Page 69 of The Leaving Kind
“Did you break up with her to go away?”
“I did.” Cam’s smile was sad but not tragic. “That’s when my love story died.”
“And you haven’t met anyone worthy since then?”
Cam shrugged. “There was someone else a while ago, but she wasn’t as into it as I was.”
“Another she.”
“I’ve never had a serious relationship with a guy.”
Victor smirked. “I see. We’re just for fun, then.”
“Hey, it’s all just for fun.” Cam picked up his spoon and seemed to concentrate on finishing his chili.
Victor did the same.
“What about your parents? They still live around here?” Cam asked after a minute.
Victor felt his good humor begin to fade and quickly bolstered it. “They moved to Oregon of all places. As if we don’t get enough rain here.”
“They get a lot of rain out that way too? I thought that was Seattle.”
“I think the whole northwest is relatively wet.”
“Were they good parents?” Cam’s question was quiet. Wary.
With a gentle smile, Victor nodded. “They were. All three of them.”
Cam blinked.
“Sunshine, Moonbeam, and Rainstorm.”
After a beat, Cam said, “You’re not kidding, are you?”
“Nope. I was raised by three loving people. They were living with many, many friends, a commune, I suppose, past Mount Airy, when my mom got pregnant with me. When I was four, the three of them moved to Milford to start their own little four-person collective.” Victor grinned.
Cam put a hand to his mouth. “I’m trying so hard not to laugh.”
“It’s cool.”
“How did you end up with a name like Victor? Is your real name Victory or something?”
At Victor’s blank stare, Cam covered his mouth again. “Oh, man. No.”
“And we will speak of it no more.” Only Tez was allowed to call him by his birth name and only once a month or thereabouts.
Pinching his thumb and forefinger in front of his lips, Cam made the universal sign for locking a secret away. “What about your last name?”
Victor smiled. “It’s my mom’s. The name on her birth certificate was Mary Ness and she had white-blonde hair and pale blue eyes, so figuring out whether Sun or Rain was my father would take a paternity test. I always suspected it was Sunshine, though. Our personalities are similar. Our moods.”
“He’s bright and colorful and totally in love with drama?”
Victor chose to laugh. Softly. “You could say that.”
Cam looked around the house again, as though Victor deciding to live with the mother of his children while occasionally hosting their other lovers now made sense. “That’s kinda cool.”
“Yeah.”