Chapter 8 Cameron
CAMERON
Grease is embedded in the lines of my fingers, a permanent tattoo of honest work.
The invoice Katie finished this morning sits perfect on my workbench–her handwriting neat, precise, and nothing like the chaos of the trailer park she comes from.
She’s taken up her administrative position at the garage like she was born to it, transforming my scattered receipts into something resembling an actual business.
The satisfaction sits warm and heavy in my chest, but somehow dangerous, like a loaded weapon.
Through the office window, I watch her gathering suppliers’ catalogs, her bottom lip caught between her teeth in focused concentration. Fluorescent light sparkles off the ring I placed on her finger a week ago. A week of her wearing my claim, showing the world she belongs to me.
Her scent has spread through the place, adding a sweet femininity to a place soaked in oil and grease. Her moans still play back in my mind every time I think about when I had her on her back on the floor, showing her just how good she could take it.
A movement outside flashes in my peripheral vision, and my body instantly tenses up.
It’s Mercedes, standing by the bay door like a phantom. A specter of a terrible decision I once made, clutching something with her fake nails. An envelope.
My body moves before I even think about what I’m doing. Instantly, I’m between her and the office, walling her off from Katie.
“Cameron.” My voice sounds rotten from her mouth. “You and I need to talk.”
“No. We don’t.”
She smiles a foul grin, ugly and knowing. “We do. Unless you want Katie to miss out on this.” She waves the envelope in my face, official and important looking.
“What is that?”
“Mom?” Katie appears in the doorway behind me, drawn by her mother’s voice.
“Hey there, sweetheart.” Mercedes’ tone is fake like artificial sweetener. She’s really hamming it up right now. “Look what came in the mail. Your scholarship letter!”
The words echo off the space around us like a bomb being dropped. Katie’s eyes widen, bright with hunger and an ambition I fully recognize—the same hunger she had when she first told me about applying for this.
“I–I got in?” Her voice nearly breaks with surprised joy. “The full scholarship?”
“You got in, sweetie. Books, tuition, housing, even a meal plan.” Mercedes’ eyes are on me as she hands her daughter the letter. “You could start spring semester. Meet people your own age. It would be great.”
The subtext is about as subtle as breaking glass. Mercedes is not here to celebrate with her daughter; she’s here to destroy. To plant a cancer in the relationship Katie and I have built.
“Got in?” I ask, confused. “I didn’t even know you applied.”
Katie traces the envelope with her fingers. She looks at me, and I watch her searching my face for a reaction. “Yeah…I never really mentioned it because I didn’t think I’d get it.”
I do my best to force a smile—I really am happy for her. But she must see right through me, as the joy on her face instantly dims like a lightbulb being turned down.
“It’s…it’s nice, Mom,” she says carefully. “But I work at the garage now. Cam needs me—”
“Don’t.” I shake my head. She’s making herself small again, only this time it’s not for her mother—it’s for me.
Mercedes laughs, happy as a pig in shit. “Well, I’ll just leave you two lovebirds to discuss my daughter’s future—the one that doesn’t involve trapping her in a garage at the age of eighteen.”
She leaves, but her poison still lingers between us.
“Cam—”
“Congratulations.” I force the word from my mouth. I mean it, but it’s so hard to say. “You earned it.”
There’s a brief pause as she looks at me, clutching the envelope like it’s either precious or might explode. “I don’t have to go, Cam. You just started the garage, and—”
“And you’re eighteen years old with a full scholarship, baby.” Each word pains me, costs me, like a tax leached from my flesh. “That’s not something you throw away.”
Katie’s chin lifts defiantly. “I’m not throwing anything away. I’m making a choice. And I chose you. Us.”
Her words should fill me with pride, satisfaction. Instead, they stab into me like knives.
When night falls, Katie lies curved against me, her breath soft as she dreams. The scholarship letter sits on the nightstand like evidence of a crime I’m about to commit.
