Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Cameron
I’ve had the bike out front since six.
Nobody asks why. Bo looks at it through the kitchen window once, catches me looking back, and goes back to loading the van.
Tyler’s been at the dining room table with the travel roster since before I came outside.
He’s printed it twice that I know of. Beckett walks past me on the porch with a duffel over one shoulder, glances at the spare helmet sitting beside me, and keeps going.
He doesn’t say a word, which from Beckett is basically a blessing.
They know. They’ve known since the story ran, when I spent that whole morning parked at the end of the driveway so nobody could turn in without looking at me first.
At seven-thirty, the screen door opens behind me. Reese comes out with her hair up and her jacket already on, ready to go even though I haven’t actually told her we’re going anywhere.
“How long have you been sitting out here?”
“A while.”
“Cameron.”
“Since six.”
Her eyes narrow. “That’s creepy.”
“It’s patient.”
“It’s creepy when you do it.”
I pick up the spare helmet and hold it out to her. “You’ve got a five o’clock bus call tomorrow. Until then, nobody needs anything from you for about nine hours.”
She takes the helmet but doesn’t put it on.
“And?”
“And I’d like some of them.”
Her eyes flick toward the house.
I don’t have to look. There’s a shadow in the front window that I’m pretty sure is Jackson. The curtain in the upstairs hall moves. Somebody has suddenly found a reason to stand at the kitchen sink.
“They’re all watching us.”
“They’ve been watching us since February.”
Her mouth twitches.
There she is.
It’s the first real thing I’ve seen on her face all week that isn’t exhaustion or the flat, careful expression she’s been wearing since the story broke. She pulls on the helmet and climbs onto the bike behind me.
“Drive.”
Ray’s is twenty minutes out on the county road, past the last streetlight and another three miles into nowhere.
The sign’s been missing the same three letters since my freshman year, so technically we eat at Ra’s Ho Dogs.
I’ve been coming here for three years and have never asked what happened to the letters.
The gravel lot is empty except for an old work truck with a ladder rack. The guy behind the window gives me the same nod he always does when we pull in. He doesn’t know my name. I don’t know his. It’s a good relationship.
We take our food to the picnic table under the buzzing fluorescent light. Reese makes it halfway through her chili dog before a glob of chili lands on the inside of her wrist. She doesn’t notice.
“You brought me here after the gala,” she says.
“You had chili on your sleeve that night, too.”
“I was wearing a very expensive dress.”
“With chili on it.” I hold out a napkin. “Wrist.”
She looks down. “Shit.”
She takes the napkin and wipes herself off, but when I go back to eating, I realize she’s staring at me.
“What?”
“This.”
“Very specific.”
“This thing you do.” She crumples the napkin between her fingers. “You’ve been doing it all spring. I need something and somehow it’s already in your hand. If anybody else did that to me all the time, I’d probably throw a chair at them.”
“Gray does it.”
“Gray gets threatened with chairs regularly.”
“Fair.”
She smiles, but she’s still watching me, waiting for an actual answer. I finish the last bite of my food before I give her one.
“I’m not figuring out what you need, Reese. You tell me.”
“When?”
“Constantly.”
“I do not.”
“You do. You’re just usually about four hours behind on realizing you’ve done it.” I wipe my hands on a napkin and lean back against the table. “I pay attention.”
She sits with that for a second, turning her empty cup between her palms. Then her eyes narrow.
“Psych major.”
“It comes up.”
Her laugh is sudden and loud enough that the guy at the window glances over. That’s the one. Not the polite laugh or the one she gives Jackson when he’s being an idiot. This one comes from somewhere lower and only seems to happen when she forgets somebody might hear.
A moth the size of a small aircraft immediately throws itself at the light above us.
Reese ducks. “Jesus Christ.”
“It’s a moth.”
“That thing has a mortgage.”
I laugh and get up. “Come on.”
The beach isn’t really a beach. It’s a strip of sand on the lake about a mile and a half off the county road, down an unmarked track nobody finds unless someone shows them where to turn.
The entrance sits between two rocks that look exactly like every other rock out here, which is probably why nobody comes down this way.
I take the ruts slow. Reese’s hands rest against my ribs, not clasped around my waist or gripping my jacket how they did the first few times she rode with me. Just there. Warm and flat.
I notice.
I notice everything with her.
