2. Cam
CAM
“You’re taking someone to the Founders’ Festival dance, and that’s final.”
Levi gave me a firm look when I came back into my living room from the kitchen. Not that I’d needed to come back to hear him.
I’d built my cabin as one big room that curved around a massive, gnarled tree trunk.
The kitchen flowed into the dining area, which flowed into the living room, which flowed into my office, which was really just a couple of old pine boards set up on sawhorses against the wall.
You couldn’t see the kitchen from where Levi sat, but you could hear everything just fine.
I liked it that way. It was simple. Unfussy. Calm.
Today, though…
Today, I was wishing I’d included a panic room in my design. Somewhere soundproof that I could have tossed my best friend so I didn’t have to listen to his well-meaning but increasingly aggravating suggestions.
“You really need to get a girl in here,” he’d said when he arrived an hour ago, frowning at the old flour sacks I used as curtains. He poked at the couch, which was really just the backseat of a 1984 Dodge Caravan. “This place could use a woman’s touch.”
I’d rolled my eyes. I liked my place the way it was.
I liked reusing old materials, repurposing things that might have otherwise ended up in the trash.
My family had owned half the real estate on the island at one point.
I felt like the least I could do was reuse things we already had, rather than buy anything new.
Plus, I knew my parents would have hated it. Spite makes a wonderful interior designer.
“My place is fine,” I said as Levi walked around to my 1952 Northstar refrigerator and pulled out a beer. He twisted the top off, then made himself at home on the couch. “And I don’t see you complaining when you drink my beer and eat my food.”
“Maybe I’m trying to be polite and buck up your self-confidence,” he said. “Anyway, even if your house doesn’t need a woman’s touch, you sure do. When was the last time you brought a girl home, for real?”
I snorted and ignored the question, but half an hour later, Levi was back on the same topic.
“Seriously, this tousled, hayseed bachelor-naturalist thing is cute up to a point, but what happens when your cabin gets struck by lightning, or encircled by howling coyotes, slavering for your blood? I don’t want you to die alone out here. You want another beer?”
That last sentence was directed at Deacon, Levi’s friend who’d arrived a few minutes ago.
He was sitting in a chair made out of old shipping pallets, padded with throw pillows I’d rescued from my grandparents’ house before they moved into a retirement community.
A metal deck chair with flaking green paint completed the living room furniture, and I sank into it.
I supposed Deacon was my friend now, too. It was hard to get used to that idea, though. Hard to get used to the idea that I had friends at all. So much of my life had been solitary that it still startled me when people wanted to hang out with me.
Growing up, Levi had been my only friend. I was awkward and quiet, and my parents were aloof and stand-offish, considering themselves better than most of the people on the island. It hadn’t made it easy to get to know people.
By the time my dad moved away and my mom got sick, it was like I’d missed a critical period for social development. I couldn’t figure out how to make small talk. Couldn’t figure out how you went from strangers to friends without scaring people away with your weirdness.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like Levi—it was Levi liking me that threw me for a loop. He was warm and outgoing. I was shy and silent and spent way too much time in my head. I wasn’t a talker like Levi, or open like Deacon, or any of the other qualities I was pretty sure made a person likable.
I was just…me. Six foot seven inches of hesitant, anxious-and-failing-to-hide-it introversion. I never knew what to say, always felt like people were judging me, and had made my peace with my quiet little life.
But Levi didn’t seem able to accept that.
“We don’t have coyotes on Summersea,” I told him.
“We have gray foxes, but they’re solitary hunters and unlikely to encircle a cabin.
There were scattered reports of a couple of red wolves here in the 1870s, but those are of dubious veracity, and in any case, red wolves have been officially extinct in the wild since 1980.
And while Canis latrans has moved into the void left by Canis rufus across most of Georgia, rising sea levels, real estate development, and the lack of any bridges to Summersea have combined to keep the island free of large mammalian predators.
In fact, there was a proposal to bring coyotes to the island in the 1990s to help control the deer and rodent population, but residents voted it down three times before the advocacy group dropped it in 2001. ”
Levi took one look at me and burst out laughing. Even Deacon couldn’t help smiling.
“Dude, I say this with so much love, but this is exactly why you need to get laid.” Levi stood and walked back to the refrigerator.
