Page 14 of A Matter of Time
“You send me one first,” he decided. I’d only added his phone number to my phone earlier this week, when I added everyone at Barnly Oil’s numbers, and at the time, I certainly never expected to be using it while sitting across from him in a bar in Corpus Christi. Life sure took some funny turns sometimes.
I quickly reviewed the messages I’d already started typing and chose one I thought would be a good place to start. Like a hawk, I watched his face as he opened it and read it over, looking for any twitch of his lips, any wrinkling of his nose, anything I could pounce on to prove that he had failed at the task.
To my disappointment, he read it with a completely straight face, first to himself and then out loud: “Tonia Callahan is the world’s best driver. I feel completely safe and relaxed when I’m in the car with her.”
Damn it.He used to hate my driving so I thought that might get to him. The old Cam wouldn’t have been able to say that with a straight face. This might be a little harder than I thought.
As if to prove my point, he raised his eyebrows at me as he lowered the phone. “Really, Sugar? That’s the best you’ve got?”
“Shut up and take your turn.”
He must have already been thinking about it in the restroom because he typed something in without hesitation, and a second later, the message flashed up on my phone.
Forcing myself to keep my expression completely neutral, I looked up at him as I spoke the words out loud. “It doesn’t bother me at all when words get spelled wrong in advertisements.”
Cam cracked a smile even if I didn’t. “Alright, your lying skills have improved. Looks like we need to turn this up a notch.”
“Agreed.” I sent the next message in my list over to him, and I could have sworn the muscles in his cheek twitched even if his lips didn’t move.
“I keep a cheerleading outfit in my closet that I put on for special occasions. It makes my ass look great and the ladies love it.”
Seriously? Not even a wobble. Who was this stone-faced man and what had he done with Cameron Bailey?
“That’s how you want to play this?” His smile came as he typed something else into his phone and when I read it, I bit hard on the inside of my cheek to keep from reacting.
My eyes raised to his, only to find him watching me with a smug smirk.
“Come on, Sugar. Out loud.”
He’d asked for it now. Clearing my throat, I read it out in as flat a tone as I could manage. “My first boyfriend ruined all other men for me. No one will ever satisfy me like he did.”
As I reached the end, still completely straight-faced, I could have sworn disappointment flashed in his eyes.
“Bad move, Bailey,” I told him now that I had passed his test. “You just put sex on the table.”
“I didn’t say anything specifically about sex,” he tried to argue, but his protest came too late. The damage had already been done.
When he got my next message, he only made it half-way through. “I have a hard time concentrating at work because all I can think about is Jason Barnly bending me over his desk and…” He couldn’t even finish, choosing to take the shot rather than complete the sentence. His cheeks hollowed at the alcohol’s bitter sting, and he gave his head a shake as he swallowed it down. “You’re going to regret that, Sugar.”
“Try me.”
We went back and forth, the things we were texting each other getting progressively filthier and more absurd at the same time, until we each only had one shot left and the room had grown distinctly blurrier than it had been when we started.
“Your turn,” Cam said, squinting down at his phone as he tried to type something out. Just watching him made me laugh, and therein lay the danger of the game. The drunker you got, the harder it became to keep a straight face. “There you go.”
My phone buzzed and I opened my text message, the words dancing around the screen as I tried to focus on them. “If they made a Cam-shaped disco, I would buy one for every day of the week.” Confused, I looked up at him. “What?”
“That’s not what it says,” he protested, taking my phone from me clumsily. He brought it right up to his face to read it and then swore when he realized I had, in fact, said it correctly. “It was supposed to say dildo. Fucking auto-correct.”
That set me giggling, which set him off too. “Too bad for you,” I taunted. “Now, it’s your turn.”
I knew I had to pull out the big guns here so I wrote the most ridiculous thing I could think of, a line from one of Cam’s favourite movies that he always used to say for me in a ridiculous dolphin voice whenever he wanted to make me smile, and when he opened up the text, he started laughing before he even got one word out.
“Yes! Victory!” My celebration got the attention of just about everyone else in the bar, which had started to fill up more as the evening wore on, and Cam quickly shushed me.
“Keep it between us, Sugar. These folks don’t need to know all the details, but I suppose you’re right. You won fair and square.”
He picked up his last shot, but I grabbed it from his hands and drank it myself as he watched me in surprise. Somehow, we were suddenly very close to each other.
