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Cami is a pretty soft person. She’s never pretended not to be--she cries at the movies and she cries listening to the radio and she cries at really pretty sunsets. She cried once when her dad texted her the emoji of the little boy holding the little girl’s hand and said, love u pumpkin , and then a second message that said, kick that midterm’s ass!
So she’s soft. It’s not new. It’s not a bad thing.
It’s kind of nice, actually. It means she gets to feel her full range of emotions. Sometimes they’re unpleasant and uncomfortable, but that’s just a part of being alive. She’s not going to pretend any alternative would be better. Lexi is jaded as a rock, and she’s Cami’s best friend, but that doesn’t mean Cami wants to be the same as her.
Cami likes people. She’s attracted to the way people smile, the way their noses bunch or their eyes turn to crescents. She likes watching people eat when they think they’re alone, and she likes watching people mouth along the words to whatever song is coming out of their headphones. She likes butts and she likes holding hands and she’s never spent much time thinking about it beyond that.
But Jack Zimmermann is something else. He’s quiet. He’s kind of an ass, actually. But he has a nice smile and a low voice and when Justin introduces the two of them, he smiles at her and holds her eye for just a second, like it makes him nervous.
He’s endearing.
She’s heard of him. She’s an athlete. She had doctors and coaches and parents and friends and friends’ parents talking about it when he overdosed. She never expected to find him at Samwell. She knew he was here — they’re in the same year, she’s not stupid — but she never thought she’d meet him, bump into him. Cami had a friend in high school who had a picture of his mom on her wall. It’s so strange, how life happens that way.
In Neurobiology of Sensory and Motor Systems on Tuesday, Justin asks if he can give Jack her phone number.
“Jack doesn’t have Facebook,” Justin says, like that’s a normal thing to say in 2013.
“You can give it to him,” Cami says, because it’s nothing. It’s just a phone number and a boy. It doesn’t mean a thing.
At practice, Lexi says, “Hey Mills,” and Cami swings hard, a backhand that would probably get her a point if she wasn’t playing against a machine.
“What?” she asks. The machine spits another ball at her.
“Wanna get drunk tonight? Ruth just texted. She’s at the liquor store.”
Cami shouldn’t. She has a Neuro midterm in ten days, and she has class at ten tomorrow morning. “Can you ask her to get me a bottle of wine?”
“White?” Lexi asks, and Cami’s next swing is just as nice as the last. “A Riesling or what?”
“Sure, whatever,” Cami says. Another backhand, but it goes out, just shy of the line.
Their apartment isn’t horrible, but it’s not great. It’s student housing, so it’s pretty normal as far as things go. Living in a quad is the best Cami could’ve hoped for. The four of them get along well, her and Ruth and Lexi and Kate. They’re all different, but that doesn’t get in the way. They make it work. Cami is pretty messy, but she’s a really good cook, and in the last year they’ve developed a system. If Cami is cooking, Kate can clean up the kitchen. Ruth’s nutso about the bathroom, so she does that. Lexi vacuums. Cami somehow gets by with doing her laundry once a month, much to everyone else’s general disgust.
Cami is social enough: she gets along with people well, and she would even call a lot of the people she knows her friends. But they aren’t her friends like Ruth and Kate and Lexi are. Cami would die for them. She’s known Ruth since they were twelve, and Kate is the sweetest weirdo Cami has ever met. Lexi is Lexi, which works well for Cami, because she can be a handful herself, and they kind of even each other out.
They’re lounging around the living room, and Cami is most of her way through her bottle of wine when her phone vibrates on the coffee table.
“Who the frick is texting you at nine on a Tuesday? Everyone you like is here.”
“Fuck off,” Cami says. Ruth is in perfect kicking distance, sitting on the floor with her feet under the coffee table. Cami takes the high road and doesn’t boot her in the shoulder.
The message says, Hi. It’s from an unknown number, but a few seconds later a second text comes through that says, This is Jack Zimmermann.
She smiles, taps out a quick, hey jack :)
He responds immediately. Hi Camilla.
“Look at that smile,” Kate says. “Fess up.”
