Chapter 4 #2
Cameron didn’t respond, but a hand appeared around the doorframe, two fingers raised.
I leaned against the counter, chilling, while the radio burbled in the background. When all the food prep was done, I helped Gary carry the burgers, buns, onions and salad outside, where Cameron had put up the parasol over the table.
Gary rubbed his hands. “Cameron, you’re in charge of burgers, so get your arse in gear. I’m starving.”
“If we’re celebrating my results, how come I get to be the one doing the cooking?”
Gary grinned. “Because there are beers in the fridge and a couple of them might have your name on them—provided you don’t cremate the burgers.”
Cameron brightened in a heartbeat.
The afternoon sun was hot on my bare shoulders, and all was right with the world.
Cameron handled the barbecue tongs as though he’d watched a hundred YouTube videos and had decided that meant he had a PhD in burger flipping.
Gary sprawled on a lounger, his eyes hidden behind his shades, a can in one hand, a half-eaten burger in the other.
I didn’t notice the change at first. It was a small thing, a hiccup in the film reel, but it registered someplace deep inside my head.
What triggered it was Cameron’s laughter.
Not the kid laugh I remembered. That had been high and tumbling. This one sat lower, in a chest that had broadened. It vibrated the air an inch differently. And when Cameron threw his head back, sunlight caught in his hair and the hollow of his collarbones.
I felt it in my own throat, a scratchiness, a tightening. I set my burger down on a plate because my fingers had morphed into clumsy sausages. It felt as though someone had flipped a switch and all my senses fired up.
Oh.
The thought wasn’t a word so much as a chord struck in a quiet room.
Cameron moved with the careless confidence of someone who hadn’t learned yet to guard his edges. And sitting with a slick beer can in my hand, I caught myself watching.
I tried not to. God, I tried.
But every time Cameron laughed, his head thrown back, sunlight threading through his hair, the sound lanced through my gut, and I looked away fast, shame flushing up my neck.
I told myself it was nothing but nostalgia, the shock of time passing.
I looked at anything else: the flowerbeds, the condensation on my beer can, the freckles across Gary’s forearm.
Anything but Cameron as he constructed another burger at the grill, sunlight dancing in his hair, catching in his piercing blue eyes, falling on his shoulders like a caress.
I averted my gaze. This is wrong.
“Gary says you’re doing another degree.” Cameron said as he took the chair next to mine, shifting it a little closer. I blinked, and he smiled. “You can have too much onion smell, you know.” His knee brushed mine.
I told myself it didn’t mean anything.
“Yeah.” The word came out as a croak, and I swallowed past the lump of barbecue charcoal that had apparently lodged itself in my throat. “I’m doing a course in IT. Dad’s happy that I’m studying a ‘real’ subject,” I air-quoted.
“You think you’ll stay in Manchester once you’ve finished?”
I managed a shrug. “Who knows?”
When did breathing become so difficult?
Cameron smiled. “I’d like to study in London. Which is why I need to find a job so I can start saving. I figure it’ll take me a year to put by enough so I don’t need to rely on food banks to eat.”
“London’s loud. Busy. Overpriced.”
“And yet you love it.”
I jerked my head in Cameron’s direction. “What makes you say that?”
“Remember that choir trip to London your college organised a couple of years ago? And I tagged along with you and Gary?” He bumped my shoulder with his own.
“I remember. You had that look as if you were listening to something nobody else could hear.” He paused.
“That was a great trip. I’d just taken my GCSEs, and I was regretting my decision to drop music at A-level.
” Cameron sighed. “I wanted to study so many subjects, I was spoilt for choice.”
I had a flash of Cameron, younger, his eyes blown wide at the way a chord bloomed when you asked it to.
I studied him. There was a nick on his jaw he’d probably gotten shaving. His mouth tilted, as though waiting for an answer I couldn’t retrieve.
My chest ached with a longing I recognised instantly, and I stomped on it, hard.
I was twenty-two, which was not old by any measure, but that still made me the adult in the room. I had rules. They weren’t written down, but they’d gotten me this far. The first rule? Don’t reach for what doesn’t belong to you.
Cameron wasn’t mine to take, but fuck, I wanted to. Hard.
The second rule?
Do not confuse your hunger with someone else’s offering.
And Cameron wasn’t offering, was he? At least, not what I wanted.
It doesn’t matter what you want. When it comes to Cameron?
You. Can’t. Have.
