I learned something he never told her.

I learned about his moonlighting job.

“You and I could go places,” he said to me that day.

He’s a lawyer and he was one of my mom’s sources on a huge story she broke uncovering the sexting senator. Cam had all sorts of shady clients, but that also meant he knew all sorts of shady things – things she wanted to know to bust the senator. He’d played a role in prosecuting the guy, but yet he also ran a high-class call girl ring on the side.

Call Cam morally ambiguous. Call him a hypocrite. Call him the best fucking time I ever had.

“Hey babydoll! You look so fucking beautiful,” he says as I sit on the bar stool next to him. I barely have time to say hello, because he continues, “How could you let me go this long without seeing you? I’ve been starving. I’m like a dying man in a desert and you walk in and I can drink again.”

“You’re mixing metaphors. When you’re starving you’re hungry. When you’re in the desert you’re thirsty,” I say playfully, wagging my index finger as I correct him.

“When it comes to you I’m starving and I’m thirsty,” he says, inching closer, so I can smell his cologne, a cool, forest-y scent that’s both sexy and sleazy at the same time.

“Looks like you already started.” I tip my forehead to his martini.

“I couldn’t help myself. I was waiting for you, babydoll.” Then he leans in for a kiss. I turn my face so his lips brush my cheek.

I loved teasing him then. Turns out it still rocks. It still sends a tingle from my toes to my nose. God, this feels so good. It’s the opposite of being blackmailed. It’s the other side of my mom setting me up with boys.

It’s my side. My turn. My time.

“The cheek? Six months and I get the cheek? It’s been a long six months. C’mon, just one kiss for your old man Cam.”

I shake my head. Cam’s never been about the kissing. Cam’s about the access for me. An entree into a world of power, into my very own war games.

“How about a drink then?”

“You don’t remember?” I give Cam a pointed look.

He leans in to whisper. “Course I do. But you’ve got your ID. And Tom —” Cam nods to the bartender at the other end “— has always believed you were twenty-two, my babydoll.”

“Cam! I’m not talking about my age. I’m talking about the fact that I don’t drink.”

He holds up his hands and shrugs. “You changed everything else. How’m I to know you didn’t change that too?”

“Touché,” I say.

Drinking has never been my thing. You could surround me with trays of cocktails, with tables full of sexy, little frothy drinks, sugared on the rim, and I wouldn’t even notice them. I wouldn’t even touch them.

“A Diet Coke for my babydoll, Tom,” Cam says to the bartender, then winks at me.

“Hey, Layla,” Tom says and I flash him a bright smile. Then to Cam, “You remembered.”

“I remember everything about you. I remember you’re a junkie for your diet pop. And maybe for what I got going on again too?” He raises an eyebrow.

I give him a coquettish shrug. This is what I miss most. The banter, the back and forth, the chase.

“C’mon. You miss the biz, don’t you? You miss the way we played them all. You wore my favorite outfit after all. You wore the outfit they all wanted you in,” he says and trails off to look me up and down.

He holds me tight with his dark blue eyes, the color of the early-morning dawn before the sun breaks. His eyes are like a tractor beam and I can’t let go. I know I shouldn’t be looking at him like this, or letting him look at me like he’s doing, reeling me in with reminders of power, of playing, of the game being on our terms. But I’ve taken the pill, I’ve swallowed it once again, and now the effects are kicking in.

I finger the hem of my skirt — my admission that I came to play.

Then the low whistle from between his lips, the shake of his head, the grin that won’t stop. I’ve been ignited again, a sweet rush of what once was is now draped over me, and the past is no longer the past. It’s the present once more. I am back in time and it’s all so familiar and safe in its own way.

“You were easy,” I say. “You always liked the schoolgirl in me.”

He cocks his head to the side. “So I’m easy, babydoll. So sue me.”

“I know a good lawyer,” I tease.

“I couldn’t represent you. Conflict of interest.”

I laugh as Tom plunks down my glass of Diet Coke. I tell him thanks, then take a drink. “That’s a good way to describe me.”

“I like conflicts of interest,” he says. “But somehow we found the loopholes, baby.”

“We were all loopholes,” I say because Cam and I covered ourselves in secrets. Like pulling a blanket over our heads, we were huddled in our fort, never letting anyone know we were running the numbers, making a mint, playing all the strange men in Manhattan who wanted a pretty young thing to look at them, talk to them, spank them, or tell them how big they were even when they were tiny little men.

Never more than that. He kept me clean. He never wanted anything to happen to me. Never wanted anyone to touch me below the waist. One of his clients tried to slip a hand up my skirt when I met him at a bar, and Cam made sure the guy had trouble walking the next few days. He protected me.

“Look at you,” Cam says, his eyes gliding over me, cataloguing every curve, every shape. “Back here at Bliss with me.” This was our spot and no one ever knew we were here. The place where I was Layla, Cam’s top earner, not my mother’s daughter, not the pretty pony she pawned off on her suitor’s sons. I was the player, I was the one who decided. I could say yes or no to anyone Cam brought to me. I could turn down the clothes he picked up for me at Bloomingdale’s. I had veto power over everything. He gave me choices.

“Just like old times. You by my side.”

“It’s not like old times, Cam,” I say, but I don’t mean it, because it is like old times. Meeting him after a job. Toasting, like we were painting the town red because we’d figured out the trick. We were like con artists, and our marks were men who liked girls.

“Tell me you miss it, baby. Tell me you miss the way we pulled them in,” he says again, moving closer to me, trying to nuzzle my neck.

“Not a bit,” I say, keeping my hand on his chest. Familiar ground—his chest, the game. He’s playing too. He loves it too. We are cut from the same cloth.

“Not one tiny little bitty baby ounce?” He holds up his thumb and index finger to show a sliver of space. I press my index finger between them, shake my head and bat my eyes.

“Harley,” he says softly. “You know I missed you.”

“Don’t call me Harley,” I say sharply.

“Harley, you’re my Harley,” he says. “I missed you more than anyone. You know that right? Nothing’s been the same without you.”

“You know who I am to you.”

He sighs and says, “Come back to me, Layla.”

I let him come closer, especially now that he’s used the name he gave me, the name I took when I was his. “Layla,” he says again. “My Layla. You know I missed you.”

My Layla.

All the months melt away. I fall back. Back into pre-Miranda, pre-meeting, pre-Trey, prehistoric Layla before I shed all this, before I learned what I’d been doing was bad for me. Because nothing is bad now that the past is here again. Everything feels right, how it should be, how it was.

So in a tiny voice, barely a whisper, I say, “I miss it too.”

Cam hears me, taking my cue, running his big hand through my hair. I let him, leaning into his hand, a cat arching its back to be pet. He closes his eyes, sighs and says, “You belong to me. Work with me again.”

“I know,” I whisper, sliding into my old skin. It’s so easy, so simple to return to the girl I once was, the only girl I have ever known myself to be.

“You’re mine. You’re not theirs. You don’t belong with them, those people in your group. You belong by my side. We can conquer the world again.”