“My ideas are never scary or bad.”
“Well…”
“Name one,” he challenged.
I didn’t have to think hard. “How about when you tied a string around Raphael’s shell and called it a leash?”
“That was an innovative idea!”
“The poor thing just stood there and put its head in its shell.”
Cam scuffed. “That’s really no different than any other day.”
I laughed. “True.”
“This idea is great.” Slapping slices of pizza on two paper plates, he winked at me. “They’re saying that it’s supposed to snow through tomorrow morning.”
I was caught between glee and annoyance. Snow was great. Walking on campus with snow or ice on the ground was not.
“And I seriously doubt that any of the classes will be cancelled tomorrow,” he continued as we walked into my living room. “But a lot of people will be out and the teachers will expect that.”
“Okay.” I sat on the couch, scooting over for him.
“So I was thinking we should skip tomorrow, stay right here and watch shitty movies all day.”
My first response was to say I couldn’t skip a whole day’s worth of classes, but as I met Cam’s mischievous gaze, I said screw it. “That is a brilliant idea.”
“I know, right?” He tapped his head. “I’m full of great shit.”
“Yeah, you’re definitely full of it…”
“Ha.”
I giggled as I bit into the cheesy goodness. Cam ate half of the pizza and when Ollie stopped by, he finished it off. It amazed me how the two guys could eat so much and be in such drool-worthy shape. I ate two slices and gained an extra ass.
Sitting between the two boys, I dozed off while they watched a mini-marathon of a reality show about moonshining. When I woke up, Ollie was gone and although I was lying against Cam, his body was unnaturally tense.
I sat up, yawning as I pushed my hair out of my face. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to fall asleep on you.”
He looked at me, expression unreadable. Unease stirred like a pit of vipers in my stomach. His jaw was so tight that I wondered if he was going to crack his molars.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
Cam exhaled softly as he glanced at the coffee table. “You got a message while you were sleeping.”
My gaze followed his, landing on my cellphone. At first I didn’t see what the big deal was, but then anxiety rose like a fast-moving storm. Wide-awake, I shot forward and grabbed the cellphone. Tapping the screen, my heart jumped.
You’re a lying whore. How can you live with yourself?
I dragged in a breath, but it got stuck. I stared at the message, wishing it would simply vanish from existence.
“It flashed across your screen when it came through,” he said.
Hands shaking, I deleted the message and sat the phone down. Hurt and a wave of irrational anger rolled through me. Those two emotions felt better than the threatening panic. “You looked at the text?”
“It’s not like I did it on purpose.” He leaned forward, hands splayed over his knees. “It was right there, sitting on your screen.”
“But you didn’t have to look!” I accused, backing off the couch.
Cam’s eyes narrowed. “Avery, I wasn’t sneaking through your stuff. The damn text came through. I looked before I could stop myself. Maybe that was wrong.”
“It was wrong!”
“Okay. It was wrong. I’m sorry.” He drew in a deep breath. “But that doesn’t change the fact that I saw that text.”
I was frozen, standing in the middle of my living room. This was pretty damn close to my worst fear coming true. Him finding out what happened held the first spot, but this was a close second and just as horrifying.
“Avery,” he said in a low, careful voice. In that moment, I realized he wasn’t mad at me. Not in the slightest and not even after I yelled at him for looking at the wretched text. Somehow that was worse than him being angry with me. “Why would you get a text like that?”
My heart threw itself against my ribs painfully. “I don’t know.”
A dubious look crossed his face.
“I don’t know,” I said again, latching onto the lie with everything I had in me. “Every so often I get a text like this, but I don’t know why. I think it’s a wrong number kind of thing.”
Cam stared at me. “You don’t know who that’s from?”
“No.” And that was the truth. “It says unknown caller. You saw that.”
His shoulders tensed at that and then he clenched his knees. Several seconds passed while my pulse pounded.
“I’m sorry for freaking out on you,” I added in a rush. “It just surprised me. I was asleep and I wake up and I could tell something was wrong. Then I thought… I don’t know what I thought, but I’m sorry.”
“Stop apologizing, Avery.” He scooted to the edge of the couch. “I don’t need to hear that you’re sorry. I want you to be honest with me, sweetheart. That’s all I want. If you’re getting messages like that, I need to know about that.”
“Why?”
His dark brows knitted. “Because I’m your boyfriend and I care if someone is calling you a whore!”
I flinched.
Cam looked away, chest rising. “Honestly? It pisses me off, even if it’s an accidental text. No one should be sending you shit like that.” His gaze settled on me again. An eternity stretched out between us. “You know you can tell me anything, right? I’m not going to judge you or get mad.”
“I know.” My voice sounded small to my own ears and I hated that. I said louder, “I know.”
His eyes met mine. “And you trust me, right?”
“Yes. Of course I do.” I didn’t waver.
Again, there was a pregnant pause that had me assuming the worse. “Shit,” he all but growled, and my heart sunk. Did he know? What was he thinking? The truth—everything—rose to the tip of my tongue, and then he closed his eyes. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you.”
“What?” That was the last thing I expected him to say.
