Page 95 of Puck Struck
The doorbell rings.
"He’s here! I'll get it!" he shouts, already racing toward the front door.
By the time I reach the foyer, Ethan has flung the door open and is staring up at Cam with blatant adoration.
"You came!" Ethan grabs Cam's hand and tugs him inside. "I have a new dinosaur book. Do you want to see it?"
Cam lets himself be pulled in. A smile stretches across hisface but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. He looks at me over Ethan's head. There's something uncertain in his expression, like he's not sure if he belongs here.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey." Cam shifts his weight, clutching a bottle of wine. "I brought, uh?—"
"Wine!" Tessa stops next to me, rescuing us both. "Perfect. Thank you so much, Cam. Come on inside. Dinner is just about ready.”
Dinner is shockingly easy, although I don’t know why I expected it to be anything different. There’s no awkwardness. I don’t feel like I’m under a microscope. We talk, laugh, and eat. A lot. Ethan monopolizes the conversation, peppering Cam with questions about hockey and dinosaurs. Cam answers each one with the kind of patience I've never seen from him at the rink. He genuinely is interested in what Ethan has to say and Tessa’s smile is so bright, it could rival the sun.
After we eat, Ethan insists on showing Cam his dinosaur collection upstairs. “You have to see them. Uncle Lo helped me organize them.”
Cam turns to me with a glint in his eye. “Oh he did, huh? And how did he organize them? By type?”
Ethan shakes his head. “No, by name. Because I name all of them, you know.”
Cam nods and winks at me. “Gotcha. I’m somewhat familiar with your uncle’s organizational techniques. They’re so normal and easy to understand.”
Tessa snorts, almost choking on her wine. “Some might say they’re a little OCD,” she says out of the corner of her mouth.
“Funny,” I grunt, standing up from my chair. “They make sense to me.”
Ethan takes Cam by the hand and leads him up the stairs to his bedroom. He doesn’t stop talking and Cam just smiles,seemingly hanging on every word. Then he glances back at me with a smile that makes my chest ache.
It doesn’t go unnoticed, either.
"He's really good with Ethan," Tessa says, gathering plates from the table. "Better than I expected."
"Yeah." I grab the rest of the lasagna. "He's... not what most people think."
"Including you?"
I don't answer. I cover the lasagna tray with tin foil and then rinse the plates Tessa puts into the sink before loading them in the dishwasher. Tessa waits a long minute before speaking again but I know she’s got something to say. She always does.
"I like him. He looks at you like you hung the moon. And he looks at Ethan like he actually cares."
"He does care." The words come out before I can stop them.
"I know." She stands against the counter and studies me. "That's what scares you, isn't it? That he might actually be the real deal."
My heart flips in my chest at those words. The real deal. Jesus, is she right? I know I’m falling for the guy. Evidently, my sister knows it too. But a future? What the hell does that look like with all the unknowns littering our path?
Before I can respond, Cam comes down the stairs. "Ethan was a little tired after telling me the names of all his dinosaurs. He wanted to lie down.”
"Thanks," I tell him. "I'll go tuck him in."
Twenty minutes later, Ethan is asleep. When I go back downstairs, the kitchen is clean and quiet. I wander down the hall and find Cam in my office, running his fingers over the spines of the books lining the shelves. He looks over to me then back at the books.
“You read a lot of self-help books,” he says as I head to the bar cart to pour us drinks.
“Yeah, well, I had a lot of shit to overcome as a kid. And the books were cheaper than the therapy I couldn’t afford,” I say, filling two glasses with Bullet bourbon.
