The End of the World (21 page)

My anxiety ratchets up another notch. Where is he?

In an embarrassingly familiar rush of desperation, I check his Twitter account, his Instagram. No activity. Not a single update to let me know in a non-communicative way that he’s doing anything but spending time with Kara.

Private time. Alone time. Time I don’t want to dwell on, even though it’s more than likely the same sort of time I just spent with Mike but for some reason seems completely different when it comes to Cameron. After all, he’s barely twenty. That’s way too young to be engaging in that type of activity. Completely irresponsible and not to mention slightly jerkish. Unless he’s planning on marrying her, which…surely he’s not planning on marrying her?

This is the type of internal conversation I have on an almost nightly basis—this mental criticism of Cameron’s private activities that always work me up into so much stress that I’m inevitably mad at him for no good reason when he finally does show up here. But I justify it, telling myself he deserves my indignation.

It’s easier than admitting the slightest possibility that I’m just jealous.

I look out the window for what I’m certain is the fourth time in half as many minutes, then finally give up in a huff and head to my bedroom, telling myself that one of us needs to be sleeping and it might as well be me. He can go ahead and live with bloodshot eyes and an insomnia hangover for all I care.

I’ve removed the make-up from one eye when I hear him knock. Ignoring the way my pulse trips over itself, then settles to a normal rhythm only to fall down again when a louder rap sounds, I walk toward the door while swiping away leftover traces of mascara. I barely manage to crack the door open before his insults begin to fly, leaving me grinning behind my pre-moistened towelette.

“You wore makeup to the pool?” He rolls his eyes. “Women. I don’t understand any of you.”

Cameron walks straight to the refrigerator and helps himself to my chocolate ice cream, dragging out chocolate syrup, Oreos, and whipped cream to go along with it. I watch with my mouth hanging slightly open while he piles them together in the kind of mound that a mountain climber might actually struggle to tackle.

Men. I don’t get their ability to eat that much crap all at once. When I pull that junk out, it can only be consumed in small portions and one at a time or I’d be fat, comatose, or dead within minutes.

“Are you celebrating or drowning your sorrows?”

He gives me a look. “Neither. We had a fight, but we made up afterwards.” He immediately grins the kind of grin that never fails to give my pulse another workout, but it’s also one I can never decipher. I think it’s intentional on his part. Usually I don’t ask, but tonight I feel off. Fidgety. Nervous. Tonight, I can’t help myself.

“And by ‘made up’ you mean…?”

Another look, but this time it’s softer. Cameron can read my mind so well that he knows exactly when to inflame my wild imagination with a few drops of gasoline…and when to douse it with water and wait for it to settle into a more manageable flame. Tonight I need the flame. The blaze is too hot. It burns too much.

“Stop worrying, Mom. It still hasn’t happened. At this point I’m not sure it will.”

And with that, he sets his bowl on the counter and pulls me to him, enfolding me in the kind of hug that I could cocoon myself inside forever. Who needs to evolve? Who needs wings? I don’t care if I ever fly. All I want is to be wrapped in this feeling of protection and I’ll stay happy until the end of time.

And I do.

And I am.

Until he lets go a few minutes later, picks up his bowl, and drags me to the sofa to sit next to him.

It’s the same every night—him watching mindless television while I read a book and watch him, trying alternately to listen and not listen as he cackles loudly next to me, depending on the level of interest I feel about my current trashy novel. This one is good. It’s all I can do to keep myself from telling Cameron to shut up and let me read.

It isn’t until I’m somewhere between hoping for the fake couple I’m engaged in to go ahead and kiss already and trying to hold my eyes open that the thoughts I’ve been plagued with all day finally reveal themselves to me. And that’s when they make sense. All of them.

The idea of Cameron with another girl shouldn’t bother me so much when I’m doing the same thing to him with other men, but it does. It keeps me awake at night and anxious during the day and sad in all the leftover moments in between. And suddenly I know why.

Because Cameron is no longer just the boy I grew up with. He’s no longer just the stand-in brother who never felt like a brother in our house full of misplaced children. He’s no longer just the guy who knows the leftover stains of the sins inflicted on me years ago and has kept them to himself all this time. He’s no longer even just my friend.

Cameron is the other part of my soul.

He’s my connector. The only person in the world who understands me. My exact missing piece…the piece that when picked up and placed next to me, it fits as though it’s been there all along. Cameron has fit perfectly with me from the first moment we met. I may never make love to him or kiss him or even hold his hand, but I can’t breathe unless he’s around me. When he’s gone, a part of me is gone. And when he’s here, he fills the room with so much of his presence that all of me is content in the fact that I could share his space forever.

Because Cameron is my soul mate.

I might not be his, but he’s definitely mine.

The realization hits so hard that part of me can’t believe I’m still sitting upright. That I’m still breathing.

As if he senses my change in mood, Cameron shifts his position on the sofa until he’s leaning into me, arm to arm, shoulder to shoulder. And without warning or discussion or even acknowledging the fact that he’s never done it before, he slips his hand over mine, spreading it wide until all five of his fingers are perfectly linked within my own. There’s no significance to the moment, no gratuitous nod to a shared private thought. He doesn’t glance at me or even break stride in his laughter, continuing to do it loudly—just like always—as he gives my fingers a squeeze.

Unable to hide my smile, I look down at the single part of us that has managed to physically join, and squeeze back. We stay that way for the rest of the night, and all I can think is, it never takes long—no time at all, really—for him to prove me wrong.

Maybe one soul can hold the hand of another.

Maybe it’s just the first step in a long stretch of stops and starts until they can finally manage more.

Cameron

“D
o you ever
think about going back?”

