Darker Space (2 page)

“I could handle it, city boy.” I turned back to the view.

Cam slid his arms around my waist and rested his chin on my shoulder. “I know you could.”

The warmth of his body crept through me. I let the cigarette burn down to my fingers, then flicked it over the railing.

“Brady.” Cam sighed.

“You’re not the boss of me, LT.”

Cam slid one hand under the elastic of my pajama pants, his fingers moving against my abdomen. “Is that so?”

“Jesus,” I said. “If the rental association doesn’t like cigarette butts, I bet they’ll really hate if you jerk me off on the balcony.”

Cam snorted. “Fuck them, right?”

“Fuck ’em,” I agreed and waited for his hand to slip lower. It didn’t. Cam was all talk tonight. I leaned back against him. “Thought I was on a promise, LT.”

He laughed lowly, and his breath tickled my ear. “Tease.”

“Me? I’m not the tease, asshole.”

He kissed my throat. “You are. Every day you are.”

My grin faded as I looked up at the stars again. A shiver ran through me.

“Are you cold?”

“A bit.”

He knew it was a lie. He tightened his arms around me, and for a while we stood there. I watched the city, and he watched the night sky. Both of us waiting for something, maybe, or for nothing at all.

* * * *

Lucy’s party dress was pretty. She didn’t want to sit down on the train because it might squash the ribbons at the back. So she stood instead, twirling around to watch the way the dress flew up and then settled again, like a parachute.

We were having Lucy’s birthday party at Cam’s parents’ place because they had a backyard and space for kids to run around. Their house was really nice. It was the sort of place where I was always worried about touching stuff or leaving scuff marks on the wall or something. The sort of place that always made me feel dirtier than I was. Today there was a bunch of colorful balloons tied to the fence beside the letter box. Lucy was tugging at my hand from the moment she saw the balloons rolling and dipping in the breeze.

“Brady! Brady,
look
!”

It was Lucy’s eighth birthday, but her first birthday party. Mine too. Kids from Kopa didn’t get much experience with shit like that.

Lucy pulled away and raced toward the gate, her face flushed with excitement. Meanwhile, something about those balloons was fucking
terrifying
me.

Cam’s parents, David and Catherine, met us at the front of the house. Catherine was already fussing over Lucy, but she gave me a quick smile and a wave, and David shook my hand.

I followed Cam inside and then out into the backyard. The backyard sloped a little, down to the fence. There were more balloons tied to bushes and branches, and a trestle table with plates full of tiny sandwiches and fruit slices and lollies.

“Brady!” David waved me over to the barbecue. “Want to give me a hand here?”

“Okay.” I made an effort not to look around for Cam. I didn’t want him to think I still needed him to hold my hand around his parents.

I liked his parents, but they didn’t like me.

Wait. That probably wasn’t true. Cam’s parents liked me, but they did it in a way that felt weird. David talked to me about fishing and football, I think because he thought they were the sort of things I should have liked, and Catherine bought me clothes she thought I might need, and they asked how I was, and every single time, with each of them, all I could think was how fucking weird it all was. Playing happy families with the Rushtons.

There was always a lot of smiling and small talk, but I knew they were all thinking it because I was thinking it too:
Your son and I, we fuck
. And maybe they could have got over that except for that other thing:
I’m a feral reffo from the gulf. I left school when I was twelve, and you’ve got so many diplomas hanging on your walls you don’t need fucking wallpaper.

Cam came from smart people. I came from Kopa.

It was dumb. Dumb how much I sometimes resented them for being everything I wasn’t, and for being so fucking
nice
on top of it. I hated how I tried too hard, even though Cam said I didn’t have to, and how it didn’t matter anyway because I’d never be good enough for them.

I reckon we all knew that.

David put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed a little. He had Cam’s smile. Cam’s eyes as well, except I could never read what was behind them. “Do you want to get this thing fired up? I’ll go and get the sausages.”

“Okay.” It was actually a relief to be given a job I could get distracted by. That way, when kids and parents started arriving, I had a reason not to talk to them.

