Page 6 of The Leaving Kind
A kernel of interest popped inside Victor’s chest.
Oh, no. Nope. No way. Not happening. This was, most definitely, not a part of the plan.
Victor cleared this throat. “Ah ...” He leaned out sideways, past the bulk of Cam’s shoulder, and eyed the pickup truck still idling in his driveway. “You can dump the mulch there, in front of the garage. On the right side, please. Try not to block the left door. And the trees can go behind the mulch, I guess.” He returned his attention to the man in front of him. The not-at-all interesting delivery driver. “Thank you.” He patted his hip and winced as his hands slid over the silken fabric of his robe. He was standing there in his underwear.
Well, then.
Spinning with enough drama to flare the robe around his calves—why wear a garment designed for such a display and not use it?—Victor stalked along the hall to his kitchen and plucked a twenty from the cookie jar on the counter. When he got back to the front door, Cam stood where he’d been left, his not-in-any-way-lovely face now creased with bemusement.
Victor handed him the tip. “Thank you.”
Then he shut the door in Cam’s face. Because he needed it to be gone from his sight. He needed this day to be over. The weariness from earlier was seeping back into the corners of the recently reinstated reality. Beneath it lurked a deepening fatigue.
A wave was building in the troughs of his mood, and soon it would crash over him. Victor needed to prepare. He didn’t have time to moon over strange delivery men in his driveway, handsome or not. He didn’t have the wherewithal to follow such whims, anyway.
He was done with men.
For the time being.
And beyond done with love. So very done.
The following afternoon, for reasons he couldn’t articulate—that would mean giving them space in his head—Cam found himself driving along Raymondskill Road. It was a hot day, and heat shimmered up from the blacktop as he navigated the long curves, his niece’s car whining when he hit another slope.
He should get his own ride. Had thought about it on and off, and had some cash put aside. But until Emma’s car died on him—full-on stopped working in a way he couldn’t fix—he lacked the impetus. Besides, when they talked, Emma always asked how the car was, as though it was a pet Cam was taking care of while she spent the summer in the city. So, he kept driving it.
He slowed down as he passed the house with the unkempt lawn, and then stopped altogether. A figure with a long ponytail the same color as Emma’s stood in the middle of a chewed-up strip of grass with what appeared to be a dead mower in front of them. Two determined kicks to the body of the mower didn’t start it. Didn’t even budge it. A grin pulled at Cam’s mouth as the kid wound up for another round. Had to be a young person with all that energy. Also, who else would dress in shorts so wide their legs resembled sticks and a shirt loose enough it might be draped on a hanger? In Cam’s experience, the older a person got, the better their clothes fit, if not only because a person filled out a bit.
Briefly, he glanced at his own belly. He should stop eating bacon sandwiches and drinking beer. A chicken and whiskey diet for the win. Easing his foot onto the accelerator, Cam moved on along the street.
He’d check in with the kid on his way back, because apparently that was his job now: Raymondskill Road Rescue. Not that Victor Ness would need rescuing today—unless he kept more than one lover in residence and was scheduled to throw another out on the lawn.
Another grin tugged at Cam’s mouth. Making deliveries to people’s homes, he saw some things. One day last fall, he’d dropped off a truckload of trees to a place out toward Honesdale that had to belong to a cult. Six-foot chain-link fencing followed the road for a full two miles before breaking at a gate. He hadn’t really clocked the gatekeeper’s outfit until he reached the end of the long drive. Then he’d had to take a second to wonder if she’d run behind the truck for the past half mile, because hadn’t she been wearing denim overalls and a bright yellow blouse? But, wait, she’d had sandy-blonde hair, and the woman who’d met his truck had dark curls.
Then he’d seen everyone else—denim overalls and yellow blouses for all of them.
He hadn’t asked and, thankfully, they hadn’t tried to recruit him. He’d temporarily suspended the dating apps on his phone the week before, thinking he should stop tooling around so much, and a house full of women—cultish women—would have been tempting. But yellow wasn’t his color. And besides, he hadn’t known if they were that kind of cult. They might have been celibate. Or not into dick.
At the bottom of Victor’s driveway, Cam again slowed to a stop. He’d forgotten that the house wouldn’t be visible from the road. Since not making space in his head for thought was the theme of the day, Cam turned into the driveway and began the long and winding ascent to the house. He could always say he thought he’d messed up the order. Delivered the wrong trees.
Or he could tell the truth.
Not the whole of it. Victor didn’t need to know Cam had spent some time thinking about him last night. And whacking off. He was taking another break from the dating apps, so masturbating and watching TV were about all he did at night now, and he hadn’t needed much imagination when it came to how a passion strong enough to drive a man like Victor to make a scene on his front lawn might translate to other activities.
Victor wasn’t Cam’s type, insomuch as Cam had a type, which he didn’t, fantasies about sex cults aside. His libido carried no physical restrictions. He sure had some mental ones, though. Cam wasn’t looking for a relationship, and Victor had commitment written all over him. He’d be a serial monogamist who thought each and every lover was The One. Victor believed in love and was—obviously—surprised when it didn’t work out.
Or so Cam suspected.
At the top of the driveway, he parked and shut off the engine. The large red house lay quiet, and Cam took a moment to appraise the rambling structure. Like the tree farm offices, it was more a collection of buildings than a single one, except these were all joined in some way. The roofline at the center had the pitch of a typical Pennsylvania barn, steeper at the sides, a gentler bend toward the peak. The brick-red paint reinforced the image, as did the hayloft shutters framing the highest window. From there, roofs jutted out at different points, on different sides, as though rooms had been added here and there, as needed. Then rooms added to those rooms.
The front door was closed, any drama having already unfurled or perhaps still waiting in the wings. He didn’t think so, though. The place had too restful a feel. No science would ever back him up, but Cam reckoned tension gathered in spots where something might happen, as though the universe knew in advance that shit was going to go down. Right there.
A soldier always knew.
Nothing was happening here today. Not even garden work. The mulch remained piled in front of the second garage door, undisturbed. The trees lined up like sentries behind. Where was the mulch supposed to go?
His car door opened, and then he was standing in the driveway, scanning the adjacent beds. Despite the anxious tick of his heart—why was he out of the car?—his fingers itched to give the beds the attention they needed: weeds were struggling up beneath a too-thin layer of mulch. The path between the detached garage and the closest rambling edge of the house could also use some TLC. The flat stones surrounded by gravel were uneven, as though the ground beneath had settled. Bound to trip someone who wasn’t watching their feet.
He followed the path around to the back of the house.