This is the start of Cami and Zander's story arc that was first hinted in Her Daddy, Dom, and Neighbor in One. A crossover or two from A Dom's Best Friend also appears here. There is no sex in this first part, but I promise that will change in parts two and three.
***
I feel as if I've wasted my time here, Cami mused. She sipped with sullen, deep red lips, pursed in annoyance and thought. I've spent too much time trying to get Zander out of my mind, too much time trying not to be who I am in order to make myself palatable to him. And, for what? For him to make that declaration that siblings of friends shouldn't date the sibling's friend?
Not that she wished Cassie to disappear or to never exist, but her brother's determination of dating rules based on a laughable possibility of Cassie one day maybe having a relationship with Max, Zander's best friend, had really put a kink in Cami's plans.
Or, rather, it hadn't put a kink in those plans. Unbeknownst to many of her friends and all of her morally starched family, Cami was a closet kinkster. She simply mainstreamed really well.
From the time she was eighteen, Cami had sought out dominant personalities when she dated. Slowly her proclivities morphed further, and the partners she sought served as the Sadist to her masochist.
Pain was her drug; pain induced her high, as addictive as lines of coke that her cousin used to snort. Pain, paradoxically, made her feel alive.
A shrink would have a field day with her. Was her walk on the kinky wild side a result of the guilt from the failure to protect her much-more-outgoing cousin who overdosed on their shared eighteenth birthday? Or, more likely, was it a derivation of her self-defense mechanism coming into play to render herself disgusting to her secret love?
Zander Leland. Her best friend Cassie's older brother.
With deadened cerulean eyes, her thoughts drifted back to the time when she realized that he was the one.
***
Ellie was late for their shared birthday party. Her cousin's tardy behavior was nothing new; for months, her vivacious, popular cousin had been slipping away as her boyfriend introduced her to new and frightening substances to give her a fix, to make her more malleable to what he and his friends wanted to do with her.
Her best friend Cassie had helped plan the party, and she and her brother Zander, nine years their senior but hot in a way guys their age could never hope to be, walked toward Cami, twin worried expressions marring their brows, now furrowed.
Identical brown, chocolatey warmth echoed their concern for Cami. Cami, conversely, was furious. This was their eighteenth birthday, godamnit! How dare she!?
In frustration, Cami grasped her curly blonde locks-Zander had taken to calling her Goldilocks, as a joke, as of late-in two handsful and yanked, growling.
Zander struggled for levity. "Careful, there, Goldilocks. You sound a bit like Papa Bear, there."
Luckily, the other guests hadn't noticed her ire. Around them, people mingled and partied, oblivious to the other guest of honor's absence.
Cami's glare was cut off by the ringing of the doorbell. "Finally," she muttered stomping to the door. Cassie and Zander trailed behind, as confused as Cami when a grim-faced policeman was revealed on the opposite side of the door.
Something deep down caused her to realize instantly that something was incredibly wrong, that Ellie wasn't just late for the party, that she would not be coming. Over the policeman's calmly sober explanation, Cami's heartbeat thundered, drowning out his words. The horrible pity in his eyes conveyed his message, though.
Great gulping breaths and hysterical laughter brought Cami up short for a few seconds, only for her to realize that the sounds came from her. Anything to drown out his words.
Ellie. Was. Dead. Overdose. Her cousin, as close to her as if she had been her own twin, was gone. Gone forever.
Whirling, Cami sought out safety in the confusion that brought acidic chunks up past the barrier of her throat. Her eyes settled on Zander's soft gaze, and she allowed her vision to fill only with his face until everything faded to black.
* * *
In the days that passed, Zander and Cassie were never far from Cami's side. They bolstered her, twin columns of supportive determination, flanking her, at Ellie's funeral.
Cami stayed at their parents' house, and Zander, who had moved out several years before, slept by her bedside each night in the weeks that followed. Cami simply could not sleep without his strong fingers laced with hers, his calm, brown eyes steady on her face, and his warm voice talking about the mundane, anything really, to help guide her to sleep.
The few times that she had relied on Cassie to help her get to sleep, she ended up feigning slumber, as Cassie's ragged optimism hurt during her grief. Cami loved her friend dearly, but Cassie didn't understand how to help. Those nights were filled with guilty nightmares, of Cami screaming at Ellie to not go out, to stay home. On those nights, she awoke screaming. Zander would be the one to come running, auburn hair matted with sweat, chest bare and heaving. And he would slowly, patiently help her back to sleep again.
With Zander, she didn't feel as if she had to pretend that she was okay, or at least that things were getting better.
