Chapter 43 #2
Once I’ve mastered the meaning of the food labels, Luis starts bossing me around in Spanish.
He keeps circling back to me to engage in conversation and leaning close to correct my grammar.
He’s a hard-ass, but he makes learning Spanish fun.
Maybe not as fun as my sessions with Reeve—which always ended in incredible sex—but I’ve learned more from him, probably because our sessions don’t devolve into sex.
“Did you and Cam have a fight?” I ask Lenni after I notice Cam send a couple of cool glances our way.
She looks up at him. “No, why?”
“He keeps glaring in our direction.”
“He’s okay. Just a little moody lately, but it’s about football. As always.”
Luis comes by and whispers something in my ear about his hopes that Cam might be bisexual. There’s no way Cam could have heard, but when I laugh, he glares at me over his shoulder. “Could you laugh any louder, Jade?”
Lenni and I exchange a surprised look. Cam’s a lot of things, but he’s not an asshole.
“I mean, I guess I could if you want,” I call over to him.
“How’s this? Ha ha ha!” I’m as loud and obnoxious as possible, hoping to make him smile or at least roll his eyes affectionately like he usually does when he disapproves of my behavior.
But when he turns this way, his eyes are cold. He comes over and drops a box loudly on our table. “How about having some fucking self-awareness, Jade?” He stalks off, leaving me in stunned silence.
I turn to Lenni. “What the hell was that?”
“Don’t worry about him.” But her eyes are lined with concern as she watches him walk away.
“He’s mad at me about Reeve?”
“I don’t know. He’s worried about Reeve, he’s worried about their season. Just let it go.”
“And he’s taking it out on me?”
Lenni huffs out a breath. “Do you blame him? At various points you’ve hated Reeve and Cam for what you thought they did to me.”
“You think I was shitty to Reeve.”
“I think you protected your heart. That’s all.”
I put my hand on her arm as she reaches for another can of corn. “That’s not saying anything. If you think I’m the asshole here, then tell me.”
“I’m not going to stand here and say you screwed up just so you can argue with me. I know why you ended it with him.”
I glance at Cam walking across the gym. “Then maybe he will.” I jog after him and call his name. He stops but doesn’t turn around. When I catch up to him, he looks down his nose at me, his jaw set. “What’s going on with you?” I ask. “If you have a problem with me, you know I welcome you to say so.”
“Easy, Jade. I was just getting a little tired of watching you and your Latin lover back there.”
I laugh shortly. “He’s my tutor.”
“So was Reeve.”
“And he’s gay.”
Cam’s amber eyes focus so intently on me that I almost step back.
I’m not used to this. Cam always seems generally uninterested in what’s going on around him, save for the object of his attention—usually Lenni.
Just like Reeve, even though he appears the opposite.
Even in a room full of people, with Reeve at the center, I always felt like the only one he was really looking at.
Even when he stood around joking and laughing, being the person everyone loved for him to be, somehow he made me feel like I was the only one he saw in that room.
“Okay, you’re right, I do have a problem with you,” Cam finally says. “That’s why I’m walking away.”
“Don’t.” I move in front of him. “Say it to my face. You think I can’t handle that?”
His jaw flexes.
“Say it.”
He glances back at Lenni, who’s watching us with a grave expression. “Fine. I like you, Jade, but I think you acted like a stone-cold bitch to Reeve.”
I’m stunned for a few seconds. Not because I’m insulted, but because I’m impressed. Cam’s usually impossible to rile up. “In my defense, stone-cold bitch is my purest form.”
He doesn’t crack. “What you did was cold. You can’t treat someone like that and think they’re just gonna be okay.”
The humor drains out of me. “What do you mean? Is he all right?”
He gives me an impatient look. “His game is hurting and that’s his life, so I’d say he’s hurting pretty fucking bad.”
I’m hit by a wave of self-loathing. “I wasn’t trying to hurt him.”
“But you did.”
“We’re too young to change our lives around for each other. You’d never ask Lenni to do that.”
He looks at me strangely. “I’m not talking about that.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
“Being in his corner. One day you’re there and the next you’re gone.”
My instinct is to tell him he’s wrong, that Reeve has the entire campus, if not the whole town of Shafer, in his corner. But I know that’s not true, not in the way Reeve needs it. “I still watch his games.” I realize how weak this sounds.
Cam is unimpressed. “You two were friends. More than friends, but at the end of the day, that’s what you were to him: someone who had his back. You yank that out from under him just because the girlfriend/boyfriend shit didn’t work out.”
My mind spins, all sorts of new worries taking hold. “What do you want me to do, Cam?”
“Be there for him,” he says harshly. “Literally, Jade—show up. Don’t take that away from him.”
Cam’s words have me shaken as I walk home after the food drive wraps up.
Reeve needed me. In spite of everything we held back from each other, he told me he needed me, and I barely heard it.
I spent weeks telling Reeve he could be real with me and not have to worry I wouldn’t like the person I saw behind the facade, and then I turned my back on him.
I love Reeve. He deserves the future he’s worked his whole life for, and I want him to have it, even if I’m not in it.
More than anything, I want him to know I believe in him and nothing will change that.
It’s the answer to Lenni’s question: What do you want to tell him?
I think back to when we began, before I loved him, before he changed what I thought I knew about my life.
For the first time, I think about how I changed his life.
That’s what he said to me—that I changed everything for him—but I never thought about what he meant.
When did it start? When did we begin to see each other as something far beyond casual enemies?
The library. I still remember that night in such vivid detail that I can feel it. That’s where Reeve and I began.