Cami drops her phone back into her lap. “Jack Zimmermann,” she says. “He lives with one of the guys in my Neuro lecture.”
“He’s on the hockey team, right?”
“I guess so,” Cami says. Probably. People talk about him a lot, and it can’t all be about his famous parents. He was famous too, once. A little famous.
Because her parents raised her right, she types out, it was nice to meet u the other day. She can’t not respond. He’s got a good jawline and his clothes are normal and he’s an athlete. She’s not going to say no. He’d probably get it. She’s busy, but she’s not dead and—
“Get on his dick asap,” Kate says, sitting up a little straighter. “He’s hot.”
“He’s a coke head,” Lexi says, eyebrow furrowed.
“He didn’t seem like a coke head,” Cami says. She doesn’t know why she’s defending him. Maybe because she would — get on his dick, that is. He’s cute. Kind of a weird texter, but he’s friends with Justin, who is a really good study buddy and a pretty good judge of character.
“So?” Lexi asks, sharp, and Cami doesn’t see why she’s got her panties in a twist over it.
“Relax, Lex. Christ,” Ruth says.
Cami takes a long sip from her mug of wine. Jack texts, It was nice to meet you too. Would you mind if I joined you and Ransom at the library on Friday? He asked, but I wanted to check that it was OK.
She says, ransom??
Jack says, Justin.
“Fuckin’ hockey players,” she says under her breath. She finishes her wine and then types out, fine by me!
He doesn’t respond, but that’s fine. Ruth is talking about her hot film prof again, and Lexi catches Cami’s eye. She rolls her eyes so hard they look like they could get stuck back there, and Cami snorts a laugh.
Jack meets them at the library. He’s got his plaid rolled up his forearms, and Cami is just one man, she’s simple, and she’s weak, and he looks good. Justin has been here since nine this morning, apparently, and he looks a little bugged out by their second hour. Cami says, “Should I go grab coffee or something? Sandwiches?”
Jack says, “I’ll come with you.”
Justin doesn’t say anything, so Cami shrugs.
“So,” Cami says, once they’re out of the library and headed down the steps. “What’re you, uh. Studying for?”
“History midterm,” Jack says. “You?”
“Justin and I are in a Neurobiology class together.”
“Do you want to be a doctor?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Do you want to be historian?”
He smiles. “I deserved that. How’s tennis going?”
She hadn’t actually expected him to know that about her. Hadn’t expected him to know much of anything about her, actually. She’s getting the impression that he’s kind of shy. Awkward, maybe. Must be hard, knowing that everyone knows your name before you know theirs. It can’t be fun.
“It’s the off-season,” she says. “But I’m training still. You know how it goes.”
“Yeah,” he says, and when Cami turns to look at his face, she finds that she believes him.
They get to Annie’s, and he holds the door open for her. She ducks past him, and she says, “I’m gonna order Justin decaf. Don’t tell him.”
He smiles at her, a sly twist at the corner of his lips. “Secret is safe with me,” he says. She orders a vanilla latte, decaf, for Justin, and orders herself a green tea. Jack takes over, then, gets a London fog, and then says, “Did you want to get stuff for lunch, too?”
She weighs the options, and says, “I could eat, probably.” She turns to the barista and says, “Do you guys have any of those turkey sandwiches left?” The barista peers off to somewhere she can’t see, tells her yes, and so she says, “Can we have three?”
Jack pays for everything, which is nice both because she doesn’t want to blow twenty bucks on coffee for someone with celebrities for parents, and also because he’s a little bashful about it. “Thanks,” she says.
“Of course,” he says. He helps her put all their coffees into a little tray, and she carries that while he balances the three sandwiches in his hands. His hands are big, but she makes sure to only look for a second.
She’s at the gym when her phone buzzes. We’re having a party tonight. You can bring some friends if you want? :)
She slows her run down, then replies with a sounds fun! maybe!
Jack doesn’t respond to that, but she hadn’t really expected him to.
She convinces Ruth and Lexi to both come with her, because she’s kind of nervous despite herself.
