Page 113 of The Leaving Kind

Frowning, Victor sat up. “Your brother is still here.”

“Nick has left the nest.” Cam made a fluttering motion with his hand and then wrapped his fingers back around the bottle neck. “It’s all good, though. He doesn’t need me anymore. Honey just needed somewhere to stay for a while. Never should have got attached.” Cam glanced over at him. “You too.”

As regarded attachment or needing somewhere to stay awhile?

Victor swallowed.

Cam’s expression darkened. “Becca needed me. I fucked up there. Donna? She only needed my money. Leland ...” He turned sharply away.

“Who’s Leland?” Victor asked.

Cam angled his left shoulder forward. He was wearing a shirt, but Victor let his gaze land on the ink resting beneath.

“August fourteenth, 2007. I couldn’t walk so I held him while he bled out. I told him he was going to be okay even though I knew he wouldn’t be.”

Victor wanted to reach across the space between them and take Cam’s hand but he refrained. “I don’t know what words are appropriate in this situation, except: I’m sorry. That your friend died. That you were injured.”

He pictured the scars on Cam’s legs and torso and put together a brief story in his head. Cam hadn’t been able to save his friend because he’d been too hurt. So he’d held him as he died. Bleeding and broken, he’d held another man’s life in his arms and watched it ebb away.

Victor couldn’t imagine such pain. Feeling small and sick and out of place, he pushed back up off the lounger and reached for his shoes.

What the fuck are you doing? Sit your ass down.

He was not going to run away from this. From a man who needed him. If he did, he might as well keep running. Besides, enough fucking people had left Cameron alone. Victor was not going to add his name to that list.

With a sigh, he wrestled the whiskey bottle away from Cam and raised it to his lips. He swallowed the sweet and rough rye without widening his eyes, determined not to wince. Then, as softly and with as much care as he could muster, he said, “I need more than somewhere to stay. I think you do too.”

Across the space, on his own lounger, Cam let out a quiet sob.

Good job, Victor.

With a sigh, he put the bottle down and dropped his head into his hands.

Lying there, chest aching, Cam worked to suppress a second sob. One would do it, thank you very much. At least until Victor left. Then he might cry a little, but only for a minute. It was too beautiful a night to do otherwise. When he wasn’t focusing on the endless procession of bus wheels rolling over his head and heart, he could appreciate that. The sky and the stars. Could think about his little bro, remember him cavorting across the lawn in weird, sideways cartwheels and froggy leaps. Uncoordinated as fuck but special because of it.

Their parents would be sitting about where he was now, on the old lawn chairs he’d found tucked away in the back of the garage, labeled because of course Nick had labeled them. They’d have been sitting side by side, talking quietly about nothing. Just chatting. They’d been good friends, his parents. Cam had always liked that about them because when they’d fought, which hadn’t been often, they’d done so without too much drama.

Rebecca would have been sitting on the back step, stretching the long cord of the telephone to its limit. And Cam would have been sitting at the edge of the lawn, watching Nick play while wondering whether his father had counted the cans of beer in the fridge.

A typical summer evening.

“I need more than somewhere to stay.”

That was it, in one of those proverbial little nutshells. Cam needed more. More than somewhere to stay. More than a job digging holes. Wasn’t that why he’d continued caring for and updating Emma’s house? Why he’d started a business with Jorge? But his fear of collapse, of an end—either big and noisy, or a quiet slipping away—nipped constantly. The dogs of Hell baying at his heels.

He’d been waiting for weeks for the sky to fall in on him. And now that it had, how long would Jorge wait for him to emerge from the rubble? To stop cowering with his hands over his head—or sleeping on a patio lounger with a whiskey bottle clutched in one hand?

Maybe he should give up now. Leave before it all fell apart. A sodden breath escaped him, the sound suspiciously like another sob.

God fucking damn it.

Victor’s fidgets stopped. “Cam—”

“Everything I touch falls apart, and here I am starting a business with a man who trusts me, who maybe even needs me, and I can’t do it. I’m too fucking scared to try.”

“But you’re already there,” Victor pointed out.

“Not right now I’m not, and it’s only a matter of time before it all turns to shit.”