Gradually, the backyard filled up with kids. Mostly little girls in pretty party dresses, but a few boys as well in bright-colored shirts. Every little kid came bearing a wrapped gift. Cam was good with the kids. He rounded them up for games and made sure none of them got left out. He was good with the parents too, talking easily and remembering names, and pretending he didn’t have one of the most famous faces on the planet.

Join the Military and Save the Earth.

Most of the posters were gone now that Cam was back—his handsome face and heroic sacrifice didn’t invoke the same useful patriotism since the Faceless had returned him—but there were still a few around, and Cam’s face was still stamped firmly into people’s consciousness. Gazes followed him even here, when he blindfolded kids and spun them in gentle circles, then pushed them toward the picture of the tailless donkey stuck up by the trestle table.

I turned sausages on the grill and listened to David talk to people.

“No, we’re not the grandparents,” he explained to some parent who’d obviously never met us before. “Lucy is Brady’s sister. Brady is my son Cam’s partner.”

The guy looked confused for a second, as though he didn’t know what that made us. Join the club, right?

Somehow all the dads had congregated over near the barbecue and talked about sports and politics and their day jobs. The mothers sat in chairs in the shade. I couldn’t hear what they were talking about, but I figured I wouldn’t fit in any better over there.

“Look,” one of the dads said, “I’ve got no problem with paying a higher rate of tax, but why the hell should my money go to support some reffo in some shithole township who just doesn’t want to get a job?”

I froze with the tongs against the grill.

“Well,” David said, his voice calm. He didn’t look at me. “Respectfully, I disagree with that. I believe most people want to work, if given the chance. And I believe the refugee townships need more support than they’re currently getting.”

One of the other dads chimed in. “I knew a few reffos when I did my service. They weren’t all lazy.”

With advocates like that, who needs enemies? It was time to walk away before I started calling them assholes and throwing punches.

“That’s just it,” David said, taking the tongs off me as I held them out to him. “They’re good enough to be conscripted into the military for us, but not good enough for all the benefits of citizenship like health care and education?”

I headed toward the house, passing Cam, who was almost buried in newspaper as the kids played some game where they had to unwrap a layer off a parcel whenever the music stopped. Ever since Cam had explained it to me, I couldn’t remember what the name of it was, and he laughed whenever I called it the parcel-wrapping game.

Fuck this place, and these people, and the fact that I didn’t know what their stupid game was called because when I was growing up, I’d been shit-poor and hungry. Or lazy, according to most of these fuckers.

The house was quiet and empty. I headed straight for Cam’s old room, figuring nobody would bother me in there. I sat on his bed. I could see marks on the wall where posters had hung once, but this was a guest room now, so there weren’t any real traces of teenage Cam left. He’d told me he’d had models of Hawks hanging from his ceiling that he’d made when he was a little kid, and known since then that he’d pilot one in the black one day.

Outside I could still hear kids shrieking and laughing. It sounded like they were a long way away.

The door squeaked open. “Brady?”

I sighed and scrubbed my knuckles over my head. “Sorry.”

Cam sat down on his bed next to me, all long limbs. Weird to think of him sleeping here when he was just a kid. I watched his gaze track around the room, as he looked past the things that were in here all the way through to his memories. The quirk of his lips made me feel a million miles away from him.

“What happened?” he asked after a moment.

“Nothing.” I shrugged. “Some asshole.”

Cam reached for my hand and threaded his fingers through mine.

I made a face. “All reffos are lazy.”

“Asshole,” Cam murmured in agreement.

Sometimes I got scared that we were just playacting, Cam and me. Like what were we supposed to do now for the rest of our lives, or for as long as this thing between us lasted? In the black it hadn’t mattered, but back here, now the dust had settled, it was like everyone could see the flaws in us, the cracks in the thing we called a relationship. I didn’t fit into Cam’s world, and he sure as fuck didn’t fit into mine.

I knew what people thought about us. They thought the only reason we were still together was because Cam felt responsible for me and Lucy, and that I was just using him because I couldn’t support a kid on my wage alone. And all that shit—from other people, but from me too—got in the way so much that I was sometimes afraid I couldn’t even
see
Cam anymore.

