“Stop, man,” Cameron snaps.
The sharpness in his voice cuts clean through me.
He steps closer, and for the first time tonight I see it in him—anger and grief tangled together so tightly you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
“Don’t do that thing where you talk like you’re explaining a playbook,” he says, eyes flaring. “Just tell me what it means.”
I hold his gaze. “It means…it could be real.”
Cameron’s breath shudders.
Then he laughs, short and harsh with no humor in it.
“Of course,” he mutters. “Of course it could.”
I open my mouth?—
He cuts me off.
“And you’re just gonna…” Cameron gestures back toward the house with a jerky movement, like pointing at it hurts. “You’re just gonna let her get attached and then leave?”
“Cameron—”
He keeps going, words speeding up like his anger finally found air.
“Is that the plan?” he demands. “You gonna play boyfriend for a few weeks and then take off when it’s convenient? You gonna fuck her and leave her?”
My blood goes cold.
It’s not the word. It’s the picture he’s painting—Sloane broken in a new way, alone in a house that already took too much from her.
“Hey,” I say, voice low, trying to ground him. “It’s not like that, man.”
Cameron’s eyes blaze.
“Then what is it like?” he barks. “Because I’ve watched her not eat. I’ve watched her stare at walls like she forgot how to be alive. I watched her bury our dad and then come home and act like the world didn’t end because everyone else wouldn’t stop talking.”
His voice cracks on the last part, and he turns his head slightly like he hates that it did.
Like he hates that he’s human.
Then he looks back at me, and the anger is wet now. Shaking.
“She finally looks calmer tonight,” he says, and his voice drops into something raw. “And I come home, and you’re in thehallway outside her room like you live there. She’s told me, you know. Not the details, but enough to know you two have had some…thinggoing the last couple months.”
I swallow hard.
“I wasn’t?—”
“I know you, Logan. I know youboth. I’m not stupid or blind. You’ve had a thing for her for years, maybe even since high school, but you never acted on it, so why now?” Cameron steps closer again, and I can feel the heat of him now. The control slipping. The brother coming out. “Why are you here tonight if you’re going to leave anyway?”
“I was taking care of her,” I say, firmer. “Because she needed it.”
“And what happens when she needs you, and you’re in Chicago?” he spits back.
I flinch at that—not because he’s wrong, but because the fear has been living in me too. Sitting in the passenger seat ever since my phone lit up.
“I don’t know what I’m doing yet,” I admit, too honest, too fast.
