Page 44 of See You Again

Cami felt bad about the other day and invited him for coffee. She knew he had to have seen her post the night before. She’d struggled with the caption, finally settling on

Late night dinner @jamesbloom accompanied by a heart emoji.

It got the message across without being too overt.

What she hadn’t expected was Justin’s over-the-top reaction to the confirmation that she was dating James Bloom.

“After what he did? You’re dating him?”

Cami’s forehead wrinkled. Justin was blowing this way out of proportion. “After what he did? It’s been more than a decade. We were just kids.”

“He used you in his fight with his father, and then he dropped you. You were so sad those weeks before graduation.”

It surprised Cami when an echo of old pain threatened to surface. James had been callous and acted completely out of character the night she’d met his father. It had devastated her at the time, not just what he’d said, but the fact that he had practically surgically removed himself from her life immediately after.

She shook herself. It was a long time ago. Besides, she and James weren’t really dating. If Justin thought she was an idiot for a month, she could live with that. The money from Kip could change things for them.

And you like being with him, again.

Cami ignored the whisper in her brain. “That was a long time ago, Justin.”

He shook his head in disgust. “I can’t believe you’re falling for this again. How did it happen?”

“I’m not falling for anything. I’m an adult and I know what I’m doing. I ran into him at a hotel bar. We started talking and things went from there.” That wasn’t a lie. Memories of how James touched her that night rushed back to her, and she hoped her cheeks weren’t as red as they felt.

“You always think the best of everyone. You don’t understand men like him. He was raised in a family who takes what they want, and they don’t care who they hurt. I know. My family may not have the same level of influence, but I grew up with guys like that. Spoiled. Thinking every woman is theirs for the taking.”

His patronizing tone sparked Cami’s anger. “You were friends with him, too. If he was so terrible, why did you hang out with him?”

In fact, you sucked up to James every chance you got.

The disloyal thought startled her, but now that she thought about it, it was true. Justin might come from a wealthy family, he constantly bragged about his father’s country club and what the yacht club had planned for the summer, but that was nowhere near the life of privilege James had been exposed to.

David Bloom was a billionaire with a massive global media empire. James had never postured the way Justin did. It was one of the things she’d loved about him. He talked far more about the mother who raised him than his father. Cami knew it was a sore spot—the expectations from his father and the world. James hadn’t wanted to talk about it, so they didn’t.

“I—I should have spoken up sooner.” Justin’s words brought her back to the present. “Like you said, we were young. It wasn’t until I heard what he said that night about you that I saw him for who he really was. Selfish, egotistical.”

At the time, it seemed to make sense. The night was already off to a rough start. The gala was her first black-tie event and she was petrified she would say or do the wrong thing. James had been distant from the moment he picked her up. He was always reserved, but this was something more. As the evening wore on, it had only grown worse. His father had started with barbed comments about her upbringing and then proceeded to ask increasingly intrusive questions until she was squirming.

Then she saw Justin talking to David Bloom and James. They’d all looked over at her, making it obvious she was the topic of conversation. She’d felt sick and not just from the multiple glasses of champagne she’d consumed.

There was something about the expressions on their faces, and David Bloom’s disgust whenever his eyes landed on her.

Justin told her David Bloom had approached James and him at the bar and that he’d witnessed James and his father’s argument take an ugly turn. Apparently, James had admitted to his father that he’d only asked Cami to be his date because he knew her being at the charity ball would irritate his father.

Then later, knowing that she and Justin were friends, the man approached Justin alone to talk about Cami. David Bloom told him there were influential people at the gala he wanted James to meet and could Justin get Cami home. His words tracked with how rude David Bloom had been to her all evening.

Cami hadn’t believed him. She thought for sure Justin had misunderstood. Until she tried to speak to James. He had been achingly handsome in his tuxedo but so cold and remote. Nothing like the boy she’d fallen in love with over the previous months. When Cami said she was leaving the gala alone, his silent, glacial stare had pierced her, making every word Justin relayed to her feel excruciatingly real.

The next day when Cami woke with swollen eyes, and a killer hangover, something didn’t feel right about the whole situation. She’d drunk a lot of champagne, hoping to dull her nerves about feeling so out of place at the fancy event, and then even more when it was clear at dinner James’s father didn’t approve of her.

Unfortunately, by the time she felt human enough to call, James had blocked her. He moved out of his apartment and didn’t come to their last two classes. He was simply… gone. Breaking her heart in the process.

Cami learned from a classmate that James enlisted in the military and was leaving immediately after graduation. When she tried to approach him on campus, he pretended he didn’t see her. Then at graduation, he looked in her eyes and turned his back. Message received.

Now, listening to Justin’s outrage as he recounted what had happened, the feeling that something was off returned.

James was selfish and a user, but he enlisted in the Navy? He didn’t need to do that. After he was discharged and finished law school, he went to work at a prosecutor’s office instead of the family business which she knew his father had wanted. James wasn’t stupid. The path he chose was a lot harder than it needed to be. None of that pointed to the selfish, egotistical man Justin was painting.