Reclaim - Aly Martinez Page 0,40

ruined inside me would never heal or even scab over. Guilt and filth devoured me every waking moment, but when I slept, the nightmares were worse. So the last two days had been spent in purgatory, staring off into space and crying.

And then there was Camden with his Coke and Snickers.

Sweet, innocent, oblivious Camden.

I’d wanted to throw up when he’d told me he’d followed me home last summer and seen my dad in all his drunken glory. My time at the creek with Camden was my safe space. He didn’t know about the hell at home. The fact that Ramsey and I were practically raising ourselves. Or the constant struggle to keep our ugly lives a secret.

All he knew was what I’d told him. For the same reasons I hadn’t shared Camden with the people in my life, I hadn’t wanted to share my world with Camden, either.

But he knew. He had always known.

And still, he’d come back.

Another hour passed with him sitting on the porch. He’d gotten up at one point and walked away. The disappointment of watching him leave was almost as intense as the relief that he was finally gone. The warmth filling my hollow chest and the tears that stung my eyes when I realized he’d only gone to the hose on the side of the house for a drink of water were the most telling emotions of all.

When a thunderstorm rolled in at the four-hour mark, I was positive he’d finally leave. He didn’t like to get his clothes wet at the creek and always wrapped himself up in his towel like a mummy. While thunder rattled the windows, the sky dumped buckets of rain, and the angry wind pelted him, he stayed.

It made me the worst friend in the world, but I sat inside, dry and warm, watching out the window in absolute awe that he cared enough to be sitting there. The broken and ugly parts of me were desperate to see how far he’d go—or, more accurately, what I was truly worth to Freaking Camden Cole.

Hour five, I paced, gnawing on my fingernails and getting frustrated. This was just ridiculous. What the hell was he doing? He was soaking wet, and despite it being a million degrees outside, every time the wind blew hard enough, he’d shiver. Why wasn’t he giving up? He must have been bored and hungry. He’d been sitting there so long I bet his butt was asleep too.

He’d made his point. He cared. Okay, great. Caring didn’t equal trust though.

Did it?

“You’re gonna wear a hole in your floor if you keep pacing like that!” he shouted from the other side of the door.

I froze and squeezed my eyes shut. Of course he heard me. It wouldn’t have been my life if he hadn’t. “Go home, Camden!”

“You still got those bruises? Then I’m not going anywhere. Because if you have those now, it’s gonna get worse one day. And it might be during the school year when I’m not here to sit on your porch for the next eighty days if need be. I know you’ve got your brother, but it’s never a bad thing to have a friend watching your back too.”

I walked to the door and dropped my forehead against it. “Why are you doing this? You’ve only been back, like, three days.”

“What’s that got to do with anything? You might have hated me while I was gone, but you were always my best friend.”

A shrill You barely even know me! hung on the tip of my tongue. I guessed that wasn’t true anymore, was it? Camden Cole knew me in ways no one else ever had.

But he didn’t know it all. He didn’t know about our dirty house or how only one of the toilets worked but only half the time. He didn’t know I had to hide food from my dad or how on more than one occasion he’d passed out with a cigarette in his mouth, so I slept with an expired fire extinguisher under my bed.

People made assumptions based on how we looked and where we lived, but nobody truly understood Ramsey and me.

Ramsey had chosen to let Thea into our hell. She knew all the secret little details of how we survived, but I’d always been of the mind that letting someone in would only run them off.

Maybe that was exactly what I needed to do to Camden—run him off before he had the chance to realize, friend or not, I wasn’t