I stare up at the ceiling, countering her heartbeats against my chest, memorizing the softness of her skin and her weight against me.
She could have everything. Classes full of kids who have never had to wash their mom’s puke off the floor, study groups that meet in coffee shops instead of trailer parks and garages. A future that’s more than brake changes and compromise.
I can see her in a classroom now, raising her hand, her brilliant mind finally getting fed by something more than just survival and microwave dinners.
She’ll laugh with normal girls her own age about boys from sociology, not older men who kissed them in their mother’s kitchen.
I picture everything she could be without me—the old anchor just weighing her down.
Love is not possession. Love is freedom.
The thought burns in my chest, my heart pained with every breath I take.
My eyes stay open until morning arrives like the date of an execution. Katie wakes happily, presses her lips against my jaw and throat, and mutters about inventory orders and appointment scheduling. She’s more than capable of running the garage. Capable of so much more.
I watch her as she stands, slips into one of my oversized shirts, and grabs her hairbrush. Such beauty, beyond anything I could have ever imagined being mine.
“Katie, we need to talk.” The words break the silence like a rock dropped into still water.
She turns, her intelligent eyes sharp as blades. She already knows what’s coming. “Cam, no.”
“Katie—”
“Whatever you’re about to say, don’t.” She shakes her head. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to be noble, trying to protect me.”
“You’re eighteen, Katie. With a full scholarship!”
“And a ring on my finger!” She presents it like a weapon, flashing the rock in my face. “Your ring. The one you put there days ago when you promised—”
“You can keep it,” I tell her. “Keep the ring, but go to school. Live the life you were meant to live.”
“That life is meant to be with you!”
“No.” I’m on my feet now, putting distance between us before I break and give in. “You should be in classrooms, not garages, Katie. With people your age. Not with—”
“Not with what? The man I love?”
She’s got a point. I know it, she knows it. The pain is almost too much to bear.
“You’ll find someone else, Katie. Someone better who doesn’t come with grease under his fingernails.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t get to decide that for me.”
But I do. And that’s the worst part. I get to decide because I’m the one with the power to walk away and save her from a future she’ll regret in a few years when she’s looking back and wondering what she missed. Wondering about the opportunities I cost her.
“This discussion is over.” I grab my keys and head for the door. “Take the scholarship, Katie. Go to school. Be an eighteen-year-old girl.”
And here it is. Love as freedom. And freedom as pain.
I’m halfway out the door when she calls out to me. “You think leaving makes you a hero? It makes you a coward, Cam. A coward!”
I don’t turn around. I can’t. Seeing her face will break me, force me to be selfish and keep her. My feet move one after the other, fighting the war going on within me, dragging me downstairs to the truck.
The engine roars to life, and I drive. No destination, just movement.
There’s an overlook just outside of town that gives a view of everything—the trailer park, the college campus just beyond that, and my garage set right in the middle like a manifestation of the choice I’ve just forced her to make.
My heart pounds like it’s about to explode. I lean back and close my eyes, take a deep breath, and fight to calm down.
I just did the right thing, right?
My phone rings, nearly causing me to jump out of my skin. Katie’s name on the display makes my chest tighten.
I don’t answer.
It rings again, and again, and again, until finally, I turn my phone off completely. The silence is louder than any ringtone.
Love. Love and agony, twisting around together inside me like two snakes fighting for survival. This is self-evisceration. A calculated amputation of my own heart. I know I have to let her go, but doing so might just kill me.
But Katie will be all right. She’ll heal, go to college, make friends, and build a life that’s beyond the one I can give her. She’ll look back on this blip in her life and realize how lucky she was to have escaped.
And I’ll have the garage. The dream I had built in my mind before she entered my world. And that should be enough.
It has to be…
Because the alternative—staying with Katie, forcing her to give up her scholarship—that’s not love.
That’s just a new kind of prison, and I’ve already helped her escape one of those.
I won’t build her another.