Turns out, it’s really fun. Jack isn’t a big drinker, but Cami likes to have a good time, and he fills up her red solo cup whenever it close to empty. They team up against one of his roommates, whose name is apparently Shitty for beer pong. He’s on a team with a short girl that Cami recognizes as maybe one of Ruth’s friends. They lose, and it’s all Jack’s fault, and he says, “Sorry,” into her ear. It’s accented and so surprisingly soft.
“You’ll have to make it up to me,” she says, and his eyebrows move up on his face a bit, but he smiles. “I hate to lose.”
“I’ll do my best,” he says, and she bites at her lip.
“I’m sure you’ll find a way,” she says.
They get split up for a bit after that, her pulled into a conversation with Lexi and the girl who wrecked her at beer pong, Larissa, and Jack somewhere else. She finds him eventually, though, slips away and walks around their disaster of a frat house. She checks out a few rooms before she finds him on the back porch, elbows resting on his knees halfway down the old, wooden stairs..
“Hey,” she says. She takes a seat beside him, and early in the night she probably would’ve pressed closer than she’s sitting now, but they’re still close. His massive arms still brush up against hers when he exhales.
He turns to her, and smiles, and it seems genuine. “Hi,” he says. “Sorry I bailed.”
“S’all good,” she says. She takes a sip of her flat beer. She laughs, then, snorts with it, almost spits out her mouthful of beer.
“What?” He asks, smiling softly at her. His bone structure is really amazing, and he has his mother’s eyes.
“I had a crush on your mom when I was younger,” she says, then giggles again.
“Not anymore?” He asks.
She knocks their shoulders together. “You’re funnier than I thought you’d be, Jack Zimmermann.”
He looks away, looks out across the back yard. There’s a bunch of bikes covered in a tarp by the fence. A plastic kiddie pool full of rainwater and leafs. Sitting this close to Jack, he smells like laundry detergent and sweat and cologne.
She finishes her beer and sets the cup beside her on the stairs. She says, “Can we go upstairs?”
He nods and then blinks and turns towards her. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she says. “If that’s—”
“Yeah,” he says.
Jack’s bed is perfectly made. There’s a lock on the door. Cami knows he’s older than her, a mature student or a late bloomer or both. His bedsheets are plaid and the comforter is soft when she sits on it.
He stands at the door, his back pressed into it. He says, “I haven’t, uh—”
She says, “It’s been awhile for me too. It’s fine.” She gets it. It’s hard to be busy, hard to be pulled in five directions at once, especially when you don’t know if you even want to go towards a single one of their destinations. “Just,” she says. Pats the comforter beside her. “Come sit. It’s not a big deal.”
He fiddles with the lock on his door, and then he moves to sit beside her. He sits down farther than she would like, though, so Cami scoots over until their legs are pressed together. Her jeans are the same colour as his. Her top is white, sheer and flowing out at the bottom. She rests one of her hands behind him on the bed. He moves and touches the hem of her shirt, pinches it between his fingers.
She suddenly feels self-conscious beside him; she isn’t usually really concerned with how she looks beyond making sure she’s presentable when she needs to be, but Jack is...Jack looks like a movie star, all cheekbones and jaw line and big blue eyes. Figures, though. He’s got the movie star genes. Cami isn’t ugly, and she doesn’t think she is, but she has a round face and a ski-jump nose and her thighs are strong, but they’re not small. Jack’s legs are strong, too, and he’s built, but he looks good in the soft light from the lamp on his bedside table.
“I like your top,” he says, and it breaks the tension in her. He’s so awkward.
“You really don’t do this often, huh?” He shakes his head, no, and a blush makes its way up his neck, his cheeks going a bit pink.
“It’s kinda charming,” she says. When Ruth was dating that Lacrosse player, all his friends ever did was talk about all the girls they were sleeping with, and it was off-putting. Cami is soft, and she doesn’t like listening to guys disrespect women, especially when those girls are better than anything they deserve. But Jack hasn’t been like that. He doesn’t talk a lot, but he’s not unkind when he does open his mouth. Cami doesn’t really know him, but that’s okay. She’s okay with that.
