of wrapping ‘em up and throwin’ ‘em in the fridge. I wonder if I should tell her the Saran Wrap has absolutely nothing to do with the asparagus and figs. Well, I guess it could though…huh.

“I dunno, his dad planted the fig trees though.”

We talked and laughed as we shared a little bit of the harebrained stuff Tristan has dreamt up in his head, but as we climbed in his Jeep, Jeff’s mood turned pensive again…

“He’s really gonna go through with it, isn’t he?” Jeff asked while he drove.

“Go through with what?” If Tristan’s come up with some sort of farfetched scheme to get Camie back, I’ve not been made privy to it in any way.

“His “birthday gift” to himself…”

Oh…that.

I shut my mouth and kept my eyes front and center, trying to stall so I could think of something that won’t incriminate me, and how the hell Jeff knows about this, I haven’t the faintest clue.

“Pete, dude, I know you know…I know you guys aren’t locked in, but even if you can’t pick it out of his head on your own yet, you’re the only one he’d go to with that because he knows he can’t come to me.”

“How’d you find out?” I asked, because yeah, Tristan knows he can’t say anything about this to anyone aside from me because he knows I’ve seen and therefore I understand his paralyzing fear in a way that no one else does, so he knows I won’t talk him out of it…even if I do think it’s a mistake.

“He was already exhausted, but we got pretty raw with each other on Thursday and I had a hunch so I played Magic 8 Ball with him that night.”

I sighed and shook my head in resignation. “I’m driving him.”

“
Fuck.
Pete, please, don’t let him do it. He’ll regret it…I
know
he will.”

“I can’t stop him, Jeff…he’ll just call a cab or something and do it with or without me.”

“This isn’t like getting a fucking tattoo on a whim you know…this is
life
altering and he’s making a mistake! Don’t you
see
that?!”

“It doesn’t
matter
what I think and it’s not like he hasn’t thought it through and doesn’t have some seriously good reasons to back this decision up! Plus, it’s his life, Jeff!
Not
yours,
not
mine…
his
. And he does
not
want children!”

“So use spermicidal lube and wear five goddamned condoms and then pull out to be safe, but don’t go out and get a fucking vasectomy! For Christ’s sake, is he even thinking about how this will impact his parents? Not to mention that this’ll probably affect Camie too…”

“Whoa! Hold on…
Camie
?”

“Yeah. Camie. Pete, dude, I’ll give you thirty goddamned days to sell tickets and then I’ll kiss your bare ass on the fuckin’ blue stage if you can honestly look me in the eyes and tell me that he’s never given a single thought to a lifelong commitment with her.”

“Okay, I’ll give you that…but, dude. First of all, they have some serious shit to deal with at the moment that has zero to do with having kids, and
if
they work things out, and that’s a pretty big if right now, Camie is the
last
girl on the planet Tristan wants to knock-up. You think he’s a fuckin’ mess right
now
? Well, trust me when I say this would be
nothing
in comparison to what he’d go through if he ever got Camie pregnant.”

I might not agree with what he’s planning to do and I’ll be the first to admit Tristan can be, at times, shockingly impulsive, but this is one thing I can say without a doubt that he’s seriously thought through and didn’t come to a decision on lightly by any means. And truth be told, after hearing his well-founded argument for taking a surgical precaution against what is his greatest fear…well, let’s just say I might do the same thing if I were in his shoes.

And on behalf of my testicles, I would like to thank God that I’m not.

A bleak absence in unfamiliar territory ~ Tristan

When I showed up unannounced at Camie’s to bring the girls back on Sunday, I was confronted with a dilemma the second my two feet and their eight paws hit the front porch; just walk in like I used to or knock and hope Kevin doesn’t view that as weird and question me about it? Yeah I know, this really shouldn’t be that hard, should it? Alright, it’s not a big deal…just walk in like you’ve done since the beginning, drop the girls and their stuff off, and then you can make a run for it. Of course it
sounds
easy, but I still had to take a deep breath before I went to open the door and even then, my decision was easier said than done because...the door didn’t budge. I must’ve looked like a complete moron when I just stood there and stared at the door like I just didn’t understand how it could possibly remain closed.

I looked down at Phineas and Ferb in apology, like it was
my
fault the door was locked. “I’m sorry, girls…you saw me, right? And now I don’t know what to do…” They both just stared back at me, but I got the message loud and clear because they said,
For the love of God, Dad, just knock, you big dumb-ass,
and they said it in that way cats have that makes you feel ridiculously stupid.

Huh. Well this is new…knocking it is then.

Nothing.

I left the party Friday night confident that Jeff and/or Pete would prevent anyone from actually hitting on Camie in my absence, and because I’ve sorta been using Kate via Jeff to keep tabs on her whereabouts out of school, I stayed home and caught up on some more sleep last night because Camie was staying in as well, and since Jeff hadn’t mentioned any plans for today plus with Mandy being so sick and barely having had more than two weeks of post operative recovery time, I assumed everyone would be home. Or, that at least
one
person would be.

“Well, do you two have any other bright ideas?” I asked my girls and I swear I saw Phineas roll her eyes in disgust. I don’t blame her, though, because I was still holding the answer in my hand and I rolled my eyes too when I realized I could just use the house key Camie’s dad had given me that I can’t seem to make myself take off of my keyring and return to him.

Honestly, I’m really not this dense on a regular basis.

