Stray for You (Rainbow Rescue Cat Café #3)

Chapter 18

Chapter Eighteen

Julian

LIFE SETTLES BACK INTO a familiar rhythm. Routine asserts itself, demanding I return to work in Manhattan. When it’s time to report to Garret about the conference, I tease Cameron carefully out of the story, but it’s like plucking the color out of a box of crayons and leaving behind only gray, white and black. Regardless, Garret accepts my report, just as my co-workers accept my little hints that I, as usual, had a good time racking up escapades and salacious stories. I feed them the tidbits I know they want, leaving the end of those stories open-ended so they can fill in the blanks themselves. I don’t tell them the truth, of course. The time I spent with Cameron is not for their dissection.

Somehow, I maintain the facade until the weekend, when I thankfully have plans to head to my mom’s house for dinner.

We try to get together at least once a month. It can be hard with the amount I travel for work, but she lives right across the water in New Jersey, so I really don’t have an excuse not to see her.

I don’t bother knocking before entering the home I grew up in. Whistles and football announcers greet me before my mother or her boyfriend realize I’ve arrived. I pry off my shoes and head down the hall to the living room at the back of the house, where Mom sits cuddled up with Dave on the same sagging tan couch that was here when I was kid.

For some reason, the sight makes my chest feel too tight, like someone is squeezing the air out of my lungs. Mom reclines against her boyfriend. He has an arm around her, and it’s so casual, so easy, that they barely seem to notice they’re touching each other. I can’t fathom Cameron ever letting me touch him that way, but when I enter the living room, that image flashes in my mind before I can banish it, burned there like a brand. Even as the ache fades, the mark remains.

Mom sits up when she notices me. “Julian, you’re here.”

She gets up to fuss over me, and Dave follows her off the couch, leaving the football game droning on the television. I know enough about the sport to know we’re rooting for the guys in green and not the guys in red, but that’s about where my knowledge of football ends. My mom has always been a big fan, however. Today, she’s got her Sunday spread all laid out; enough chips and dip and beer sits on the coffee table to supply the whole neighborhood.

Mom wraps me up in a hug. “It’s been too long. How was your trip? This was Nashville? No, this was Seattle, right?”

She’s going rapid-fire, but I know it’s just excitement. In the meantime, Dave offers his hand. I shake it. I don’t know the guy well, but he seems nice enough. Him and Mom have been dating for a few months, and she seems happy. If she ever isn’t happy with him, we’ll have a problem, but until then, the man seems mild-mannered, quiet and eager to please, and that’s good enough for me. I liked Miss Ortiz better, but obviously that didn’t work out … and maybe that wasn’t about my mom as much as it was about me. I never thought about it much before, but perhaps the memory of my mother dating Cameron’s mom carries positive connotations simply because it put me in Cameron’s proximity so often.

I shake that off and try to answer my mother’s questions. “It was Seattle,” I say. “And I’m still kind of exhausted.”

“Oh God, yes, sit, sit,” she says. “We have chips and beer and whatever you want. Do you like that brand? I can run out and get something else.”

I sink into the arm chair beside the couch and take a lukewarm beer without even looking at it. “It’s great.”

I struggle to get it open, and Dave reaches over to pop off the top with a bottle opener attached to his keyring. Okay, one more point for Dave.

Mom and Dave settle back on the couch, sitting closer to the edge to be near me. The game is still unfolding on the television, but only Dave pays any attention to it. My mother’s eyes never leave me now that she’s got me back in her house, and I silently promise myself I won’t go so long without seeing her next time. It’s been a busy couple months with work and traveling.

“Tell me everything about Seattle,” she says. “I’ve never been there. What is the city like? Did you see the fish market?”

I nod. “I stayed a few blocks from the fish market.”

I tell her about Pike Place Market, where they’ll toss fish around if you buy one, and the Ferris wheel that you can see from the pier, but I didn’t spend much time on those things. Instead, I recount the Underground Tour, the one super touristy thing I indulged in while in Seattle. It wasn’t about the tour, of course, but I dance around that, carefully excluding Cameron from the story. I’m not sure what my mother would think about his presence. Does she hold any guilt or pain or regret about the breakup with Miss Ortiz? It never seemed that way to me, but it’s one thing to have an amicable breakup and it’s a whole ‘nother thing to find out your kid is hooking up with your ex-girlfriend’s kid.

Unfortunately, I got my brains and my good looks from my mother, and she easily senses that there’s something missing from my story.

“Did your co-workers go with you?” she says. “Who were you on the tour with?”

Normally, I’m pretty quick on my feet, ready to spin a lie or half-truth to dodge a sticky situation, but when it comes to my mother, I’ve never had the heart to pull that shit. It was always the two of us; unlike Cameron, I never even knew my dad. So lying to her never sat right with me, no matter what outrageous tales I would tell anyone else.

