Chapter 48 Cameron
FORTY-EIGHT
CAMERON
“Oh. Right! Sorry!” She plasters on that fake smile I hate as she backs up.
I wipe a hand over my face, self-hatred burning in me.
I’m a bellend. She was just trying to help. “Summer,” I call. “Come back.”
“No, no, it’s fine, I’m sorry, I’ll leave you alone—”
“Summer.” Oh, for God’s sake. I close my eyes. “Summer, I want a hug.”
She pauses in the doorway. “What?”
“I’ve changed my mind. I want a hug. Please.”
Her eyes narrow. “No, you don’t.”
I just open my arms and wait. She hangs back. “Well?” I prompt. “I can’t cross the room and get you.”
After a few moments, she perches on the edge of the mattress. I grab her waist and haul her into my arms.
And…
Well. Shit.
There’s a reason I’ve been keeping her at arm’s length. Feels too good to hold her.
“I’m sorry,” I say into her hair. “My leg is killing me. I can be a twat when I’m like this.”
Unsurprisingly, she immediately forgives me. “That’s okay,” she says. “I can be such a bitch when I have period cramps.”
I do not believe that at all.
She tentatively lays her head on my chest. “Are you okay? Is it…bad?”
“You can ask.”
“Fraser actually told me what happened,” she admits. “You got injured trying to pull a machine off Alec’s dad, right?”
I should probably be annoyed that Fraser gossiped, but I’m mostly just relieved I don’t have to retell the story. “Aye.”
She looks down. I’m just in my boxers, and her eyes travel over my scarred thigh.
I force myself to not cover up. “It’s ugly.”
She looks affronted. “No, it’s not!”
I snort. “You don’t have to lie to me, princess.” A girl like her knows a lot about pretty.
“I’m not lying.” She runs her hand up my leg. “You have humungous muscly tree-trunk thighs with an impressive scar on one. Nothing ugly about that.”
I grit my teeth. “Stop it.”
“What?”
“Flirting with me.”
She gives me a sparkly look and curls up against me. “I heard you arguing with Alec.”
“Aye, well, he’s being a twat,” I mutter. “He blames himself for the accident. He wasn’t even there. I’m the one who ran out to help his dad, but he acts like it’s his fault.”
She turns solemn. “It hurts you.”
“Aye. I’ve moved on with my life, and he refuses to.”
“It hurts Fraser too,” she says sadly. “He’s getting so tired of having to smooth everything over whenever you argue.”
Shit. She’s right. “I have to leave,” I say flatly. “I can’t be around Alec anymore.” He doesn’t treat me like a friend. He treats me like a tragedy.
Summer looks troubled, fiddling with her nails. I catch her wrist, examining them. The paint has peeled from farm work, and all the jewels have fallen off. “Why don’t you put more on?”
“Oh, they’re gel. I may be an overpacker, but I don’t actually pack a UV curing light in case I need a manicure.”
I just stare at her. “You what?”
She snuggles into my side. “You should be proud of me, Cameron. I’m a country girl now. I like rolling around in the grass and swimming in lochs and stuff. I no longer care for silly things like my nails and clothes.”
I frown. Did I make her feel like that? “Nothing wrong with your nails,” I mutter. “It’s just your shoes I hate.” I damn near had a heart attack when she tripped the first time I met her.
She laughs. “Yes, I know. The Chanel pumps especially weren’t very practical. But they were my favourite. The first designer thing I ever owned.” She yawns. “Mum hated them too. When I first showed them to her, she said I looked like a clown. Which is probably true. But they made me happy.”
I glance down at the faint scar shimmering up her forearm. Summer doesn’t talk much about her mum. What I have heard doesn’t sound promising. “Have you spoken to her since you stopped posting?”
Summer shakes her head. “We don’t really talk a ton. She’s always so busy.”
A bad feeling swells in my stomach. “Any other family?”
“Nope, I was an oops baby.”
“You know that?”
“She’d joke about it all the time. She’s even spoken about it in interviews. I was the unfortunate side effect of a drunken mistake.” She yawns again. “She still looked after me all by herself though. And while working, like, twenty-hour days. She’s like Superwoman.”
Hmm. Summer yawns again, this time so widely it must hurt her jaw.
“You’re tired. What have you done today?”
A shadow passes over her face. “Nothing. I’ve been a potato.”
“Fair enough.” That makes two of us.
She sighs, frustrated. “It’s not. I hate it. I have these days sometimes where I literally can’t make myself move. I took a shower this morning, then I lay there and stared at the ceiling for three hours trying to make myself do something.”