She wraps her hand in the front of his shirt and tugs gently and he moves easily. He crowds towards her, and she shifts back, makes him follow her until he’s perched above her, her back on his extra-long twin mattress. When their lips meet, she’s smiling, and he is too. It’s not a great first kiss, but it’s not bad, and it gets better quick. He tilts his head to the side, and his smile falls away, and hers does too, and then they’re just kissing, Jack’s lips against hers. She runs her tongue along his bottom lip, and he opens his mouth to her, sure as the night is long. He’s a good kisser, and as they move against each other, she moves her hands down his back, across his shoulders and along his spine. He feels bigger than he looks, looming over her, but it’s nice. He shifts against her, moves his hands up from her waist to her chest. He’s getting hard in his jeans, she can feel it when he grinds down into her. She gets her hands under the back of his shirt and drags her nails up his back, rucks his shirt up as much as she can.
His hands are huge on her chest, and when he moves to kiss at her neck, her collarbone, she moans into the heavy silence of his room. She says, “Jack,” and he lifts his head, stops grinding his hips against her thigh.
“Sit up for a second,” she says, and he does. His lips are pink, wet, and he’s definitely hard in his jeans now. He doesn’t move, just looks at her, his chest heaving, and she smiles. “Take your shirt off, ya dummy.”
“Oh,” he says, then smiles at her. “Okay.” He unbuttons his plaid with fumbling fingers, and she leans back on his bed, unbuttons her jeans and wiggles out of them. She tosses them off the bed, and then sits up to pull her shirt over her head. She shakes out her hair, and Jack is just blinking at her, his head tilted, eyes on her face.
Cami smiles at him, and he’s quick to move after that. He’s still in his jeans, but that’s okay. Is kinda good, actually. He settles over her and brushes her hair off her forehead before leaning down to kiss her. He presses his thigh between her legs, and she grinds against him. He moans into her mouth, and she presses her hands against his shoulders.
When he pulls away from her mouth, Cami mourns the loss until he’s pressing his lips to her neck; he nips at the spot under her ear with his teeth, and she says, “Fuck, okay, do something.”
He lifts his head and looks at her, then, and he looks a bit like a shark, sharp canines and straight white teeth. Jack says, “Okay,” and it’s more confident now. He shifts down her body, licks and nips at her collarbones. He skims his hands down her ribs as he mouths at her breast, runs his tongue along the upper edge of her bra. She expects him to undo it, but he doesn’t, moves to kiss down her stomach instead.
She says, “Fuck,” without meaning to, and grabs onto his shoulder. He runs his tongue along the soft skin under her navel before moving down to kiss her thigh. She was self-conscious before, because she’s soft. Soft centered, a soft heart with a soft belly and soft skin. Jack is all hard lines and strong muscle, but she feels good.
He says, “Okay?”
“Yes,” she says, quick and breathy and kind of bossy, and he smiles against her thigh. He tugs at the top of her underwear and she shifts her legs so he can pull them down and off.
She’s already so wet, and when he runs his index finger from her slit, up her lips to her clit, he says, “Fuck,” a breath against her hip. He moves again, runs his fingers back down and then up again. When he presses his mouth against her, she moans. He licks at her, follows the same movement his finger just made, up and then on her clit, just the right amount of pressure. She grips a hand in Jack’s hair, and he moans against her. When he presses his fingers into her, curls them the a bit, she twitches.
He’s better at this than she thought he would be, which is a strange thought to have when a dude whose mom made you realize you were at least a little bit gay is going down on you, but Cami can’t take it back once it’s crossed her mind. She thrusts down against his fingers, and his free hand grips at her thigh. She can hear little sounds coming out of the back of her throat, but she doesn’t know how to stop them, and when he adds a third finger, presses into her, all hard pressure and perfect angles, she pulls at his hair a bit, makes a noise that’s a bit louder than is respectable. His tongue circles her clit, flicks against her perfectly, and she’s close, got there fast, and he eases off a bit and she says, “Fucking don’t.” He presses his fingers back into her, hard and perfect and right there, and her thighs go tight around his shoulders. Cami comes with Jack’s mouth still on her, his fingers pressed up in her. She pulls at his hair and he lifts his head.