“Julian?” she prompts.

Shit. I’ve waited so long that it’s obvious I’m holding something back. Even if I had the heart to lie to her, she’d hear it.

I let out a breath.

“It was actually, um, Cameron. Cameron Ortiz,” I say.

Her eyebrows rise. She sits up straighter, the football game entirely forgotten. Even Dave shoots a quick glance in my direction.

“Oh,” Mom says, clearly trying to sound casual. “How is he?”

“He’s, um, yeah, he seems to be doing well,” I say.

I mean, it’s true. He did seem to be doing well, especially when he was in that hotel room moaning so beautifully for me.

“How is his mother doing?” Mom asks.

An unexpected pang strikes my chest. It socks me out of nowhere, like a bully hiding around a corner, waiting for me to let my guard down. I didn’t see Miss Ortiz. It never even crossed my mind to see her. Cameron never suggested going to his apartment or somewhere more personal like that. Everything happened in a public place or my hotel room, anonymous, impersonal locations. Was that a coincidence, or did Cameron shield his “real” life by ensuring I never encountered it?

I gather myself before answering Mom. “I didn’t actually see her,” I say. “There wasn’t time. I was downtown for the conference and everything, and I think she lives somewhere north of the city.”

“I see,” Mom says slowly. I only realize my mistake when she continues. “So Cameron came down to see you?”

Sometimes I really wish my mother wasn’t as smart as she is.

“We happened to be in the city at the same time,” I say. “We ran into each other and caught up.”

God, is that ever glossing over things. I was not in that bar where his band played by accident; I asked Henry about it in order to ensure I saw Cameron that night. He had no desire to see me, and I still don’t know why he took me up on my offer of dinner after that.

My mother’s hand lands on my knee, calling me out of my thoughts. “Julian, is everything okay? You can tell me. It’s not going to be an issue because of whatever happened in the past.”

She means her and Cameron’s mom dating. She means that that might be an issue because she suspects Cameron and I did more than catch up.

I look straight into her eyes, eyes as blue as mine. They’re so clear and steady, and I’ve always found strength in her gaze, no matter how hard things were for us at times. Behind her, Dave is carefully looking away, giving us whatever privacy he can without making this even weirder.

Fuck it. She’s my mother and I love her and I’ve never managed to keep anything important from her in my life. And this? Yeah, this feels important.

“Okay, fine,” I say in a rush. “It happened. Yeah. Cameron and I… Some stuff happened between us. I didn’t expect it. I was hoping to see him and maybe catch up or something, but, um, I guess things … went a different way.”

Mom squeezes my knee before sitting back. She’s wearing a playful little hint of a smile that suggests this revelation is not as shocking to her as it should be.

“When are you seeing him again?”

I jerk my head up. I might be in my mid-twenties, but I still manage to flush when my mother hits me out of nowhere with an observation that dredges up every hope and insecurity I’ve been suppressing this past week.

“I-I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know if he wants to. Maybe it was a fluke.”

“Does his mother know?” Mom asks.

“No, I doubt it. He was … a little secretive about things.”

She nods. “I see. Well, he never did keep things from Elena. I imagine she’ll know soon enough.”

That casual observation does absolutely nothing helpful for my quickening pulse. Is his mom knowing a good thing or a bad thing?

“It probably doesn’t matter,” I say, hoping to diffuse this conversation. “I mean, I have my job in Manhattan and he’s working somewhere way north of Seattle. We live so far apart. It was nothing.”

Mom takes my hand in hers, scooting to the edge of the couch so her knees are almost touching mine. Dave busies himself gathering up empty beer bottles and taking them to the kitchen, affording us a moment of privacy.

“Julian,” Mom says, and her voice is soft in that way that makes me want to break down like a little kid crying over a scraped knee. “You shouldn’t let the distance stop you if you really like him.”

I blink at her, my eyes widening. “I don’t… I just…”

Mom chuckles, squeezing my hand. “Did you think we didn’t know? You boys had to be around each other a lot when we were dating and let me tell you, you weren’t exactly subtle.”

“Oh God. Don’t tell me that’s why you broke up.”

“Of course not, but it was something Elena and I were aware of, certainly. Back then it might have been complicated, but now there’s nothing holding you back. Tell him how you feel.”

“I … I don’t think he feels that way about me.”

“There’s only one way you’re going to know for sure,” Mom says, “and don’t you want to know for sure? Don’t you want to hear it from him?”

It’s hard to fathom Cameron ever feeling anything positive toward me, but I nod anyway. I do want to know. Even if all I get is hard, cold rejection, I need to be sure. I need to know there’s absolutely no chance.

Because if there’s even the slightest hope…