9. Jordan
JORDAN
Cam seemed shocked when I let Doris herd me to the patio table for lunch. Maybe I should have been shocked too. It was pretty fucking awkward, making him spend more time with me after I’d basically molested him last night. But at the same time, shouldn’t it have been more awkward?
I’d spent all night wondering what the hell had possessed me to make out with him—a straight guy—my brother’s friend—in public. Not just make out with, but get handsy. I knew I needed to apologize, and I was dreading it.
But as soon as I had, I’d felt…shockingly normal? Not just normal, but good. Talking to Cam was easier than it had any right to be. Around everyone else on Summersea, I had my guard up. With him, I just felt like myself.
A better version of myself, actually. Cam seemed to see a me who I wasn’t quite sure existed. But I wanted him to.
So even if Cam was never going to be into me—even if the best I could hope for was Quincy forgiving me and agreeing to meet up again—I couldn’t help wanting to stick around for lunch. Being around Cam felt too good. I wasn’t ready to cut myself off.
Cam helped Doris make sandwiches while Arthur grilled me about life in New York. He’d lived there when he was in college, studying engineering, and he had an endless list of bars, restaurants, and bookshops he felt I needed to visit.
Apparently, he and Doris had met in the city. It made my heart ache, hearing about their romance. I wished my life there had been half as beautiful as theirs sounded. The closest thing I’d had to romance recently was my aborted attempt to meet up with Quincy, and I still hadn’t heard back from him.
Maybe that was for the best, though. Making reckless decisions with a stranger had seemed a lot more appealing before I’d spent any time with Cam. Even though my crush was hopeless, it was hard to get excited about anyone but him.
Still, it was a lovely lunch. The only thing I would have changed was the part where Doris brought Cam’s shirt out of the dryer, and he put it back on. I wouldn’t have complained about more time to ogle him when he wasn’t looking, but Cam seemed relieved to be fully clothed again.
He was quiet through most of lunch, but he didn’t seem unhappy. I was pretty sure it was just his default setting. He did get more animated when Doris began telling a story about how, one year, he’d waited up all night on Christmas Eve for Santa to come.
“I want to make it clear,” he said, “that I did not still think Santa existed at age thirteen.”
“My mistake.” Doris patted his hand. “You were waiting up to see the reindeer, not Santa. You always did love animals.”
“Nana, if I didn’t believe in Santa, why on earth would I believe in his reindeer?
” He gave her an affectionate look. “I was waiting up because someone had heavily implied I was getting a puppy for Christmas, and you always put the presents under the tree on Christmas Eve, so they’d appear magically the next morning.
I was worried you were going to put a puppy in a box and then leave it there for eight hours. That’s all.”
“So what did you do?” I asked. “Creep downstairs and stick your ear to every box, listening for panting and snuffling?”
Cam’s cheeks turned a faint pink. “Not quite.”
“No, he was much more troublesome,” Arthur grumbled. “He filibustered us. Said he wanted to read to us from the book he was devouring at the time. Something about fungus, if I recall correctly.”
“Mushrooms Demystified,” Cam said with a sheepish laugh.
“That’s the one!” Arthur said. “I like a portobello as much as the next guy, but a thousand pages on the subject? Come on.”
“He started on the first page of chapter one and read until his voice gave out.” Doris shook her head fondly. “Described the pictures in minute detail.”
“But why?” I asked. “How was that supposed to keep a puppy from suffocating?”
“I figured if I read through the night, they couldn’t set the boxes out at all, so they’d have to bring the puppy out to me, unpackaged, from whatever room they were hiding it in,” Cam said.
“Weren’t you worried it was already in a box, just in some other room?”
He laughed. “You know, the thought never even occurred to me.”
“If it had, we might have been spared several chapters,” Doris said. “It was months before I could even look at a button mushroom again.”
“He fell asleep, book on his lap, at about five a.m.,” Arthur said with a grin. “Just dozed off mid-word. We hustled to get those boxes out before he woke up again, and you should have seen his face when he opened all of them, and there wasn’t a puppy to be seen.”
“Wait, after all of that, you didn’t even get one?” I said. “Are you serious?”
“I did get one,” Cam said, “but not until later that afternoon. They’d left her at a friend’s house, and brought her over when I inevitably crashed and took a nap.”
Arthur snorted. “You tried so hard to teach her how to hunt for truffles—nevermind the fact that we don’t have truffles on Summersea—but all she ever wanted to do was eat old socks and drink ditch water.”