“You good?” He asks, and she nods. She has dry mouth, a bit, but it’s okay. Worth it.
“Yeah,” she says, delayed.
She leaves the party with a hickie on her neck but everything else the way it should be. When she gets back to the apartment, no one is there. The party was still in full swing when she left, Jack in the shower and his sweatshirt thrown over her shoulders. It’s a bit antiquated, but it’s cold out, and it’s a nice idea.
The Neuro midterm is hard, but not harder than she expected. Lexi makes her go to hot yoga with her to “work off the stress,” which is such bogus because Lexi is a cranky asshole all the time. The yoga doesn’t work, clearly, if Lexi’s resting state is what she considers zen. Cami wears Jack’s sweatshirt when she’s watching Netflix in bed, but nowhere else.
Kate asks about him, and Cami says, “I haven’t seen him since the party,” and shrugs.
“His team’s been doing well, apparently,” Kate says, and she shows Cami an article in the school paper.
“That’s nice,” Cami says, meaning it even though it sounds disingenuous.
She sees Jack eating lunch with a boy in the same sweatshirt that’s sitting on her bedroom floor. She’s in line in the cafeteria, and she spots them from across the room. He’s smiling at the boy, and he’s smiled at her enough, but never like that. It doesn’t make her jealous, but it makes her wonder.
She gets a text that says, Would you be interested in going to Winter Screw with me? and she sends back a sure even though she doesn’t really want to go. She hates that shit. She tells Lexi about it, and Lexi groans.
“If you don’t want to go, don’t go.”
“He asked!”
“So?” Lexi asks, indignant. “Who cares about him? You can’t actually like him.”
Cami shrugs. “I don’t wanna like, have weird hockey babies with him or whatever. He’s nice enough.”
“When have you talked to him, other than that day at the library and that party?”
Cami shrugs, because she hasn’t talked to him outside of those occasions. She had fun each time, and she knows Lexi isn’t shaming her for anything she’s done, but. She doesn’t know him.
“I’m gonna go,” Cami says.
“You’re so stubborn, Milly.” Lexi says, and Cami wants to punch her, a bit.
“You love me,” Cami says, instead, like a dick.
Lexi rolls her eyes, but she’s biting back a smile when she says, “Don’t know why.”
So Cami goes. Jack buys her a drink, rests his hand on her back. Someone takes their photo. They don’t dance, but they make out against the wall for a few awesome minutes. Cami says, “I have practice in the morning,” and Jack nods, lifts his hands off where they’re pressed into the wall behind her.
“Do you want me to walk you home?” He asks.
“Nah,” she says. “It’s all good. Thanks though.”
He nods, and blinks at her a bit, and it feels kind of awkward to her, so she just says, “See ya,” and pats his arm before ducking out of the room.
She finally caves. When she does, it’s to Justin, of all people.
“I mean,” she says, exasperated even though she hasn’t even said anything yet. “He’s nice enough, I guess. But he doesn’t text, and you guys are busy, I get it, so am I! He’s smart, I think, but we haven’t actually spent that much time together. He’s hot, but like, I’m not crazy about him or anything? He’s a good kisser but he’s a total weirdo. You do know that, right?”
Justin laughs, but it’s really not funny, because this is Cami’s life. “Okay,” Justin says. “Sorry, but one: Jack is like, an automaton. Holster and I might run an experiment on him. You can’t take the weirdness personally. He’s just like that.”
When he says it, it’s not that Cami doesn’t believe that he means it, just that she knows it’s not true. She saw him in the cafeteria acting like a live human being, and she's had his dick in her mouth. Jack is private, maybe, but there’s something under that exterior. He’s just sharing it with someone else.
“Two,” Justin says. “Why aren’t you crazy about him? We thought everyone was crazy about him.”
