There was once a time in my life when a day felt like an hour, an hour felt like a minute. Back when the word “lifetime” felt unworthy, because although a lifetime is, arguably, a very long time, to a young couple in love, it wasn’t nearly enough.
It wasn’t even close to enough.
I know I went searching for love. I acknowledge my part in this mess, and I have no one but myself to blame for the heartache that cripples me on a daily – really, a minutely – basis. But damn, you’d think the universe would take it easy on a guy who’s lived a week… a month… two months since the one he loves raced out of his life without so much as a goodbye… or a valid phone number.
Cameron Quinn, eighteen years old, five feet, six inches tall, blue eyes that reminded me of the jeans she always wore, and dark brown hair that hung a little past her shoulder blades.
Most of that is verifiable fact. Her eyes, I saw with my own. Her hair. Her height.
I suppose she could have been lying about her dreams to one day choreograph and dance with someone famous, but I feel in my heart that was true.
Her age… well, she might have been lying about that, but the number fits well, so I doubt she was exaggerating much. Maybe she’s seventeen, or maybe she’s nineteen, but that’s as far as I can stretch my imagination.
If she was fifteen, I’d be a dead man. Her brother would have had me assassinated the first time she and I kissed. And if she was twenty-five, I feel like he wouldn’t have been so mad about the kissing… or the time he found us together, asleep, lying in each other’s arms.
The phone number I texted for a week no longer works. The hotel she and her brother stayed in gives us nothing but the names they already fed us.
Cameron and William Quinn. Siblings.
Jake and Eloise Williams are the names Oz had when he was trying to arrest Will… or, well, the guy who claimed his name was Will. But those names are as false as the first two.
The familial relations are easy to confirm, at least. Not everyone is born with dirty denim eyes, bad attitudes, and matching butt chins.
“Baby?” Mom walks into the kitchen on February thirteenth – the day before Valentine’s Day, almost two whole months after Cam… Quinn… Eloise… sped out of my life – and stops behind me as I sit hunched over the counter. She wraps her arms around my waist, and lays her cheek between my shoulder blades. “Hey, honey.”
All I can muster is a sigh. “Hey, Mom.”
“I miss your face.”
I stare at the marble countertop, and simply… breathe. “I’m right here. I’m always here.”
“But are you?” she questions. “Your body is here, but I’m not sure I’ve seen your eyes since Christmas. I haven’t heard you laugh.”
“Nothing to laugh about.” I shrug. “Tell Dad to get better jokes, and maybe I will.”
Her breath comes out on a gentle snicker. “He’s trying. Can you believe he lays in bed at night Googling jokes? He’s trying to crack you.”
Yeah? Well, the problem is, once I’m cracked, I’m not sure I have the strength to put myself back together again. “What am I supposed to call her, Mom?”
“What?” She pushes off my back, only to come around and sit on the stool beside mine.
Somewhere between my twelfth and thirteenth birthday, I grew bigger than my mom. I grew taller, broader, stronger. But the strength in a man’s muscles is nothing compared to the strength my mom and the other women in my life hold in their hearts.
She sits beside me now, shorter, so she has to look up into my eyes, but she takes my hand and squeezes. “What do you mean?”
“Cam.” I hate that my voice cracks on the word. A single syllable, three letters… enough to slam me against a wall so hard that I wish I was dead. “I know her as Cam. I fell in love with Cam.”
I bring our joined hands to my heart and swallow what threatens to explode free. I’ve had this bubble of pain sitting in my chest for months. Wrapped in a sheen of rage. Interspersed with pockets of homicidal hunger. “But now they’re saying Cameron Quinn isn’t her real name. They keep saying she doesn’t exist. So tell me, what am I supposed to call her?”