6. Cam
CAM
Istared in shock.
Was Jordy—beguiling, gorgeous, mysterious Jordy—asking me out?
Well, no. He had no reason to think I liked guys, and if he did, he wouldn’t be inviting me to spend more time with him. He’d made it clear he wasn’t interested.
But he was offering to spend more time with me, weird as that seemed. And the longer he watched me, those quick, dark eyes of his focused on my face, the more my heart sped up, the improbability of this moment swirling around me.
“Sh—sure?” I croaked.
“I just figured, if we’re both at loose ends,” he said with a shrug.
“You’re sure you don’t have something you’d rather be doing?”
Jordy barked a laugh and muttered something that sounded strangely like, You have no idea. But when I peered down at him, wondering if I’d misheard, he just said, “Not really, to be honest.”
Which was how I found myself following him out to The Port Hole’s back patio five minutes later, beer in hand.
There were four wooden picnic tables under a canopy of palmettos and string lights.
A gnarled muscadine vine clawed up the brick wall of the building next door, its tendrils finding purchase in cracks in the mortar.
Jordy led us to a table in the corner. The sun wasn’t down yet, but it was low enough in the sky that this part of the patio was in the shade. The table was mostly occupied, so we ended up squished together on the same side.
I straddled the bench. Jordy bent one leg at the knee and faced me, and I found myself studying his eyes, the way they seemed lit from within.
There were flecks of gold in that brown, radiating out.
His lashes were long and black, and freckles danced across his cheeks.
I wanted to run my finger across them, counting each one.
Even in waders and a T-shirt, he looked incredible. He was just so alive, so comfortable in himself. He took a sip of his beer, then grinned. His lips drew out a little farther to the right than the left, giving his smile a roguish feel. It set my heart racing all over again.
It didn’t make any sense. Just a few minutes ago, I’d been depressed that Miller hadn’t shown up, and now it was hard to remember the guy even existed. It was hard to remember anything but Jordy.
“So,” he said, after another sip of his beer. “Tell me her name, so I can tell you all the reasons you’re better off without her.”
“What?” I’d lost focus, staring at his freckles again, but he just laughed.
“Don’t worry, I was kidding. I know you’re too much of a gentleman for that.”
“Oh, right. Yeah, probably best not to get into that.”
If for no other reason than that I didn’t want to have to keep track of a fake personality for my fake crush for my fake foiled date. A thought occurred to me, then.
“Would you mind not telling your brother what happened, though? It might keep his matchmaking skills at bay a little longer.”
Jordy laughed again. “That, I promise I can do.”
“He can just be a little enthusiastic sometimes.”
“Try a lot enthusiastic.”
“It’s not that I want to lie to him,” I said. “It’s just that sometimes, he gets so excited about helping you—”
“That he forgets you never actually asked for help in the first place?” Jordy finished. “Trust me, you’re preaching to the choir.”
“How so?”
His lips twisted, and I was about to apologize when he spoke. “I guess there’s no point in not telling you.”
“I really wasn’t trying to pry.”
He shrugged. “You already know I’m home because of a breakup. There’s not much to hide. My ex, Harvey, cheated on me, dumped me, and was pretty much ready for his new boyfriend to move in before I’d even packed my bags.”
“Yikes.”
“The thing is, I’m grateful to Levi for giving me a place to stay. But he tries so hard to be supportive, and he’s so mad at Harvey that he just ends up reminding me of everything that went wrong, instead of letting it fade, you know?”
“I’m sorry. Both for what you went through, and for bringing it up.”
Jordy made a face. “It’s not like I can really forget. It’s just nice to pretend sometimes.” He took a sip of his beer. “Sometimes I think pretending is all I do.”
“What do you mean?”
I felt a little rude. All I was doing was asking him questions, grilling him about his personal life. But I couldn’t help it. There was something so tender, so hopeful about Jordy. I found myself wanting to protect him.
He was quiet for a moment. “Do you ever feel like maybe your whole life is a lie?”
“More than you can imagine,” I said before I could stop myself.
Jordy’s eyes widened, and he gave me a long look, and for a second, it was like time stopped.
I was aware that conversations were still going on around us, the breeze still sifting through the palmetto fronds above our heads, flashing shadows and sunlight across his face.
But at the same time, I felt like the world was holding its breath.
I was, at least. I was waiting, I realized. Waiting for Jordy to ask me what I meant. I almost wanted him to. Wanted someone to call me out on it, point-blank. To force me to tell them what I was hiding. To take the decision out of my hands.
“I just feel like a fraud,” Jordy said, and the moment shattered. “I was so ready to put Summersea behind me when I finished high school. Told everyone I was never coming back. I was just done, you know? I didn’t want to end up like my mom, or like my sister, or—” He broke off there.
“Like Levi?” I asked.
He sighed. “Levi should be my role model, right? He’s the only one in my family who didn’t screw everything up.
But I just wanted to be somewhere where no one had any expectations when they heard my last name.
I wanted the chance to succeed, without my family’s reputation following me around.
And yet here I am, back home, broke, single, a failure. None of the things I said I would be.”
It hurt, seeing him like this. The Jordy I remembered was full of life and ideas and energy. And no matter what he said, I couldn’t picture him as a failure. Jordy made you smile when he walked in the room. He made your life better just by existing.
“It’s not permanent, though, right?” I said. “Things might suck now, but Levi said you were going back to New York in a few weeks and—” I broke off, wincing at the stricken look on Jordy’s face.