Her days leading up to college were spent on the lake with Zander, quietly absorbing nature in all its wholesomeness in an effort to blot out the ugliness of Ellie's boyfriend's arrest and trial. The charge was manslaughter; a jury quickly found him guilty the following year.
In August, Zander and Cassie worriedly looked at her as she defiantly glared back at them. "The plan was for us to go to college, Cassie. We were going to room together. You and me and-Ellie," Cami broke off, biting her lip, swearing resolutely that THIS time, she wouldn't cry simply from attempting to say her cousin's name.
Cami turned away to regain control of her emotions, but soon she felt the enveloping warmth of Zander's brotherly hug. With a deep breath that only tilted into shudders at the end, she inhaled the fresh scent of the outdoors that clung to him like the most erotic of colognes.
She shoved down those thoughts. Zander did not feel that way about her; she was the burden, his kid sister's grieving, fucked-up best friend, not the femme fatale to woo away this man nine years older than she.
"It's okay; I don't mind. My apartment is less than half a mile away from campus," Zander rationalized, his breath warm in her ear. Resolutely, she tamped down those newly confusing feelings of lust.
With a definitive shake of her head, she responded with an unequivocal "No."
She glanced over at Cassie and winced. Her brightly optimistic friend appeared more like the proverbial puppy that had been kicked. "Why not?" Cassie whispered.
Zander's comforting hand smoothed her blonde waves. "Yes. Why not, Goldilocks?"
"Because we will cramp your style, Mr. Hotshot Attorney." With a pang, Cami wrenched from his delicious grasp. "And you will cramp ours." Looking to Cassie for support, she continued. "We are going to be college girls. This is our first taste of freedom. And the last thing either of us needs is our de facto brother-well, you are Cassie's actual brother-raining on our parade."
A hooting laugh alerted the trio to the presence of the understood fourth of their group of late, Zander's best friend Max Phillips. "Cami has you there. You remember our wild university days, right, Zan?"
Zander's wolfish grin and the complicated "man handshake" were his only responses. Cami looked from one to the other expectantly, hoping for further explanation, but none was forthcoming. Then, Zander's concerned brown orbs slide to Cami, capturing the gaze of her bright blue eyes. "I just want to make sure that you will be okay."
Wincing from that implied reminder that Cami equaled burden, she ground out, "I'll be fine."
Those words would haunt her as they moved into the cramped, two-person dorm room and began their courses of study. Ever with an eye brightly on the future, Cassie tackled her early childhood education classes with gusto, humming happily each night as she read and studied.
Cami, by contrast, floundered in her first few weeks. Originally an English major, she found she could no longer find comfort in the classics. Several sleepless nights caused a concerned Resident Advisor to recommend counseling.
It was in the counselor's office at the health unit on the sprawling university campus, that Cami broke down completely-and slowly began to heal. Her first few sessions were unremarkable. Cami responded to the counselor's softly probing questions with shrugs and other non-commital responses.
During her fourth visit, Cami espied a photograph on the counselor's desk. Her "Who is that?" was meant to elicit a bland response, but her glance back at the older woman's dark eyes revealed the same grief she herself had felt the weight of the last several months.
"My sister," Dr. Layton revealed with a sad, tight-lipped smile. "She passed away five years ago. A drug overdose."
"I'm so sorry," came Cami's polite reply, but Dr. Layton's explanation unlocked the key holding back Cami's grief.
Slow, trickling tears quickly morphed into gulping sobs as she struggled, incoherently, to explain her reaction. "My cousin. Ellie. She was. Supposed to be. Here. Drug overdose. March. Eighteenth birthday."
Cami's reaction seemed to guide Dr. Layton back into her mien as a counselor. Having read Cami's file with her vital statistics, she asked, "Your eighteenth birthday was when she overdosed?" She handed Cami a tissue and watched as it quickly absorbed moisture and was shredded by the girl's clenching fingers.
Cami shook her head. "Both of ours. We shared the same birthday."
Even Dr. Layton's counselor training couldn't hide her shock. "I'm so sorry."
Curled into a fetal position on that dreaded chintz couch in the counselor's office in the health unit, Cami began to heal.
* * *
Several months later, in February, Cami exited Dr. Layton's office with lightness in her heart. Her counselor had agreed that addiction counseling would be a good fit for her, career-wise.
Unseasonably warm, even for Dallas in February, the sun shone on Cami's bare shoulders and, as she tilted her face up to feel the heated rays, on her soft smile of satisfaction.
Which is why she missed seeing the approaching familiar figure until she bumped into him-quite literally. "Cami!" Zander exclaimed, righting her, his fingers brushing the inside of her elbow. "Cassie said you would be here!"