Having finally let myself in, I walked down the short hall and feeling like I’d come home, I took a deep breath and let it out in one burst of pure relief. It’s been so long since I’ve actually been inside the house that I was afraid it would feel different. That would entirely suck because from the very first time I stepped through that front door, I felt like I was meant to be here. I know it sounds weird, but it just felt…right. Anyway, I took another quick minute to breathe in the lingering smell of breakfast, which made me grin and only confirmed to me that Camie’s serious love affair with bacon hasn’t been derailed alongside our personal one.

You wouldn’t think it’s possible, being as small as she is, but truthfully, the girl can eat bacon like none other. I’m not kidding; she can go through more than an entire pound of it on her own in one sitting and be sincerely disappointed when it’s gone. As I took the cats and their Hello Kitty suitcase Jillian had given them for Christmas upstairs, I smiled to myself, remembering that one Monday morning when I was staying here and we weighed ourselves in her bathroom before school…

She’d somehow managed to put on like five pounds and was pouting. Teasing her about it I said, “Get off the scale before you break it, baby hippo.” I wasn’t calling her fat though and she knew it. The only part of her that showed any weight gain was pretty obviously her boobs, which therefore made me a pretty happy camper, and the baby hippo thing is from the movie
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
…yeah, Jeff makes me watch kid movies… Anyway, then I told her it was all the bacon she eats making her gain weight and she defiantly and very confidently replied, “Bacon would
never
do that to me. We have an understanding and weight will never get in the way of our love.” When I got on the scale and we saw that I’d put on a, ah…a “few” pounds too, she started laughing and said, “Who’s the baby hippo now?” Jeff called it “Wedding Weight” as opposed to the “Freshman Fifteen” and laughed at me about it when I was the one doing the pouting later that day.

The whole thing was really pretty funny and walking down the hall, I’d started laughing a little out loud, but then, without any warning, all my laughter and reassuring familiar feelings about the rightness of being here vanished, leaving me to do the moronic front door staring again when I walked into Camie’s bedroom. At least I
think
it was her bedroom…

Aside from the faint smell of “Camie” that was doing battle with the odor of fresh paint, there wasn’t a single thing about her room that was familiar to me. The entire room had been made over since the last time I was here, not that I really care to remember that because it still makes me nauseous, but still…I felt like I’d left my homeland and had turned into a foreigner visiting another country by simply climbing the stairs.
Everything
had been replaced…the dresser, the desk, the curtains, the color of the walls, the bedding and the bed, not to mention that the bed wasn’t even in the same place it used to be. Even the goddamned light fixture on the ceiling was different, and there were some new additions to those that had simply been replaced; a big, comfy looking chair and ottoman was sitting at an angle in one of the corners with two short bookcases on either side of it.

I never really thought how Camie’s room was decorated fit her, but instead of the somewhat jungle appearance the animal print bedding and rattan furniture gave her room previously, now it looks lush, warm and elegant, much more befitting of who she is on the inside and although I feel like I’m a stranger here, it makes me smile to think she’s figured out a way to express to the rest of the world some of what I love about her whether she meant to or not. I let the cats off their leashes, put the suitcase down, and then just stood there and kinda took in all the rich colors in hues of bronze and gold, which really reminded me of the unusual shade of her eyes, and like the green that’s flecked in them, to offset all the darker colors of the furniture and bedding, she’d mixed in turquoise of varying shades with the curtains, little jeweled pillows, candles, picture frames, and paint.

My internal happiness and outward smile left me though when I realized there wasn’t a single visual representation of me in her bedroom expression of herself. I scanned the walls and flat surfaces and found not
one
piece of anything that could be traced to me. Not even a picture of me alone or the two of us together or even a group picture. I mean yeah, there are pictures;
I’m
just not in any of them. Right when I was about to let what is obviously her intentional way of cutting me out of her life really fuck with my head and my mood, I saw it. It took me a second to grasp what I was seeing, though, because I was seeing it through a cheval mirror on the other side of the room, but when I turned around, I was eye level with a small shelf on the wall next to the door and it was sitting there, plain as day. The 6X6 box wrapped in gold foil paper I’d given her. The one she’d thrown in a trashcan.

I don’t know where it came from, or rather how it managed to find its way back to her, and although it hadn’t been unwrapped and is the only thing in this room providing irrefutable proof that Camie and I still know and once loved each other, it was more than enough to keep me from lapsing into what I’m sure would’ve ended up being a debilitating depression.

“You’re welcome,” Jillian said from the doorway where she hadn’t been seconds before. Surprising as her appearance and words were, I didn’t jump because I wasn’t even startled. Now seriously, what the hell does
that
say about me? It has to mean something, right?

“As grateful as I am, I wish I didn’t owe
you
any thanks for this,” I told her, thinking I’d much rather have believed it was Camie herself who regretted what she did enough to dig through the trash. Not throwing it away in the first place would’ve been acceptable too.

“Then it should please you to know that the only reason you do is because I beat her to it. That’s what I meant when I told you her stab at hurting you backfired on her. She didn’t know I’d already rescued it from its future life at the dump, so she went back after lunch to find it and then she proceeded to have a meltdown of almost epic proportions when it was gone. Oh, and if you were thinking of laying a guilt trip on her for that maliciously asinine move, you might be interested to know that I already took care of that too, seeing as how I wasn’t all that kind when I gave it back to her…but, ah, since she still hasn’t opened it yet, I’m curious…what’s in it?”

Mentally I chuckled and thought to myself, “Not on your life…the little terrorist already knows.” I’d be willing to bet what’s in that box that Jillian unwrapped it at some point and she’s only asking because she wants to see how I really feel now. And yeah, I could just tell her and let her in on the naked truth of how much her sister really meant to me, or, still means to me,
but
, Jillian already has more information than I’m comfortable with her having at the moment and really, what kind of sport would I be if I didn’t play along?