When we reach the lake, I kill the engine, and the sudden quiet lasts maybe half a second before the crickets take over. Reese gets off before I do. She leaves her helmet on the seat, pulls off her boots, and walks toward the water.
I stay where I am.
The lake is almost black tonight. The moon isn’t much help, but there’s enough light to see her standing ankle-deep in the shallows, jacket hanging loose around her, face turned toward the water.
I give her a few minutes. She’s had eight people within arm’s reach of her for most of the week. Somebody has been making sure she eats, sleeps, drinks water, answers her phone, doesn’t answer her phone, gets to practice, gets home from practice. All of it necessary.
All of it probably driving her fucking crazy.
Eventually she looks back at me. “Ask me.”
“No.”
Her whole body turns this time. “No?”
I get off the bike and walk down as far as the dry sand.
“You’ve been asked for something by pretty much everybody you’ve spoken to since the eighth.
Carmine wants blood. Kowalski wanted your father.
Vance wanted your collar. Reporters want a quote.
The university wants you to keep your head down until nationals.
” I sit and stretch my legs out in front of me. “I’m not getting in that line.”
She watches me for a moment before coming a little farther out of the water. “Then why did you bring me here?”
“Because you haven’t been anywhere in six days where somebody wasn’t waiting for you to make a decision.” I nod toward the lake. “You can stand in the water. That’s the whole plan.”
She waits like there’s going to be more.
There isn’t.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“That’s your whole plan?”
“Pretty much.”
Her mouth falls open a little. “Cameron, that’s a terrible date.”
“It’s an excellent date. You’re just not used to them.”
She snorts and comes up the beach. Instead of sitting across from me, she drops down beside me, close enough that her shoulder settles against my arm. Her boots get tossed somewhere behind us, and she digs her bare feet into the sand.
We don’t talk. That’s the point.
After a few minutes, the cold from the ground starts working its way through my jeans. Reese shifts closer, either because she’s cold too or because she wants to.
I don’t ask which.
“Cameron.”
“Mm?”
“I want you to bite me.”
I’ve known it was coming, or at least I’ve known she wanted it. Hearing her say it still sends something hot and immediate down my spine, but I’ve spent two months learning the difference between feeling something and having to do something about it. I keep looking out at the lake.
“I know.”
She pulls her shoulder away from mine enough to look at me. “That’s it? I know?”
“You’ve wanted it since the maintenance room. I’ve wanted it since about a week before that.” I glance over and find her staring at me like I’ve personally insulted her. “You don’t need me acting surprised just because you said it first.”
“Then why the hell have you spent two months staying three feet away from me?”
That’s harder to answer. Not because I don’t know why. I’ve known exactly why since the night it happened. I just haven’t said it to anybody, and once I do, Reese will have something that I’ve spent most of my life making sure people don’t get.
I dig my fingers into the sand beside my leg and watch it fill the spaces between them. “When I was fourteen, my father put my head through a storm door.”
Reese goes very still beside me.
“The scars on my left side are from that night. The ones on my back are from another one.” I don’t need to look at her to know what her face is doing.
I can feel the questions coming, but she keeps them to herself, which is one of the reasons I’m able to keep going.
“After a couple of years, I got good at knowing when it was coming. How he put a glass down. How hard he shut a cabinet. Whether he answered when my mother said his name. I could usually tell he was going to lose his shit before he knew.”
“Cameron.”
“I’m not telling you because I want you to feel sorry for me.”
“I know that.”
Of course she does. I look over then. She’s got her knees pulled up now, arms loose around them, and there’s no pity on her face. She’s just listening.
“I’m good at reading people,” I tell her. “Really good. I had to be. Somewhere along the way it stopped being something I did because of him and became...” I shrug because I don’t have a better way to say it without sounding like Tyler. “Mine, I guess. The one part of me I could always trust.”
Her expression shifts a little at that. “And you couldn’t read me?”
“Not in the maintenance room.” Even thinking about those few seconds makes my shoulders tighten. “When your heat hit, I lost the room. Completely. Couldn’t tell you where the door was, what Jackson was doing, whether somebody was talking to me. There was just you.”
She looks back toward the lake. “So you thought you might hurt me.”
“Yeah.”
No point dressing that up.
She picks at a loose thread on the knee of her jeans for a second. “Do you still think that?”
“I don’t know.”
That gets her attention faster than anything else I’ve said. Her head turns, and I can practically see her deciding whether to be pissed.