I flushed. This was my problem. I either didn’t talk enough, or I talked too much about the wrong things.
“Sorry. I know I kind of go off on tangents sometimes. But I don’t think hooking up with someone is going to stop that.”
“I’m not trying to stop it, I’m saying you need to find someone who’ll find your tangents as charming and thrilling as we do—” Levi paused to point between himself and Deacon “—but who has, you know. Breasts.”
This time, it was Deacon who rolled his eyes. “Ignore him,” he told me. “He just fixates on other people’s love lives so he can ignore the trainwreck that is his own.”
“Excuse me, I don’t fixate, I care.” Levi lifted a finger. “I lovingly express my care for my friends, and support their desires for full, meaningful lives, and science shows that a life well-lived is one full of deep connections and intimacy. Unlike some men, I’m not afraid of opening up.”
“Clearly.” Deacon cracked open the beer Levi handed him. “You talk as much as Cam, and make even less sense. No offense,” he added with a nod in my direction.
“None taken.” I looked down at my bottle.
“I feel like a better way of supporting your friends might be asking them what they want. I haven’t exactly heard Cam moaning about how alone he feels,” Deacon continued.
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean anything.” Levi barked a laugh. “Cam could be bleeding out from a coyote attack—”
“We don’t have coyotes.”
“—Fine, bleeding out from a wild, venomous rodent attack,” he amended, “and he’d still refuse to ask for help because he wouldn’t want to bother anyone. Which is precisely why you need someone out here with you,” he said, looking over at me.
“To watch while carnivorous rabbits attack me?” I raised an eyebrow.
“And to insist on taking you to the hospital afterwards, because you know you’d talk yourself out of it, left to your own devices. A girlfriend would make you see sense.”
I couldn’t decide which annoyed me more—that he wouldn’t let this go, or that he was probably right.
At least, partially right.
Because I did avoid going places that forced me to interact with lots of strangers, if I could help it. And I wasn’t a big fan of people focusing on my body, which would probably be necessary in a hypothetical death-by-rabbit scenario.
But the other part…
“Isn’t your brother in town these days?” Deacon asked Levi. “Why can’t you meddle in his life instead?”
“Oh, believe me, I plan to. But not his love life. He’s just getting over a breakup, so I don’t think he’s ready to jump into something else.”
I cocked my head to the side. “Jordy’s visiting?”
Jordy Brooks, Levi’s little brother, was seven years younger than the two of us.
I hadn’t seen him since he’d graduated high school, but I could still picture him perfectly.
He’d been a growth spurt in perpetual motion.
Always two inches too tall for his jeans, his knobbly wrists sticking out from the sleeves of his shirt as he waved his hands around.
Constantly underfoot, trying to get Levi to hang out with him.
Jordy, eager and energetic and one-hundred-and-ten percent on at all times, was my polar opposite, but I’d always kind of liked the kid.
Maybe because he was so unabashedly himself that I forgot to be self-conscious around him.
Or maybe it was just hard to feel too awkward around your best friend’s kid brother.
Either way, it was nice that he was visiting. Though I doubted he’d remember me at this point. He’d left the island years ago, and I’d probably been too quiet to have left much of an impression. I’d spent a lot of my life trying to fade into the background.
“Yeah,” Levi said, snapping me out of my reverie.
“He and his boyfriend broke up, and they shared an apartment, so for obvious reasons, he doesn’t want to stay there.
And with the festival this week, I could use the extra help at the cafe.
I’m sure he’ll go back to New York soon, but I told him he could crash with me for as long as he wanted.
” Levi’s face darkened. “Actually, I might just go with him and hunt down his ex. Pay him a little visit.”
“Shit,” I said. “What did he do?”
“Cheated on him. And then had the audacity to tell Jordy he was the one who had to leave.” Levi grimaced. “I think this ex of his needs to learn what happens when you mess with my little brother.”
“I think your nieces might prefer it if you didn’t end up in jail,” Deacon said mildly. “Maybe just send a nice, menacing text message?”
“Right, because that’s threatening.” Levi glowered. “I can tell you this, the next guy who wants to date my brother is getting a stern talking-to ahead of time. One that comes with a very detailed promise of what will happen to him if he breaks Jordy’s heart. The kid’s been through enough.”