Page 76 of Slots & Sticks
Camden steps into the room, scratching the back of his neck, a faint blush coloring his cheeks. “Oh. That.” He crouches beside me, the floor creaking beneath his weight. “Didn’t mean for you to find that tonight.”
My throat feels tight. “You kept all this?”
“Yeah.” He looks down at the box, then up at me. “Guess I’ve always been kind of sentimental about you.”
That shouldn’t undo me the way it does. My pulse pounds in my ears. “Camden…”
He smiles, shy and unguarded in a way I don’t see often. “You were the first person who saw me. Before the hockey. Before the noise. I guess you feel like home to me. I didn’t want to forget that.”
The words hit harder than they should. My eyes sting. I tell myself it’s the dust, but we both know better.
“I thought I was the only one who remembered all this,” I whisper.
“I remember everything,” he says simply. “Every stupid inside joke. Every time you laughed so hard you snorted. Every time you looked at me like I was worth something.”
I want to melt into him. To let this be the moment where I finally stop running from what’s always been true. But the ache in my chest says I can’t. Not yet.
If I let myself fall all the way, there’s no safety net. My mom’s shadow stretches long behind me, whispering that love always ends in ruin. And my dad—he’s still broken, still fighting. How can I tie myself to someone when my own life feels like it’s held together by duct tape and denial?
Camden doesn’t push. He just sits there, shoulder pressed to mine, warm and steady.
And somehow, that makes me love him even more.
Camden doesn’t say anything for a while. He lets the silence stretch, heavy but not uncomfortable, while I trace the edge of an old digital printout with my thumb. We’re fourteen in this one—standing in front of his parents’ garage, my arm slung over his shoulders, both of us sunburned and sweaty from rollerblading all afternoon. He’s mid-laugh, eyes crinkled, braces flashing, a smear of Powerade across his cheek from the bottle I dumped on his head.
“Remember that?” he asks, leaning closer until I can feel the warmth of him against my side.
“How could I forget? You dared me to do it.”
“And you did it before I even finished the sentence.”
“You said you needed to cool off! Sometimes I take you literally.”
He laughs, and the sound wraps around me like summer—lazy and golden and devastatingly safe. I want to crawl inside it and stay there.
He reaches into the box and pulls out another scrap—this one a piece of notebook paper, edges frayed, my handwriting looping across it in purple pen:You’re my favorite person.
I blink. “You kept that?”
“Yeah.” His voice softens. “You wrote it the day my mom left for Africa. I was pretending I was fine, but you saw right through me. You always did.”
My throat closes. I can see it so clearly now—the scrawny boy in the too-big hoodie, trying to act brave when he felt abandoned. I’d pressed that note into his hand at the bus stop. He’d smiled like I’d handed him the moon.
He still looks at me that way.
“You were the only person who ever made me feel like I was enough,” he says. “Even before I was good at anything. Before anyone knew my name.”
I swallow hard. “You’ve always been enough, Camden. You didn’t need to prove that to me.”
“I know. But I wanted to prove it to you.”
There it is—that sincerity that disarms me every single time. My heart clenches painfully. He’s sitting here, looking at me like I hung the stars, and all I can think is how unfair it feels to be this happy when I know I’m going to break his heart.
He deserves someone uncomplicated. Someone who isn’t carrying a thousand pounds of grief and guilt and unfinishedbusiness with a ghost. I know how much he wants a wife and children of his own. Roots. And I wouldn’t even know how to be a mother.
“I don’t deserve this,” I whisper before I can stop myself.
He flexes his jaw. “What do you mean?”