He rubbed his palm along his jaw. “I tell you that you should trust me and that you can tell me anything, but I’m not doing the same thing. And eventually you’re going to find out.”
Whoa. Forget the text message. Forget saying anything. What the hell was going on? Almost numb, I hurried around the coffee table and sat a few feet away from him on the couch. “What are you talking about, Cam?”
Lifting his head, he pierced me such a tortured stare that it made my chest ache. “You know how I told you we all have done shit in our past we aren’t proud of?”
“Yes.”
“I can say that from firsthand experience. Only a few people know about this,” he said, and I suddenly thought of the day he’d gotten upset with Ollie and then at the party when he’d gone after that guy. There seemed to be something that Jase had been telling him without really saying it. “And it’s the last thing I want to tell you.”
“You can tell me,” I assured him, and yeah, I felt like a twat considering all that I wasn’t telling him. I pushed those thoughts away, focusing on Cam. “Seriously, you can talk to me. Please.”
He hesitated. “I should be graduating this year, along with Ollie, but I’m not.”
“I remember you telling me you had to take some time off.”
Cam nodded. “It was sophomore year. I hadn’t been home a lot during the summer because I was helping coach a soccer camp in Maryland, but whenever I did go home, my sister… she was acting different. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but she was super jumpy and when she was home, she spent all her time in her bedroom. And apparently she was rarely home according to my parents.”
My stomach sunk as I crossed my legs. I hoped I was wrong and I didn’t know where this was heading.
“My sister, she’s always been this bleeding heart, you know. Picking up stray animals and people, especially stray guys. Even when she w
as a tiny thing, she always buddied up with the most unpopular kid in the class.” His lips quirked up at the corners. “She met this guy. He was a year or two older than her and I guess their relationship was serious—as serious as they can be when you’re sixteen. Met the kid once. Didn’t like him. And it had nothing to do with the fact he was trying to get with my little sister. There was just something about him that rubbed me the wrong way.”
Cam slid his hands downs his cheeks and then dropped them between his knees. “I was home over Thanksgiving break and I was in the kitchen. Teresa was in there and we were messing around. She pushed me and I pushed her back, on her arm. Not even hard and she cried out like I’d seriously hurt her. At first I thought she was just being dumb, but there were tears in her eyes. She played it off and I forgot about it for that night, but on Thanksgiving morning, Mom had walked in on her in a towel and she saw it.”
I held my breath.
“My sister… she was covered in bruises. Up and down her arms, on her legs.” His hands closed into fists. “She said it was from dancing, but we all knew you couldn’t get bruises like that from dancing. It took almost all morning to get the truth out of her.”
“It was her boyfriend?” I remembered the conversation at the table and Cam’s sudden interest in who she was talking to made sense.
A muscle popped in his jaw as he nodded. “The little fuck had been hitting her. He was smart about it, doing it in places that weren’t so easily noticeable. She stayed with him. I didn’t know why at first. Come to find out that she was too scared of him to break up.”
Cam stood suddenly, and my gaze followed him. He went to the window, parting the curtains. “Who knows how long it would’ve continued if Mom hadn’t walked in when she did. Would Teresa have finally told someone? Or would that bastard just kept hitting her one night and killed her?”
Emotion crawled up my throat as I sucked my lower lip between my teeth.
“God, I was so pissed, Avery. I wanted to kill the fuck. He was beating up my sister and my dad wanted to call the police, but what were they really going to do? Both of them were minors. He’d get his hands slapped and get counseling, whatever. And that’s bullshit. I wasn’t okay with that. I left Thanksgiving night and I found him. Didn’t take much, fucking small town and all. I knocked on his door and he came right out. I told him he couldn’t come around my sister anymore and you know what that little punk did?”
“What?” I whispered.
“He got all up in my face, puffing his fucking chest at me. Told me he would do whatever the fuck he wanted.” Cam barked out a quick, harsh laugh. “I lost it. Angry isn’t even the word to use. I was enraged. I hit him and I didn’t stop.” He turned around, but he wasn’t really seeing me. “I didn’t stop hitting him. Not when his parents came out or his mom starting screaming. It took two police officers to get me off him.”
Oh my God, I didn’t know what to say. As I watched him sit in the moon chair, I couldn’t imagine him hitting someone and not stopping. Not even after seeing how angry he’d been at the guy at Jase’s party.
Cam rubbed his cheeks again. “I ended up in jail and he ended up in a coma.”
My mouth dropped open before I could stop my reaction.
He looked away, lowering his chin. “I’d been in fights before—normal shit. But nothing like that. My knuckles were busted wide open and I didn’t even feel it.” He shook his head. “My dad… he worked his magic. I should’ve gone away for a long time for that, but I didn’t. Guess it helped that the kid woke up a few days later.”
With every passing second, my muscles locked up, one after another.
“I got off easy—not even a night in jail.” Cam smiled, but there was no warmth to it. “But I couldn’t leave home for several months while it got worked out. I ended up with a year’s worth of community service at the local boys’ club and then another year’s worth of anger management. That’s what I do every Friday. My last session is in the fall. My family had to pay restitution and you don’t even want to know how much that cost. I had to stop playing soccer because of the community service gig, but… like I said, I got off easy.”