I knew nothing about relationships. I only knew that it had been easier to love him when I was sure I was a dead man. Now I sometimes felt like we’d backed ourselves into a corner, except neither of us wanted to admit it.

Or maybe that was just me.

Ungrateful dirty reffo scum.

“You don’t need to babysit me,” I said at last.

He smiled. “I needed a break as well.”

“Are you saying that just to make me feel like less of a loser for sneaking in here?”

“What?” He snorted. “Jesus, Brady, no.”

Of course. Most famous face on the planet. Sometimes he needed to get away from all that shit too.

I shifted so that I was facing him and brought my free hand up to press my palm against his cheek. “You know I love you, right, Cam?”

Worry flickered through his eyes. “I love you too.”

“Good.” I swiped my thumb over his cheekbone. “Because I know I’ve been an asshole today, and I’m gonna be even more of an asshole by the time we’re done, because things like this suck balls, because everyone out there is smarter than me and has a better job than me and looks down on me the second they know where I’m from, and I fucking
hate
it.” I pressed a finger over his lips before he could talk. “But I love that you and your parents did all this for Lucy. And not just the presents and the party, but everything you’ve done. And I really was trying to be sociable and shit, but I kind of had to get out of there before I wrecked it by throwing a punch.”

“You’re not an asshole.”

That’s what he took away from that? “I kind of am.”

He wavered. “Not always.”

That made me smile and lifted some of my bad mood.

“Would you really have thrown a punch?”

“Yeah.” I shrugged. “You know us reffos, LT. We’re lazy as fuck, but we can fight dirty if we want.”

Cam’s grinned. “I wouldn’t expect any less.”

I leaned in for a kiss. “Fuck, no, you wouldn’t. Someone’s gotta keep you city boys on your toes.”

“So come back outside with me,” he said, his fingers curling behind my ear, “and keep me on my toes.”

* * * *

After the party, Cam’s mother offered to take Lucy for the night.

“You know she’s always welcome to stay.” Her smile was a little too bright. “And I’m sure you two could do with a night on your own.”

“Can I?” Lucy asked, eyes wide with hope. “Can I stay?”

Catherine looked at Cam, not at me, like she knew she wouldn’t like what she saw in my face.

Cam didn’t need to ask me what I thought.

“Maybe another time,” he said.

“Okay,” Catherine said, that too-bright smile faltering.

I think she thought I didn’t trust her and David, but it wasn’t that.

I’d promised my dad I would look after Lucy.

More than that, when I was in the black, I’d felt the loss of her so fucking profoundly that the ache had never left me. I could feel it even now, even when she was right in front of me. Even when her hand was clasped in mine, I could feel millions of miles stretching out between us. Once, I’d been so sure that I’d failed her, that she would die alone and afraid, that I couldn’t let her go now. What if she needed me and I wasn’t there?

“It’s not fair!” Lucy scowled at me. “You’re not being fair!”

I ushered her out the door so I wouldn’t have to see Catherine’s disappointment, and left Cam to make whatever excuses he could for my overprotectiveness.

It was already dark by the time we reached the station and caught the train. The carriage was mostly empty. Lucy picked a seat near the window, and I sat next to her. She huffed and ignored me. Cam sat across from us, the bag of Lucy’s presents balanced between his feet.

I don’t think I’d ever gotten a birthday present in my life before I met Cam. Hell, the only surprise I ever got was the letter when I turned sixteen saying that I’d been conscripted. It was good that Lucy was learning a different way to grow up. A better way. At least when she grew up and shacked up with someone, when she walked out to breakfast one morning and got a box wrapped in colorful paper shoved under her nose, she wouldn’t screw it up by asking,
What the fuck is this?

I mean, I hadn’t remembered it was my birthday. Why would I? Cam had, though, because, well, that was Cam through and through, wasn’t it?

“What?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“Nothing.” I couldn’t stop my smile, though.

He raised his eyebrows.

“Just wondering how I got so lucky,” I admitted.

“You haven’t yet,” Cam said. “But play your cards right, and who knows?”