“Mabel didn’t have the most refined palate,” Cam explained. “On the other hand, she did once eat an entire package of Hydrox cookies and survive, so I can’t really complain about her digestive system.”
“Speaking of chocolate,” Doris said, rising from the table, “who’s up for some cake?”
“Oh, Nana, I’m not sure I have room,” Cam said.
“Honestly, me neither,” I said. “Everything’s been delicious, but I couldn’t eat another bite.”
“We’ll just see about that,” she said ominously, sweeping up a stack of plates and whisking them off to the kitchen. Arthur put the big sandwich platter in his lap and followed her.
“Why am I scared now?” I said to Cam.
“Because you’re a smart man.” Cam’s voice was utterly serious. “You’ve issued a direct challenge, and now she’s going to take it upon herself to make you eat more food, even if it takes a funnel and a feeding tube.”
“I knew it was too good to be true when she asked me for this lesson,” I said. “No wonder she offered to pay me so much. She was planning on feeding me to death; she knew she’d get it back.”
Cam cocked his head to the side. “She said something about that, actually.”
“About murdering me?”
“No, about you not usually doing lessons. Which is weird. You seem like a great teacher.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, a little uncomfortable.
I’d taken the gig because Doris had more or less forced me to, and the pay was too good to turn down. And yeah, it had turned out better than I expected. When I’d focused on Arthur and stopped ruminating on my own shit, I’d felt freer than I had in a while. But that didn’t mean I was any good.
“Look at what you did with my grandfather.”
“I gave him one lesson, and I didn’t even try to get into any of the fundamentals of color theory, or composition, or anything other than, here’s how you hold a brush. I wouldn’t say I taught him a whole lot.”
“You made him laugh.”
“I don’t know if that counts for much.”
“It counts for a lot more than you’d think,” Cam said. “But I guess you’re probably busy with your own stuff, right? So teaching’s just not a priority.”
I barked a laugh, and when he looked at me, I didn’t know what to say. This was the problem, I realized, with spending time with him. Pretending to be the person he thought I was. The inevitable crash back to reality sucked even harder, now.
“I’m sorry,” Cam continued when I didn’t reply. “I don’t want to sound ungrateful, or like you owe Grandpa anything. You should be working on your own stuff. Of course that’s what’s important to you.”
I grimaced and rubbed my temples. I needed him not to be so nice. It only rubbed my failure in more.
“Jordan? Did I say something wrong?” He paused. “Well, obviously, I said something wrong. But could you tell me what it was, so I can at least apologize for the right thing?”
I put my head in my hands and groaned softly.
“I might not have mentioned this,” Cam said, “but this is actually my personal hell right now, knowing I messed up but not knowing how, and I’m about to start babbling to make up for it, so unless you want to hear about oyster mushrooms for the next fifteen minutes, you might want to—”
“I haven’t painted in six months!” I burst out. I dropped my hands and looked at Cam. “You didn’t say anything to offend me, but you did say something wrong, because you’re acting like I’m this great artist when what I actually am is a fake.”
“Jordan, I—”
“You want to know why I’m really back? It’s not just that my boyfriend dumped me.
It’s that I haven’t sold a painting in years.
Haven’t had a show in longer. And I don’t make enough from coffee shop wages to even rent a closet in someone’s murder dungeon, let alone an actual apartment.
I came home because I have nowhere else to go, and I can’t tell what’s worse—the people who say they knew I’d never actually get out of here, or people like you who I’ve somehow tricked into thinking I’m competent. ”
I made a disgusted noise in the back of my throat.
“Levi’s making me hang up my paintings in The Roastery like they’re something to be proud of.
You keep saying I’m going through a rough patch, like this is just a temporary thing.
And I know you’re both just trying to be nice, but it actually makes it worse, because I know it’s not true, and then I feel even shittier for being ungrateful to the only people in my life who believe in me. ”
I sighed. “Before today, I hadn’t picked up a paintbrush in months. Every time I think about trying to make art, I feel sick to my stomach, knowing it’s just one more piece that no one will want to buy, one more example of how I’m not measuring up.”
“You don’t have to measure up,” Cam said softly.
“This, from the guy whose social anxiety is so bad he either goes mute in public or rambles to strangers about melons for half an hour?”
“You know what I mean,” he said with a laugh. “It’s enough to just be yourself.”