‘Come here.’
Anika obeys, but as she moves to stand between his legs, staring down at Cam, it occurs to her to ask, ‘Are you angry with me?’ Her voice is a whisper.
He doesn’t look at her for a moment. ‘Are you angry with yourself?’ he asks, then turns his gaze up at her. Anika doesn’t know how to answer. They’re quiet for a moment.
‘I don’t know.’
Cam seems frozen, like he’s conflicted over something. But then he pulls her closer, so close, until his lips connect with the skin right above her heart. He kisses it softly and then moves his mouth lower, kissing and biting her breasts and nipples until Anika begins to moan.
‘Cam …’
She steps away enough to allow him to slip off his boxers before he resumes his position on the bed. Impatiently, Anika climbs astride him, straddling his lap. She rises up and reaches onehand underneath her to guide him inside her. They both groan loudly as she sinks easily over him, their bodies connected, grasping one another urgently. It’s like she needs to be closer to him than could ever be possible. She squeezes him inside of her, arching her back and undulating in his lap while Cam’s hands cup her bum, supporting her rhythm. She presses her eyes closed. The sensation of being with Cam like this feels incredible and frightening – like life itself. Tears begin to sting her eyelids, because Anika suddenly realises that she’s still in a fight to feel alive.
‘Cam, I need …’
She doesn’t even know how to finish the sentence, but when Cam says, ‘Take it,’ his words send her over the edge. She emits a loud, high-pitched whimper as she climaxes and Cam’s fingers press hard into her flesh as he hunches forward into his own orgasm. Their muscles relax, both of them panting hard. She feels a moment of perfect peace with him still inside her.
He sighs. ‘You good?’ His voice is low, his eyes roaming all around her sweating body, running his hands up her thighs and to her waist. He reaches up to brush her braids back over her shoulders and his gaze moves to her face. ‘Sometimes I feel like I can’t take you in all at once,’ he tells her. There’s that ripple between his brows again, as though she’s a puzzle he can’t quite figure out.
Anika wants to tell him everything – her fears, her hopes. That this is her dream and that she can control her dreams now. She can stop this from ever failing with the stroke of her pen on the page of tomorrow.
But all she says is …
‘I love you.’
Cam stares at her and for once he seems at a loss for words. She almost tells him she doesn’t need to hear it back, but the words don’t sound truthful even in her head.
Time seems to stretch into his silence.
‘Anika …’ he whispers, but she shakes her head.
‘It’s fine.’
She shifts until Cam slips out of her, but then he quickly and wordlessly wraps his arms around her body, lifting her and standing up. Their hot skin is still sticky with sweat as he carries her, pulling aside the bedclothes and settling her inside them before climbing in beside her and holding her tightly.
All of this should have been under control. Tonight, Kwesi, this with Cam … Has she been wrong all this time? Is love the one thing she’s not worthy of, even after everything she’s been able to change for herself –aboutherself?
Eventually she feels Cam’s muscles relax as he begins to fall asleep. She whispers his name to make sure, then disentangles her limbs from his and shuffles out of the other side of the bed. For the first time in a long time, she feels genuinely vulnerable. Anika looks down at Cam’s sleeping form. She felt it. She can’t believe he can’t have felt it, too?Maybe this is just how love shows up for me.Perhaps it’s something she must jump to touch, held aloft just out of reach since she was a girl.
Anika sighs, turning her gaze around the room looking for her phone. A missed call notification is on the screen when she picks it up, from Hattie. The second one she’s ignored in the last week. And just visible in the faint gloom, she sees the diary sitting on her bedside table.
There’s only one way to make this work.
She picks up the diary and moves to the door, pulling on the robe hanging there and padding away to the bathroom.
She needs to fix this.
Chapter Forty-Two
Tuesday 28th August
A week later, Anika is on the train into work for the first day of her new job, the sky outside the window mottled with dull white clouds. She scrolls her streaming app trying to choose an album to listen to, frowning at her own indecision. In the meantime, the silence in Anika’s ears feels deafening. Without Cam’s show to listen to in the morning, she’s felt slightly adrift. His schedule for the press tour in Europe was pulled forward, and a couple of days after the incident with Kwesi he had to head off for his business trip. His show is being covered by another of the station’s DJs, but Anika misses Cam too much to tune in.
Things have been a little awkward between them since the unreturned ‘I love you’. Some part of her wished they could have combined a holiday with his tour, but it seemed too soon to insinuate that. There would be time for a perfect getaway once any hiccups between them were ironed out with the help of the diary.
Giving up trying to decide what to listen to, Anika selects one of the app’s playlists and smiles as Ari Lennox begins to sing about her new apartment. She settles back to stare out of the train window, pushing thoughts of Cam aside in anticipation of the day ahead. This is where she was always meant to be – hurtling towards a future that’s everything she’s dreamt of. Everything else will come right – she’s certain of it.
A teenage schoolgirl with cornrows and an oversized blazertakes the seat beside Anika as the train reaches the next stop. She glances over at the girl, dark skin shining, braces, a light smattering of acne on the forehead. It’s like looking at herself from years earlier – the girl from the first four-and-a-half years of the diary’s pages, the ones that she wrote as a teen. Anika only has a few months’ worth of space left to fill in there now. So far, projecting her life a day ahead at a time has got her a new look, a new job, a new man and a new outlook on her life.I need to remember that, she reiterates to herself.It’s working.
