Page 30 of When You Are Mine

“My mom was a crackhead.” He looked at her from beneath his straight, silky brows. “You know that, right?”

Kerris nodded, feeling like a voyeur about to look on a past possibly more obscenely painful than her own.

“She started tricking before she had me, I guess to get the drugs. I know my mom was mixed, half white, half black. Her name was Sarah. My old man—who knows. One of her johns.” He chopped the words up finely, pushing them to the side to make room for more. “I’m guessing he wasn’t black because of how I look. Maybe white or Hispanic. Guess we’ll never know.”

Even with such gaps in his identical mosaic, Kerris envied him the knowledge of his mother. The vital pieces of the puzzle she had been. Her face, her hands, her hair, her smile. Even her vices, the mistakes she’d made that set his life on the course it had taken. Kerris didn’t have even that.

“We lived in a hellhole. It was rough.”

By the look on Cam’s face, Kerris felt pretty sure that was an understatement. She recognized the painful thought of that place twisting in his eyes; eyes that were no longer seeing her, but looking back along a darkened corridor of memory.

“I mean, my mom was a crackhead who whored for money, so yeah, it was bad, but bad is relative. It could’ve been worse. Itdidget worse.”

He let his last words settle around them and drift away with the river’s strengthening current before drawing a shallow breath and continuing.

“My mom met this guy, Ron MacKenzie, when I was about nine. He became her pimp and drug dealer, and then it got…much worse.” Cam paused, running his eyes down the river before starting again. “We shared a room, me and my mom. I slept on the floor. She slept on the bed. Well, not just slept. That’s where she did business.”

Kerris closed her eyes against the horrific images invading her mind. A young boy subjected to the filth of that lifestyle. The sounds, the smells, the sights of adult moral squalor robbing him of his innocence.

“I saw it all. It was bad enough having to listen to my mom fucking some stranger, blowing guys off while I was doing my homework or whatever.” A perverse smile played around Cam’s mobile mouth. “Sounds pretty fucked up now that I say it out loud, but I got used to it.”

“Mac was a real piece of work.” Cam pulled his brows down around something Kerris wasn’t sure he wanted to share. “He would beat my mom some, but not too bad, if she kept him happy. You know, brought in enough cash and other stuff that he wanted. He, um, he liked boys.”

Kerris’s breath stilled in her throat, her eyes glued to Cam’s shuttered face. She could see the red crawling up his neck, but wasn’t sure if it was shame, anger, embarrassment, or some witch’s brew that stirred them all together until one was completely indistinguishable from the others. Dread filled her.

“He liked boys.” Cam said it again and looked at her without flinching or hiding. “He liked me, Ker.”

The summer sunshine toasted and dried Kerris’s tears before she realized they’d slid down her cheeks.

“It was about a year.” He plowed on, looking at his reflection in the water before quickly looking away like he couldn’t stand what he saw. “For about a year he…you know, molested me. He had me and my mom both hung up. Told her that if she didn’t let him have me, he’d cut off her drugs. And he told me that if I fought him, he’d kill my mom. And I knew he would, so I stopped fighting.

“We got lucky,” Cam continued in a voice as flat and dead as his eyes had become. “He died.”

Kerris remembered the relief she’d felt when the man who had hurt her died in prison. Like she could breathe easier just because he was no longer in the world.

“What happened?”

Cam looked over her shoulder, his face hiding secrets.

“He got what was coming to him.” Cam’s eyes, cold as a corpse, shifted back to Kerris. “Live by the sword, die by the sword.”

Kerris shivered in the sun. The Cam sitting across from her was not the man she knew. Rough around the edges, but tender and quick to smile. This man had granite for eyes and turned the air around him deadly. Kerris remained quiet, fingers floating in the water, until Cam’s face softened and he returned to her. Cam rubbed his eyes, wiping away the last vestiges of that hardened stranger.

“After that, Mom got arrested when she approached some undercover cop posing as a john. I saw her only one more time after that. She signed all her parental rights away and I got tossed into foster care.”

“And how was foster care?” Kerris was afraid to unearth anything worse than what he had already revealed.

“Not bad.” He shrugged like a man who knew what bad really looked like. “In the first one, there was this guy who liked punching on me, but nobody was ever gonna have me by the balls again like Mac did. I told my social worker, and she got me out of there. Put me with these really sweet folks I stayed with until I graduated high school. They moved to Florida my freshman year of college, but we still talk from time to time. They’re the ones who found out about the Walsh Foundation’s summer camp.”

She smiled at how his face relaxed when he talked about that first summer. How he and Walsh had rubbed each other the wrong way, only to become best friends. How Jo was the sister he’d never had.

“And Ms. Kris.” His features softened in a way reserved for Walsh’s mother. “I hadn’t ever met anyone like her. Walsh has no idea how lucky he is to have her.”

“They’re like family to you.”

“They’re not family, though, Kerris.” He leaned forward in the small boat, capturing one of her hands still floating in the water. “I love them, but they’re not my family. That’s what I want with you. Even with them, I didn’t belong to them. My mom was the only person I ever belonged to, and she sold me out for crack.”

Kerris understood parental betrayal, when the person everything in nature dictated should preserve and protect you had abandoned and hurt you the most.

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