I shrug. “You’re a guest. You don’t have to do anything.”
“I don’t want to be lazy. I hate wasting time like this.”
I consider her. She looks genuinely annoyed. “This an ADHD thing?”
“Yeah.”
“Happen a lot?”
She fiddles with my chest hair. “About once a week.”
“You tried to stop it?”
“My whole life.” She groans. “The meds help, but every so often my brain just craps out, like I’ve used all my mental energy.
And I can’t do anything. And I really, really want to, my body is like, revving to go, but I just can’t make myself get up.
There’s, like, this insurmountable gap between what I want to do, and actually doing the thing. ”
“Sounds like you don’t have a choice then,” I say bluntly. “Don’t see the point in being angry at yourself. I take the day off when my leg flares up.”
She frowns down at my thigh. “It’s not the same. I should be able to push through. You physically can’t.”
I raise my eyebrows. It’s probably the unkindest thing I’ve ever heard Summer say. “I think you’re being shitty,” I tell her frankly.
“What?”
I sift through my thoughts, trying to work out how to word it. “Have you ever seen Fraser or Alec get in the trailer of the tractor while I’m driving it?”
“No?”
“They don’t even wait for me to stop. They’ll grab the side and jump right in.”
She blinks. “…Okay?”
“If I need to get in while one of them is driving, I make them stop the tractor. I don’t jump. Because I know my leg is weak.”
She’s looking at me like I’m very odd. “That…makes sense.”
“If I insisted on jumping into the tractor, just ’cause they both can, I’d be making my life harder.” My head hurts. I’m shite at metaphors. “You can’t jump into the tractor either, but you’re insisting you should be able to. Why? Because your shite is in your head and not your body?”
“It’s not the same—”
“Maybe, maybe not, but it’s more similar than you’re letting on.
Maybe other people don’t need days off, but you do.
Deal with it. Your brain is different from other peoples’.
You need different things. You know this.
You have a diagnosis telling you this. But you expect yourself to rise above it and act like everyone else, anyway.
It’s shitty of you. This is a symptom of how your brain works, not a choice. Accept it and move on.”
Her mouth opens and closes a few times. “Yeah. I guess,” she says eventually. “My therapist says the same thing. It’s just—my Mum hated it when I needed a day to rest. She said I was being lazy.”
Aye, I bet she did. “People are shit at understanding anything except what they know. They’ll treat you badly because they can’t be arsed to empathise with you. That’s on them. But if you decide to join in and treat yourself badly too, that’s your own fault.”
Her mouth quirks. “I…this is the most aggressive pep talk I’ve ever received.”
I snort. “Aye, well, I’m not known for bein’ sweet.” I tug the covers over her firmly. “Just give yourself what you need. What do you want to do right now?”
She sighs. “Nothing. I just want to sleep.”
“Sleep then.”
She shakes her head. “I should go help out—”
“You’ll stay,” I repeat. “Sleep. Now. Close your eyes.”
Despite everything, she laughs. “Cameron, I can’t just sleep on demand—”
I reach up and slap the light switch over my bed. “Night.”
“But—”
“Stop talking.”
She snorts and curls into a ball. “Fine. If you insist.” She lays her head on the pillow and lets her eyes flutter shut. “You are…” she mumbles. “Sweet.”
I ignore her, watching as her breathing slows. It’s barely five minutes before she’s asleep.
I wipe a hand over my face. I feel overwhelmed with some emotion I can’t put a name on. Summer shifts, and I see the ridge of the scar curving up her wrist.
Anger. That’s the word for it. Feeling slightly perverted, I carefully extricate my phone from under my pillow and type “Summer Faye mother” into the search engine.
Immediately, thousands of results pop up. Summer’s mum is called Caroline, and she’s apparently quite famous. I click on an article named “Ten Women Who Shaped the World of Civil Law” and scroll down to Caroline’s section.
She looks a lot like Summer. Same brown eyes and long blonde hair. She’s dressed severely in a blouse and skirt, and she’s giving the camera a hard look I’ve never seen on Summer’s face. I read the caption.
Caroline Faye is making waves in the entertainment industry with her unflinching boardroom presence and constant drive for justice.
Hmm. I scan the article. Apparently, Summer’s mother was a prodigy.
She graduated high school at sixteen, went to Oxford Uni, and was one of the youngest people in the UK to pass the bar.
In her thirties, she won a very public case against a film producer who abused several of his celebrity actresses.
Now she owns her own boutique law firm, specialising in workplace abuse. I skim to the end of the article.
Caroline has spoken in interviews about how an unplanned pregnancy in her twenties almost derailed her career.
