Page 75 of Slots & Sticks
The kitchen smells like garlic, basil, and comfort. The good kind—the kind that wraps around you like a blanket instead of pressing down on your chest. He moves beside me, barefoot, chopping vegetables with quiet precision while I stir the sauce. We don’t talk much, but we don’t have to. It’s the kind of silence that says everything. Familiar. Easy. The air hums with the unspoken.
Every time our hands brush, my pulse spikes. His forearm grazes mine when he reaches for the salt, and it’s ridiculous how that one touch feels like gravity choosing sides.
“Need more garlic?” he asks, glancing over with that half-smile that could ruin nations.
“Always,” I say, handing him the jar. “I like it when food has a personality.”
“Just like you,” he murmurs, not even realizing he said it out loud. Or maybe he does. With Camden, I can never tell where the line is between accidental and intentional.
He moves around me as if we’ve done this a thousand times. Maybe we have, in smaller ways—helping my dad make pancakes, sneaking snacks in the team lounge, sharing space in kitchens and arenas, and memories. But this is the first time it feels likeours.
By the time dinner’s done, we’re laughing over the disaster we made. Flour on the counter. Tomato sauce on the floor. I have no idea how it got there, but Camden’s grinning at me like I’m the best mess he’s ever seen.
“Cleanup or dishes?” I ask.
“Neither.” He leans against the counter, watching me. “We’ve worked enough for one night. How about a fort?”
“A fort?”
He shrugs. “Like when we were kids. Blankets, pillows, movies. Only difference is—” His gaze dips to my mouth for half a second before finding my eyes again. “We’re old enough for wine now.”
That smile should come with a warning label. “You kept that bottle from dinner?”
“Of course I did.” He rummages through the fridge, grabbing the bottle and supplies. “Grab the extra blankets from the closet in my room—let’s build it in there. Less kitten interference.”
I wipe my hands and make my way to his bedroom, the door cracked just enough for me to slip in. It’s neat in here, surprisingly so. A desk, a few framed photos, a perfectly made bed. It smells like his cologne—clean and woodsy andhim.
I open the closet and pull down a stack of folded blankets, but something catches my eye on the top shelf. A cardboard box with a frayed corner and a faded label that saysstuff.
It’s the kind of box people keep because they can’t bring themselves to throw away what’s inside.
My heartbeat slows.
I shouldn’t. I really shouldn’t.
But I do.
When I pull off the lid, I stop cold. Inside are scraps of our lives. The movie stub from a class field trip. A photo of us grinning with dirt-streaked faces after building our first “real” fort.
My tongue presses against the roof of my mouth. He kept it all.
Every piece ofus.
And I don’t know whether to cry—or finally believe this might be real.
I sink down to the floor with the box in my lap, tracing the edge of a wrinkled photo that smells faintly of dust and time. Camden’s twelve years old in this one—skinny, bright-eyed, and proudly holding a large rock. I’m beside him, grinning wide, with a gnarled stick that I’m using as a cane.
I laugh under my breath, the sound catching halfway between fondness and heartbreak. Beneath the photo is a pink straw—the same one I’d chewed on nervously that day he came back to Vegas to stay for good. He must’ve stolen it before we packed up my lemonade stand. A set list I wrote when I was going to sing at an open mic night, so I could be like my mom. I bailed. Cam said he was proud of me, even if I didn’t sing “Landslide.” He always believed in me even when I didn’t.
The program from our middle school musical, where he played a tree because he didn’t want to sing, and I was a stagehand because I didn’t want to be seen. Every tiny artifact is a thread connecting me to every version of us that ever existed since that first day he protected me from the high school boys harassing me.
And suddenly all rational thought scatters.
I realize that he’s been keeping pieces of me all along, while I’ve been trying my whole life not to take up space.
“Hey.” His voice is soft from the doorway. He sets down the wine and glasses on the nightstand. “You get lost in there?”
I freeze, clutching the straw. “Sorry. I—uh—found your time capsule.”
