“He’s not here. I came alone.”
“Shame.”
“Is it?”
“Perhaps. It amuses me when he waits outside for you with such a fierce expression on his pretty face.”
Cam laughed, then regretted it with a heavy wince. “You think Saint’s pretty?”
“You do not?”
“Pretty ain’t the word.”
“I did not say it was the only word to describe him. Eat your food, biker boy. Then you can have the good drugs.”
Cam shot me a curious stare, but hunger and fatigue won out. He ate his food, then lay down again. I took his plate away, washed it with the other dishes, then returned to the bedroom to find him pointing the remote at the flat-screen TV on the wall.
I pried it from his hand and found the menu for him. “What do you want?”
“Whatever. Except football and soap operas.”
I clicked on Film4 and looked away before the screen loaded, uninterested in whatever was playing.
Cam wasn’t interested either. He shifted, dumping his head in my lap at my invitation, and stared up at me. “You’re the strangest dude I’ve ever met.”
“Should this upset me?”
“Fuck no. I just don’t understand you.”
My fingers migrated to his hair. It was silky and messy. I brushed it away from his face. Tucked it behind his ears again, and his answering grin was as spellbinding as it had been the first time. “You do not need to understand me.”I will never hurt you.
“I want to try.” Cam spoke softly. “Who was on the phone?”
“My mother.” The words slipped out of me, easing past the blocks in my heart as if they were as desperate to get close to him as I was. “She calls from the nursing home in Kolpino.”
“In Russia?”
I nodded and adjusted a nearby pillow to support his back. “She has dementia, so she talks at me about things I do not remember anymore. I don’t talk back, but I didn’t before, so...”
“Before what?”
“Before she was sick. I haven’t seen her since I was young.”
“That sounds complicated.”
“Families are, I think.”
Cam hummed, eyes falling closed for a moment as I rubbed his scalp. A different man might have drifted to sleep, taking the comfort on offer and forgetting about everything else. But not him. His eyes opened a split second later. “What about your dad?”
My fingers spasmed. I forced them to keep moving, finding solace in his tousled locks. “He died a year ago. I had not seen him for many years either.”
“How many years?”
“Fourteen.”
“By choice?”
A humourless laugh spilled out of me, bitter and cold.