‘I think everyone expected me to quit when I became a single mother,’ she tells our correspondent.
‘But I refused. Life will always throw you obstacles. It’s your job to push through them to your goals.
I’d encourage any woman to do the same.’ Caroline’s now-adult daughter is a popular fashion influencer.
I put my phone down, feeling sick. She called Summer an obstacle.
I’m familiar with abandonment. I know what it looks like.
I grew up wondering what the hell was wrong with me.
Why none of the adults in my life ever wanted to keep me.
My dad left. My mum shipped me off to my nan.
My nan wanted nothing to do with me. It wasn’t until I was a teenager I realised that most people are just selfish.
I was better off without them. I don’t need a family.
But Summer does. She’s brimming over with love to give. And what does she get instead? A mother who criticises her for how her brain works, and tens of thousands of people online mocking her.
And I’m part of the problem. I called her pink shoes ridiculous. They were her favourite ones, and I let them get stained with mud. I’m no better than the rest of them.
I need to fix this. I don’t know how.
But luckily, I know someone who will.
Very slowly, I eke myself out from under Summer. She mumbles in her sleep. I grit my teeth against the pain in my leg and leave the room as quietly as possible.
When I limp into the lounge, Fraser’s on the sofa in front of some trashy reality TV show. He’s got Summer’s lamb wrapped in a blanket on his lap, and he’s trying to bottle-feed her. His face lights up when he sees me.
“He lives! Missed you this morning, mate.” He offers me a hand, and I sit down heavily next to him. He immediately hands the lamb over to me. “Your leg doing better?”
I ignore the question, passing him my phone. “Read this.”
He examines the picture. “Who’s that?”
“Summer’s mum.”
“Looks like she’s sucking a lemon.” He goes quiet as he reads the article. Summer’s lamb tries to eat my finger. “Right,” he says eventually. “Great lawyer, shitty mum.”
“Seems like it,” I mutter.
I can see it clearly. I can see this sharp, intelligent, high-flying lawyer looking down on her sensitive daughter for liking pretty clothes and struggling to keep up in class.
“I want to do something for her,” I mutter. “Something…special.”
Fraser strokes the lamb’s ear. “Like what?”
“I don’t know,” I say impatiently. “I don’t do that stuff. That’s why I’m asking you.”
“Ahh.” He nods understandingly. “You’re outsourcing your grand gesture. Romantic.”
“It’s not a gesture. It’s just…a thing. To make her happy. Women like you. You’re good at this stuff. So you come up with something, and I’ll do it.”
“Okay, give me a sec.” He thinks for a moment, tapping his bottom lip. “Well, there is this one thing I do that girls love.”
“Aye?”
He lowers his voice. “Don’t tell anyone, okay? It’s sort of my secret sauce. Can’t have it getting around.”
I lean in. “What is it.”
He looks around, as if we might be overheard by some spy hiding in our lounge. “Well,” he says, “what you do is—and bear in mind, this can take a bit of practice—you put your mouth between her legs—”
“Fraser.”
He puts his hands up. “I know, I know. It’s unorthodox. A bit out there. But it works, I’m telling you.”
“I want something that will make her happy,” I growl. “Not just sex.”
He looks politely confused. “Not quite what you’re looking for? Give me an example then.”
“Like…” I think. “Taking her out shopping or something. She likes clothes.”
“Mm-hmm,” Fraser says.
“May as well get her nails fixed too,” I mutter to myself. “They’ve been broken for ages. Not had any gems on them for a week at least.”
“Mm-hmm,” Fraser says again.
I frown. “And I don’t know what a cake pop is, but she mentioned she likes them. We should try to find them.” I look up at Fraser. “You know. Stuff like that.”
“Right,” Fraser says. “Great. Let’s do all that then.”
“What? Don’t you have any ideas?”
“Oh, I’ll take her on my own date. Wouldn’t want to overshadow yours. Not after you’ve put so much thought into it.” His eyes sparkle. “I will invite myself along though, if you don’t mind. We’ve not got much time with her. I’m not letting you hog her for a whole day.”
I’m taken aback. “It’s not a date.”
“No? It will be for me, I think. Inverness tomorrow, yeah? We can coordinate it with the city deliveries, and even Alec won’t be able to complain.
” He stretches and yawns like an animal.
“Well, I better get back to work. See you tomorrow for the date.” He claps me on the shoulder and strolls out of the lounge, whistling.
He’s ridiculous. “It’s obviously not a date,” I tell the lamb in my lap.
She sticks her tiny tongue out at me.