He had gotten off easy.
Just like Blaine had gotten off easy.
No. I stopped myself right there. These were two different situations—Blaine was a rapist and Cam had beaten the guy who’d beat his sister. What Cam had done was wrong. Violence should never be the answer to violence, but the guy had hurt his sister.
“I understand,” I said, and I realized that even though their situation was similar in a way, it was vastly different. And I was shocked myself. The old me—all she would’ve been able to think about was how both had gotten off because of who they were, who their parents were, and money. But I wasn’t her anymore. And sometimes good people did bad things.
His head swung to me. “What?”
“I understand why you did it.”
Cam stood. “Avery—”
“I don’t know what it says about me, but you were defending your sister and beating the crap out someone isn’t the answer, but she’s your sister and…” And if I had a brother and he’d reacted that way after what happened to me? Well, he would have been my hero, as terrible as that was. “There are some people who deserve an ass kicking.”
He stared at me.
I unfolded my legs. “And there are probably some people who don’t even deserve to breathe. It’s a sick and sad thing to say, but it’s true. The guy could’ve killed your sister. Hell, he could have beaten some other girl to death.”
Cam continued to stare at me like I’d sprouted a second nose. “I deserve to be in jail, Avery. I almost killed him.”
“But you didn’t.”
He didn’t say anything.
“Let me ask you a question. Would you do it again?”
Several seconds passed and then he said, “I still would’ve drove to his house and I would’ve hit him. Maybe not as badly, but honestly, I don’t think it would’ve changed anything. The bastard beat my sister.”
I took a deep breath. “I don’t blame you.”
“You’re…”
I shrugged. “Twisted?”
“No.” A real smile broke the tension in his face. “You’re remarkable.”
“I wouldn’t go that far.”
“Seriously,” he said, coming to the couch. He sat beside me. “I thought you would be disgusted or angry if you knew.”
I shook my head.
Cam dropped his forehead to mine and he clasped my cheeks gently. His eyes searched mine. “It feels good getting that off my chest. I don’t want there to be secrets between us.”
I smiled as he leaned forward, kissing the corner of my lips, but I barely felt the touch. Cam settled back, pulling me against his chest. I snuggled closer, but coldness still seeped deep into my bones. He’d shared this major secret with me, even though he’d feared I would judge him somehow, and I had remained quiet, keeping my secrets close to my heart. That wasn’t fair, and I couldn’t shake this terrible premonition that it would somehow come back around.
How can you live with yourself?
Cam kissed the top of my head, and my breath caught
I wasn’t sure how I did.
######
Chapter 28
I hadn’t really noticed it till then, but there had been a stress that Cam carried with him; the weight of keeping a secret he thought would destroy something he cared about. How I hadn’t recognized it before was beyond me.
But it was good now… mostly.
Part of me suspected that one of the reasons why he’d finally told me was because he didn’t believe what I said about the text. That maybe he hoped by opening up with me that I’d do the same.
I wished that was the case, but my secret would destroy what I cherished most.
Us.
But since it was Valentine’s Day, I refused to think about it. I was having the most perfect day and I wasn’t going to ruin it.
&nbs
p; Cam had shown up at my door in the morning with a single red rose and with one after every single one of my classes. By the afternoon, I had half a dozen, which turned into two dozen when he arrived at my apartment that evening. I hadn’t been sure of our plans, so I was relieved to see him in jeans and a sweater and nothing fancy. It was late, after nine, since Valentine’s fell on a Friday, and I wasn’t sure if we were even going out.
Thanking his for the rose, I took them into the kitchen and added them to the vase. He remained by the door. “What are you doing?” I asked.
His grin was mischievous. “Stay right where you are and close your eyes.”
“I have to close my eyes?”
“Yep.”
I arched a brow as I tried to hide my burgeoning excitement. “So it’s a surprise?”
“Of course it is. So close your eyes.”
My lips twitched. “Your surprises are just as scary as your ideas.”
“My ideas and my surprises are brilliant.”
“Remember when you thought it would be a good idea to—”
“Close your eyes, Avery.”
Grinning, I dutifully closed my eyes. I heard him walk away and then a couple of moments later he reentered my apartment. “Don’t peek.”
Not peeking was like putting a slice of cake in front of me along with a fork and telling me not to eat it. I shifted my weight. “Cam…”
“A couple more seconds,” he said, and I heard something heavy roll inside.
What the? More than curious, it was a struggle to not open my eyes. I honestly had no idea what he was up to and with Cam, anything was possible.
His hand wrapped around mine. “Keep your eyes closed, okay?”
“They’re closed.” I let him lead me out of the kitchen and into my living room.
Cam let go of my hand and slid his arm around me from behind, pressing his cheek against me. Months ago I hated when anyone stood behind me, but I loved it when he did. The feel of his arms, the strength of his embrace, the intimacy behind it.
“You can open your eyes now.” His lips brushed my cheek, sending shivers across my skin. “Or you can stand there with your eyes closed. I like that, too.”
I laughed as I placed my hands above where his rest on my stomach and opened my eyes. My jaw hit the floor. “Oh my God, Cam…”