《Of Romance and Revenge》Five

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Present Day...

I sit there next to Oliver, trying to push back tears despite the flood of bad memories. The air between us feels a lot heavier. I know he was remembering the same thing I was.

The memories hurt just as badly as the day it happened.

Oliver had been my world, the one person I could trust and count on. I look anywhere but at him. I try to collect myself, doing my best to prove that I wasn't still affected by everything.

"Camden..." Oliver sounds unsure and vulnerable, very unlike him.

I hate the sound- it makes me want to wrap him in a hug and forgive him for how he treated me.

"Oh, look, an empty bottle. You want to keep going with tequila or are we switching it up?"

I avoid whatever it is he wants to say, not ready for that conversation yet, and reach behind the counter before he has a chance to answer my question. He sighs deeply as he watches me and rubs a hand along his stubble.

"You're going to have such a bad headache tomorrow," he smirks as I take a swig straight from the bottle.

There's no use bothering with the shot glasses anymore. He declines the bottle as I try to pass it to him, but motions for Marley to bring us something. She places two water bottles down in front of us with a wink before turning back to her cleaning.

I hadn't even realized the bar had almost completely cleared out. Only a few stragglers remained, scattered out amongst the tables. Oliver and I are the only two actually sitting at the bar.

"My tolerance isn't quite as bad as you remember," I stick my tongue out childishly at him.

We both burst into laughter at that, a good indication of our drunken state.

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"Listen, I love you both, and I know you're my boss, but you two need to get the fuck out so I can close up," Marley calls from the register. "Do I need to call an Uber to come get your drunk asses?"

"Nope. It's nice out, I wanna walk," I stumble over my words a little, and when I stand up, things are a little wobbly.

Oliver reaches out to steady me, his hand on my back, and I shudder at the touch. He pulls away instantly, thinking I was shying away from his touch.

Admittedly, it felt good.

I wave a sloppy goodbye to Marley and head for the door. Glancing back to see why Oliver isn't following behind me, I see him putting a hundred dollar bill into her hand.

"I'll swing by tomorrow to place a liquor order, just make me an inventory list of everything that's low," I hear him tell her.

Jesus, did we really drink that much?

When he makes his way back over to me, I'm leaning against the door frame with my eyes closed. The wood feels nice and cool against my forehead.

"Ready, drunky?" he says with a soft laugh.

"Not drunk," I mumble, but I let him wrap his arm around me again anyways to stand me up.

We walk outside, side by side, our shoulders grazing each other occasionally as we attempt to stay upright. We've walked these streets together countless times before- it feels just like old times.

In fact, it's a lot less awkward walking home with him than I expected, but that could just be the drinks talking. Either way, we easily fell into step with each other as we walked back to my house.

We laughed about old memories together, glossing over the obvious bad ones, and gushed about new experiences we'd had in our time apart. We joked about the time I fell off the boat on the summer lake trip our families took together and I made sure to taunt him about the time he got caught shoplifting a cheap bottle of vodka from Ms. Baker's convenience store when we were sixteen.

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She still checks his pockets every time he goes in there, he tells me.

He tells me what it was like getting started in the family business- leaving out the illegal stuff for my sake- and how crazy it's been running the thing since our dads retired. In turn, I tell him about all my adventures from traveling abroad and how different my little college town was from where we grew up.

By the time we made it to my front porch, things almost felt normal between us. It was almost like no time had passed at all. Like he didn't hurt me and I didn't leave without a proper goodbye.

Almost.

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