“He wants me gone?” he whispered.
“No, no. He was just saying that he thought you would want to leave. And I swear, we don’t actually sit around talking about you, I don’t want to sound creepy. It’s just, like you said. He cares. He doesn’t consider a day a success unless he’s given at least three pep talks.”
Jordy snorted. “True.”
“It’s just a rough patch, right?” I added. “You can’t give up because of one setback.”
“It’s hardly just one.”
“Okay, a few setbacks, but still. They won’t last forever. As long as you’re passionate about what you’re doing, that’s what matters. The world needs people like you. People who are passionate, that is.”
“I don’t even need Levi to give me a pep talk at this point,” Jordy said with a grin. “I’ve got you.”
I tilted my head to the side. He didn’t seem annoyed, but I had the sense that something was still bothering him.
“Why do I feel like you’re not convinced?” I asked.
He grimaced. “Probably because I’m a malcontent who’s determined to be unhappy.”
“Somehow I doubt that.”
“I mean, you just heard me complaining about having a brother who loves and supports me, and yet here I am, hanging out with a relative stranger just so I can avoid going home. Clearly there’s something wrong with me.”
“Clearly.” I made myself laugh, but I couldn’t deny that the relative stranger bit stung. Just because it was true didn’t make it any easier to hear.
Then again, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Even my anonymous internet hookup hadn’t wanted to spend time with me, in the end. Why should Jordy be any different?
“Anyway,” he said, “I’m sure you don’t want to hear me ramble about how pathetic my life is. You have an actual life of your own.”
“Not much of one,” I said. “And you weren’t rambling.”
“I was definitely rambling.”
“No, rambling requires at least a solid minute of talking, not letting another person get a word in edgewise, either because you’re so nerdy that you don’t realize the other person doesn’t care at all about what you’re talking about, or because you’re so nervous that you couldn’t shut up if you tried.
” I smiled ruefully. “Trust me, I’m kind of an expert in both, and you weren’t doing either. ”
“Is that right?”
“Two days ago,” I told him, “the cashier at the hardware store asked me how my day was going, and I got so tongue-tied trying to say that it was fine, that she said, That good, huh? But I still couldn’t figure out how to respond, so she goes, completely deadpan, So do I need to put you on a watchlist?
They say it’s always the quiet ones. Because I was buying fertilizer, which you can use to make a bomb, I guess.
And I knew she was joking, but I got so freaked out that she thought I was trying to make explosives that I spent the next five minutes explaining, in detail, that I was actually testing the effects of store-bought fertilizer versus homemade varieties on subsistence farming crops in a home garden for the book I’m working on, and how if she wanted, she could come out and look at the different varieties of gourds and fruits I was experimenting with. ”
“Wow.” Jordy’s eyes went wide.
“I’m pretty sure I am on a watchlist now,” I said.
“Possibly several. One for people who make bombs, and one for sex offenders, because I couldn’t stop talking about melons, and how I was trying to see if growing them vertically and exposing them to the air made them larger and healthier, and I don’t think she realized I meant literal melons and not, you know, breasts. ”
Confiding all of that was terrifying, but weirdly freeing, and when Jordy cackled, I felt absurdly pleased to have made him laugh, even if it was at my own expense.
“She must have been really pretty,” he said when he got his laughter under control.
“What? Why?”
“For you to get that nervous.” He grinned. “Maybe you should ask her to the dance.”
“She was about eighty years old. And I wasn’t nervous because I wanted to ask her out, I was nervous because I’m weird, and any time I talk to a stranger, there’s a seventy-five percent chance I’m going to make a fool out of myself.”
“You’re not weird.”
“I know a lot of people who would beg to differ. I would beg to differ.”
“You’ve never gotten tongue-tied around me,” he pointed out.
That wasn’t strictly true. I never used to get tongue-tied around Jordy, but the past twenty-four hours had changed that dramatically. Explaining that, however, seemed like a bad idea.
“You’re not a stranger,” I said instead.
Sometimes, I thought it would be easier if he were. Easier to deal with garden-variety social anxiety, instead of the extra-special, grass-fed, organic anxiety that came from having a crush on Levi’s off-limits little brother.
Jordy took another sip of his beer, and when he set his glass down, he had foam on his upper lip.
“What?” he asked, when he noticed me staring.
“Nothing.” I shook my head. I could not stare at him like that. Why was that so hard to remember?
“Come on,” he pressed. “Don’t clam up on me. You just told me I’m not a stranger, so you’re not allowed to be silent. What mortifying secrets are you holding back from me now?”
“None, I swear,” I protested. None that wouldn’t creep you the hell out, anyway. “It’s just—you’ve got—there’s foam on your lip.”
“Oh.” Jordy flushed. “So I’m the one who should be mortified, and you weren’t even going to tell me.” He shot me an injured look. “Thanks a lot.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I thought we were friends, Cam.” He sighed dramatically and wiped the foam away, except what he mostly managed to do was flick it onto his left cheek. “And yet this is how you treat me.”
“You didn’t actually—that is, you have some more.”
“Well, then help me, dammit. Don’t just sit there.” He gave me an impudent grin.
“I am helping you.” I tapped my left cheek. “It’s right there.”
But he swiped his fingers against his right cheek, mirroring my motion, and brought them away clean and dry.
“Clearly not very well,” he retorted. “Are you just fucking with me? Do I actually have foam on my face, or are you just—”
“Oh, shush,” I told him, and brought my fingers to his cheek.