Her words are so soft that I’m not sure I hear them right. And the way she strings them together to make up that particularly odd question, I’m not sure I want to. Go back? It hasn’t been that long since I left, but any question about the ugliness of those last moments were resolved in my mind back then. I have no desire to go back. That is, until a particularly sweet brunette that holds half of my heart inside her hand and the other half neatly tucked beside her own without even realizing it casually brings it up. If she asks me to go, I know without a doubt that I will. That doesn’t mean I’ll encourage it.

“No, I don’t. It’s not something I allow myself to think about, ever.”

“Why not?”

She bites her lip. I know she bites her lip because I hear a small crackle as she parts them and lightly uses her teeth to hold it in place. It’s the same every time. Shaye asks a hopeful question, Shaye strikes that same pensive pose as she waits for me to respond. Usually I think it’s so cute that I make her wait. Today, her struggle is too raw for silly games.

“Because other than that first year, none of my memories of that place are good ones. Things happened there, Shaye…awful things to people I loved.” I let that comment hold in the space between us for a moment. She can take it how she will; it doesn’t change the way the words are intended. “It was terrible, all of it. Not something I want to revisit in person. My mind replays it enough against my will.”

We’re sitting side-by-side at the edge of the pool, our bare legs dipped in the chilly water. Shaye swings her feet slowly back and forth, creating soft waves that manage to mesmerize me in the same way every movement she makes pulls me in. Mugginess still clings to the late September air, blanketing the darkness with a layer of wetness that sticks to our arms, hair, and thighs. At least to Shaye’s thighs. I’m not embarrassed to admit I keep checking them out, though I would never tell her.

“I think I might want to,” she says. This doesn’t surprise me. Shaye has a hard time letting go. It’s the single reason I still can’t believe she ever let go of me. “The night I left, I never considered the kids. Or myself. Or what it would be like to never see that place again. So many things are still on pause in my mind. I think they always will be unless I face the memories head on.”

She nods, so slight I almost don’t catch it.

She doesn’t think; she knows. I hear the resolve in her statement, the finality. Except that something she says doesn’t make sense. So I ask her about it.

“Then what made you leave? If it wasn’t for the kids or for you, why did you do it, Shaye? Why did you just leave me without saying goodbye?” My voice cracks on that last word, revealing the pent-up emotion I’ve spent the last six months trying not to let her see. But suddenly I don’t care. In this moment she needs to know how much she hurt that fifteen-year-old kid all those years ago. How much he still hurts from it, even today.

Something changes in her eyes, a flicker of fear, a downward pull of regret, an instant of panic as she takes in my face. The subtlety of the gesture settles in my gut. In those few seconds of silence I look at her—I look
into
her—trying to remember that night. Those awful noises. Shaye’s tears in the aftermath. Our clumsy walk to the end of the world as I tried to simultaneously carry her and keep her upright. Her swift tumble into sleep in a search to escape the pain. My hands as they went numb from the weight of holding us both up for hours.

Carl’s anger the morning after when he discovered her missing…his words…his threats…his temper as anything that wasn’t anchored to the floor went flying through the blackened air. Until that moment, I never knew madness had a color.

I think back to his words…

His words.

“I told her I would kill you if I saw you together again.”

His fist as it connected with my jaw, my arm, the back of my head as he repeated the same thing over and over again.

“Where did she go? Where did she go? Tell me where she went, you worthless piece of crap!”

Another hit. The inhale and exhale of labored breaths. A pause as he waited for an answer I had no idea how to give. A string of curses as he stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind him.

“You didn’t let go of me, did you?” The whispered words barely squeeze through the tightness in my throat. “You left to keep me alive.”

Tears stream down her face and pool around her collarbone. I don’t need an answer. I’m looking at two affirmations in the form of salt water and bloodshot eyes as both of them glance at me and give a crushing nod. This is why she left. This is why there was no goodbye. She was too afraid the alternative would be to say goodbye over a bulldozer-packed strip of dirt with my body buried six feet under.

Carl threatened to kill me a thousand times. From everything I know about him now, I have no doubt those threats would have become substantive if he’d been forced to witness our friendship one more second. And if he found out what I knew back then…

I take a deep breath and stare into the water. For a long moment, the only sound is the rev of an engine in the distance and the
whish whish whish
of water lapping against the pool. I nod to the water.

“It isn’t exactly the end of the world, but I guess it works for us, doesn’t it?”

This gets the small smile I was hoping for. The smile I’ve come to count on.

“I guess it does. Then again, something tells me we can always find a place.”

I scoot a little closer without being too obvious about it. “Something tells me you’re right.”

She moves next to me until her left side is flush against my right. The adrenaline rush crashes abruptly over the wave of sadness that comes from knowing it’s probably the closest we’ll ever get. I love Shaye. I know she loves me. But there’s a barrier that exists that I’m not sure we can ever overcome. A barrier much bigger than the years that separate us.

I know too much.

She knows too much.

We’ve both seen too much.

Maybe there is such a thing as being too close to another person. Maybe there’s such a thing as feeling like brothers and sisters and friends and lovers and soul mates and feeling all those things about the exact same person—maybe all of those things meshed together are too tangled to navigate. Maybe they aren’t. All I know is that I’ll do anything for her.

Now.

Forever.

Always.

“I’ll go back if you want me to.” I say. “As long as no one knows we’re there.”

She sniffs and wipes away wetness under her eyes. For the span of few irregular heartbeats, it’s quiet while she processes my words. I wait; her silence never bothers me.

“Can I think about it for a while? I want to be sure before I give you an answer.”

We lean into each other, both of us sure of nothing at all and the one thing that matters, though neither of us will admit it. There’s too much risk in ruining what’s already good.

Finally, I give her my answer.

“Take your time to decide. I’ll wait for you as long as you need me to.”

*