Page 59 of Be Mine Forever

“Cam, why would I think of you as a victim?”

Everything about him seemed to drop, and Jo’s mind went back to that field earlier today where nothing weighed anything. Where on a lazy day with an audience of bees and flowers she contemplated love and gravity. Right before her eyes, the one she loved most was falling. His eyes fell to their hands. His shoulders slumped. His mouth turned down at the corners. Before he spoke the words, she somehow knew it was much too late to catch him because Cam had fallen long ago.

“Jo, I was molested.”

Chapter Eighteen

Cam had dragged those words out, and they’d left behind a sunken wake, a heavy trail as deep as a ditch. He had known this moment would come, that Jo would dig until she hit the truth at the very bottom of him. She must feel now like she had fallen into a dark, empty well with no way out.

Okay, maybe that was just him.

He wanted to escape. He wanted to run from the pity and the disgust he expected in her eyes, but he couldn’t move. The fireflies bumping against the mason jar hypnotized him, mesmerizing in the summer night. What was so great about light? Light exposed. It hurt your eyes. It showed your flaws.

And your scars.

“Cam, what’d you say?” Jo’s eyebrows snapped together. Shock pulled her mouth open. “I thought you said you were—”

“Molested.” Cam almost had to stick his finger down his throat to get the word to come back up, a shameful regurgitation.

“But…when? I don’t…I don’t understand.”

“Before I met you.”

“Before you met me? But I…I would have known.”

“Not if I didn’t tell you.”

“What happened?”

“I can’t go through everything tonight, Jo.”

Cam’s heart pummeled his chest like a punching bag. The night had cooled some, but sweat gathered on the back of his neck, on his forehead, on his scalp, dampening his hair. It was like waking up from one of his nightmares, but with Jo standing by the bed, a witness to his pathetic fear.

“No, you don’t have to tell me everything, but who did it?”

“A guy in my old neighborhood. My mom’s pimp.”

“Did she know? Your mom, did she find out?”

Cam remembered that day when Mama had finally come home to find him on the kitchen floor, pants still around his ankles, blood on his thighs. Mac only had to smack her around a little and give her that rock to make her turn a blind eye. That day and the days that followed.

“Yeah, she knew.”

“But how could she let it happen? Did she report it? Did anyone intervene? How long did this go on?”

Jo’s questions whizzed past his head like a flurry of bullets.

“I can’t do this.”

Cam stood up, grabbing his jar of fireflies and using it to guide him back up the riverbank. He heard Jo following with swift steps, but he deliberately used his longer stride to pull ahead. When he reached the patio, he unscrewed the mason jar lid and watched the fireflies go free, dispersing splotches of brightness in the dense night. He envied their freedom. He envied their light.

When he reached the patio door, the motion sensor light triggered, illuminating Jo a few feet away, staring at her jar. She met his eyes, and there was no disgust. No pity. Just questions and sadness painfully interlocked like a barbed wire fence.

Cam grabbed the bowl of neglected peaches and headed back into the house, covering the fruit and putting them in the refrigerator. He pulled their dinner dishes off the counter and started rinsing them. Anything to occupy him, to block out the quiet woman waiting at his back.

Slim arms wrapped around his chest from behind, stilling his motions. Jo laid her head against his shoulder. Her scent, the stroke of her fingers across his abs under his T-shirt, the sweet kisses she feathered across the back of his neck—all coaxed each wound-tight muscle to go lax. He covered her hands with his, dropped his head forward, and sank back into her softness.

“Talk to me,” she whispered, stroking his hand with her thumbs.

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