“Burgers,” I said at last, and my voice came out wrong. I pointed at the grill. “You need to keep an eye on them.”
Cameron blinked, then grinned. “Right. I don’t want to poison you.”
I watched him go, my heart hammering in a way that made me angry at my own body. The shape of Cameron in my head had changed, and I watched myself draw a line around it with a Sharpie, then another, then another. I called the lines boundaries.
They were protection.
They were necessary.
“I still think he’s nuts.” Gary’s voice broke through, scattering my thoughts.
“I mean, who’d want to be an artist these days?
” He stared at me. “You’re into all this tech stuff.
Tell him. Everyone’s pouring money in AI right now.
I tell you, the days are coming when no one will pay anyone to create something that a computer can do in a fraction of the time. ”
Cameron shrugged, self-deprecating. “Then I’ll draw on pavements for coins.”
I laughed, the sound too sharp. “You’ll do fine.”
“Thanks.” Cameron’s voice was softer. “You always say that.”
I turned to really look at him, and for one suspended moment the world narrowed to Cameron’s face, the crease at the corner of his mouth, the bright blue of his eyes holding mine.
Something had shifted, and I felt it like the ground tilting under me.
By the time the plates were cleared and the sun slid lower, I’d practiced not-looking enough that I could leave with my smile intact.
I kept the lines after that. And then Cameron left for college, Gary stopped mentioning him as often, and life got faster and rolled downhill. I filed that hot afternoon away in the cabinet marked Not Yours. Sometimes it rattled at night, the drawer misaligned.
Okay, it rattled a lot.
I never opened it.
I came back to the café with the memory of that sunlight still warm on my face, still tasting the acid bite of panic in my throat. The present reasserted itself in the clatter of the coffee shop, in Max’s tilted head and Gary’s voice waiting in my ear for an answer.
“So?” Gary said. “Can he?”
I looked at Max without seeing him. It wasn’t a question of square footage.
The flat could hold two. My aunt and uncle had proved that for years, the way a ship knows it can survive storms because it already has.
Okay, so there was only one bedroom, but there was a sofa bed, wasn’t there?
It wasn’t even the question of routine, although the thought of a second toothbrush near mine sent a trickle of discomfort down my spine.
It was the thought of proximity. Having a living, breathing person only feet away. Cameron in my kitchen at 8 a.m., his laughter finding its way into corners the way only light did. Cameron in my living room, shirtless and barefoot on the floor I walked every morning.
Holy fucking Christ. Cameron naked.
Every line I’d drawn around that summer became as insubstantial as chalk dust.
“It’s… not a great time.” I heard my own voice try to balance on a fence. “We’ve just started the group. My schedule’s—”
“Cam won’t get in your way,” Gary said quickly, and I could hear the plea. “He’ll be gone most of the day. He’s quiet as a mouse when he’s drawing. You’ll barely know he’s there.”
That was the problem. I knew myself.
“Please, man,” Gary said softly. “He’s my kid brother. I need to know he’s safe.”
The word safe tore through the rest of my arguments as if they were tissue. I’d spent so long being the safe friend, the safe bass, the safe pair of hands. It had cost me, but I knew how to do it. I didn’t know how to be anything else on command.
I closed my eyes. I could hear Gary’s trust in his voice. Could hear what was really being asked.
Look after him. Keep him safe.
And there it was, the one thing I’d never learned how to do—say no to someone who needed me.
I sighed.
“Okay, but this is temporary. A couple of weeks until he finds something else.”
Gary exhaled a huge sigh. “You’re a legend. I owe you one. Nah, I owe you a dozen. I’ll text him now—he’ll call you, so you can share details. Thanks, Theo. Seriously.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t trust myself to say any more.
“And I know I was assuming a lot, but I’ve already prepared him.”
I stilled. “For what?”
“Waking up one morning and finding a strange guy coming out of your bedroom. So do me a favour, will you, and don’t freak him out too much? And don’t blow a gasket if he brings a girl back there for coffee or something.”
My throat seized.
“Tell Max hi from me,” Gary added. “Has he stopped stealing people’s chips?”
“That’ll never happen.” I managed to force out the words. The banter wrote itself without effort. The call ended and the line clicked quiet.
Max widened his eyes theatrically. “Soooo?” He smirked. “That sounded suspiciously like you volunteering for domesticity.”
I glared. “It’s temporary.”
And if I keep saying it, I’ll believe it.
“Who’s the lucky lodger?”