Page 60 of Curious
Cam chuckles. “That’s a funny way of saying you like the same things I do.”
“What can I say? I’m weird.”
“I think you mean ‘cool,’” Cam says, squeezing my hand.
We walk into the hole-in-the-wall restaurant, and a group of guys a little younger than me gasp when they see Camden.
“Oh my god, it’s one of the CoopBros,” one of them says.
Cam scrubs the back of his neck. “Yeah. Hey.”
“Can we take a selfie, please?”
Cam shrugs. “Sure.”
Then one of them recognizes me. “Wait, that’s the guy from your latest video.”
I wave. “Hey.”
“That’s my husband, Shelby. We got married this summer.” The proud way Cam says it makes my heart soar.
“Oh my god, congrats,” one of the guys says. “Shelby, can you get in the picture, too?”
After looking at their expectant faces, I give in. “Sure. Why not?”
We all crowd in, four of them plus the two of us, and Cam holds the camera because he’s the tallest. After snapping off a couple of shots, Cam gives them back the phone, and we go to our table.
I’m absolutely thrilled that Cam claimed me in front of his fans.
“Do you get recognized often?” I ask.
He slides into the booth. “Sometimes. It happens.”
At the table, we brainstorm things to do today. I make sure that whatever we do, he likes, too, but we still end up with quite a list: shopping for lamps, going to the La Brea Tar Pits, checking out the trains in Travel Town, and sitting on rooftops among them.
“Why do you like rooftops?” he asks. “From your reaction to the Ferris wheel, I thought you didn’t like heights.”
“That’s different. It moved. Roofs stay put. When I was a kid, we lived in this apartment, and it felt like the roof was the one place where I could sneak off and get away from everyone. Like I had a place to go no one knew about, but I was still in the building. It was an alternate world.”
Cam grins. “Same. I always like going on roofs. We’ll have to go to a rooftop place for dinner tonight. Will that work?”
“Sure. Happy birthday to me,” I mutter.
But despite my grumpiness, we do a lot of things on our list, and it ends up being a pretty spectacular day.
When we get to the restaurant for dinner, after spending the day all over Los Angeles, Cam gets a shy look on his face and hands me a gift bag he had stashed somewhere in his truck.
I furrow my brow. “When did you have time to do this?”
He chuckles. “Actually, I had this made a while ago, but I hadn’t given it to you yet. So it can be a birthday present. Or, if you don’t like it, ananti-birthdaypresent.”
Undoing the tissue paper, I pull out a dark blue T-shirt with text in yellow Futura font that says “Galactic OSHA Inspector.” While my first reaction is to laugh hard, my second reaction is to swoon. Because Cam thought of me and had something custom made for me.
When people say it’s the thought that counts, they mean things like this. It’s just another way that Camden and I are starting to have inside jokes and shared memories and sex and legal consequences. In other words, what I think of as a real marriage.
There might be one thing missing from my list, though.
CHAPTER19