Cami shrugs because she doesn’t have a way to explain. He’s making her frustrated, but she think it’s mostly because she would be more than happy to sleep with him again but doesn’t know how to pursue it. There are people that get under your skin and people that just...don’t. Jack’s nice, but he’s kind of boring, doesn’t have much of anything to say. She’s not sure if they have anything in common, really, other than that they’re both athletes and halfway decent at giving oral.
There’s no spark, not really. And Cami’s good at faking her way to getting her way; she could flirt her way into his bed with a confidence that she doesn’t really have, and she could make out with him in public and steal his sweatshirt from the back of his bedroom door, but she doesn’t know how to make it feel like it’s real. Like he could ever be anything more than a good lay and a beautiful smile.
She runs into Jack at the gym a week later, and he says, “Hi, Camilla.”
She says, “Don’t call me that,” and it comes out meaner than she intended.
Jack’s brow furrows, and he says, “Uh,” and she huffs.
“My friends call me Cami,” she says.
“Okay,” Jack says, slow, like he’s trying to figure out what it means. She sighs again, and hits the button to slow down the treadmill. She stays standing on it, though, because it gives her some height against him, and she feels like she needs it, suddenly.
“Sorry, look.” She wipes her hand across her forehead. “I know that the paper ran that article, athletics and romance, Collins and Zimmermann, blah blah blah. I was flattered, you know? It was a nice photo. And,” she shrugs. “I had fun, you know, but I don’t think you’re really what I need right now, and I don’t think I’m what you need, either.” She doesn’t say want, because that seems like it would be twisted up, but when she’d asked Larissa about Jack and the boy, she’d said, “Oh, you mean Bitty?” and she’d gotten a knowing look on her face, and that was enough for Cami.
“Oh,” Jack says. “Um, okay. That’s. That’s fine,” he says.
“Okay,” she says.
“Thanks, uh. I’m gonna — ”
“Yeah,” Cami says.
“Bye, Camilla,” he says, and then he turns away, and then he’s gone.
Lexi says, “You can’t fucking make me go with you.”
“Please, Lex,” Cami whines, reaching for her waist.
“You cannot bully me into going to that stupid Screw dance.”
“It’ll be fun,” she says, dragging out the vowel sound.
“Milly, no, come on.”
“Worst girlfriend ever,” Cami says, smiling as she says. “Maybe I’ll ask Jack.”
Lexi rolls her eyes, but she steps back towards Cami. “You should text him,” Lexi says, because she’s an asshole. An asshole that managed to steal Cami’s heart. After nearly a year together, it’s easier to believe: how easily they fit together, how well they get along despite all the sass that comes out of Lexi’s mouth. They’re doing okay.
“Maybe I will,” Cami says. “He was a good date.”
“He was not,” Lexi says, laughing, and Cami kisses it off her lips.
“Fuck it,” Cami says, later. “I’m texting him. Try and stop me.”
“I’m not gonna,” Lexi says. “But nice try tricking me to go with you. You think I was born yesterday?”
Cami shrugs, and she does text Jack. long time no talk, dudeman. wanna be my plus one to the screw?
He texts back an hour later. Could be fun. Better than Ransom trying to set me up with someone else.
Cami laughs, and she says, looking forward to it :)
They go together, and it is fun. More fun than the last time. She tells him about getting together with Lexi, about how she told her parents and it wasn’t scary at all. He says, “That’s really amazing,” and he sounds genuine. She hasn’t seen him in a long time, but she thinks it’s funny. You get an impression of someone, don’t see them again, but the impression sticks. When he met her outside her apartment, she’d been struck with the bizarre thought that Jack was just someone she knew once. But she’s wondering now if she knew him at all. He seems different. A bit softer around the edges. He’s smiling a bit more, but he also looks sad. His eyes track the guy Larissa named Bitty, and Cami gets it. She doesn’t know what to say to make it easier, doesn’t want to spook him.
“Everyone deserves it,” she says. Love isn’t easy, and it isn’t the same for everyone, but it’s worth it, and it makes everything else in the world easier to handle when you know you’ve got a second set of hands to carry the load. “Even you,” she says, and a laugh bursts out of him.
He smiles at her and says, “Thanks, Cami.”