My chest ached with a longing I recognised instantly, and I stomped on it, hard.
I was twenty-two, which was not old by any measure, but that still made me the adult in the room. I had rules. They weren’t written down, but they’d gotten me this far. The first rule?Don’t reach for what doesn’t belong to you.
Cameron wasn’t mine to take, butfuck, I wanted to. Hard.
The second rule?
Do not confuse your hunger with someone else’s offering.
And Cameron wasn’t offering, was he? At least, not what I wanted.
It doesn’t matterwhatyou want. When it comes to Cameron?
You. Can’t. Have.
“Burgers,” I said at last, and my voice came out wrong. I pointed at the grill. “You need to keep an eye on them.”
Cameron blinked, then grinned. “Right. I don’t want to poison you.”
I watched him go, my heart hammering in a way that made me angry at my own body. The shape of Cameron in my head had changed, and I watched myself draw a line around it with a Sharpie, then another, then another. I called the lines boundaries.
They were protection.
They were necessary.
“I still think he’s nuts.” Gary’s voice broke through, scattering my thoughts. “I mean, who’d want to be an artist these days?” He stared at me. “You’reinto all this tech stuff.Tellhim. Everyone’s pouring money in AI right now. I tell you, the days are coming when no one will pay anyone to create something that a computer can do in a fraction of the time.”
Cameron shrugged, self-deprecating. “Then I’ll draw on pavements for coins.”
I laughed, the sound too sharp. “You’ll do fine.”
“Thanks.” Cameron’s voice was softer. “You always say that.”
I turned to really look at him, and for one suspended moment the world narrowed to Cameron’s face, the crease at the corner of his mouth, the bright blue of his eyes holding mine.
Something had shifted, and I felt it like the ground tilting under me.
By the time the plates were cleared and the sun slid lower, I’d practiced not-looking enough that I could leave with my smile intact.
I kept the lines after that. And then Cameron left for college, Gary stopped mentioning him as often, and life got faster and rolled downhill. I filed that hot afternoon away in the cabinet markedNot Yours. Sometimes it rattled at night, the drawer misaligned.
Okay, it rattled a lot.
I never opened it.
I came back to the café with the memory of that sunlight still warm on my face, still tasting the acid bite of panic in my throat. The present reasserted itself in the clatter of the coffee shop, in Max’s tilted head and Gary’s voice waiting in my ear for an answer.
“So?” Gary said. “Can he?”
I looked at Max without seeing him. It wasn’t a question of square footage. The flat could hold two. My aunt and uncle had proved that for years, the way a ship knows it can survive storms because it already has. Okay, so there was only one bedroom, but there was a sofa bed, wasn’t there? It wasn’t even the question of routine, although the thought of a second toothbrush near mine sent a trickle of discomfort down my spine.
It was the thought of proximity. Having a living, breathing person only feet away. Cameron in my kitchen at 8 a.m., his laughter finding its way into corners the way only light did. Cameron in my living room, shirtless and barefoot on the floor I walked every morning.
Holy fucking Christ. Cameron naked.
Every line I’d drawn around that summer became as insubstantial as chalk dust.
“It’s… not a great time.” I heard my own voice try to balance on a fence. “We’ve just started the group. My schedule’s?—”