“If we’re celebrating my results, how comeIget to be the one doing the cooking?”
Gary grinned. “Because there are beers in the fridge and a couple of them might have your name on them—provided you don’t cremate the burgers.”
Cameron brightened in a heartbeat.
The afternoon sun was hot on my bare shoulders, and all was right with the world. Cameron handled the barbecue tongs as though he’d watched a hundred YouTube videos and had decided that meant he had a PhD in burger flipping. Gary sprawled on a lounger, his eyes hidden behind his shades, a can in one hand, a half-eaten burger in the other.
I didn’t notice the change at first. It was a small thing, a hiccup in the film reel, but it registered someplace deep inside my head.
What triggered it was Cameron’s laughter.
Not the kid laugh I remembered. That had been high and tumbling.Thisone sat lower, in a chest that had broadened. It vibrated the air an inch differently. And when Cameron threw his head back, sunlight caught in his hair and the hollow of his collarbones.
I felt it in my own throat, a scratchiness, a tightening. I set my burger down on a plate because my fingers had morphed into clumsy sausages. It felt as though someone had flipped a switch and all my senses fired up.
Oh.
The thought wasn’t a word so much as a chord struck in a quiet room.
Cameron moved with the careless confidence of someone who hadn’t learned yet to guard his edges. And sitting with a slick beer can in my hand, I caught myself watching.
I tried not to.God, I tried.
But every time Cameron laughed, his head thrown back, sunlight threading through his hair, the sound lanced through my gut, and I looked away fast, shame flushing up my neck.
I told myself it was nothing but nostalgia, the shock of time passing.
I looked at anything else: the flowerbeds, the condensation on my beer can, the freckles across Gary’s forearm.
Anything but Cameron as he constructed another burger at the grill, sunlight dancing in his hair, catching in his piercing blue eyes, falling on his shoulders like a caress.
I averted my gaze.This is wrong.
“Gary says you’re doing another degree.” Cameron said as he took the chair next to mine, shifting it a little closer. I blinked,and he smiled. “You can have too much onion smell, you know.” His knee brushed mine.
I told myself it didn’t mean anything.
“Yeah.” The word came out as a croak, and I swallowed past the lump of barbecue charcoal that had apparently lodged itself in my throat. “I’m doing a course in IT. Dad’s happy that I’m studying a ‘real’ subject,” I air-quoted.
“You think you’ll stay in Manchester once you’ve finished?”
I managed a shrug. “Who knows?”
When did breathing become so difficult?
Cameron smiled. “I’d like to study in London. Which is why I need to find a job so I can start saving. I figure it’ll take me a year to put by enough so I don’t need to rely on food banks to eat.”
“London’s loud. Busy. Overpriced.”
“And yet you love it.”
I jerked my head in Cameron’s direction. “What makes you say that?”
“Remember that choir trip to London your college organised a couple of years ago? And I tagged along with you and Gary?” He bumped my shoulder with his own. “I remember. You had that look as if you were listening to something nobody else could hear.” He paused. “That was a great trip. I’d just taken my GCSEs, and I was regretting my decision to drop music at A-level.” Cameron sighed. “I wanted to study so many subjects, I was spoilt for choice.”
I had a flash of Cameron, younger, his eyes blown wide at the way a chord bloomed when you asked it to.
I studied him. There was a nick on his jaw he’d probably gotten shaving. His mouth tilted, as though waiting for an answer I couldn’t retrieve.