Ty woke the next morning with a hammer pounding in his head. He didn’t remember drinking that much the night before, but with trying to keep up with Cam and then the middle-of-the-night incident, Ty supposed he shouldn’t be surprised at the hangover.
There were voices in the living room, floating in through the closed bedroom door. A female one, upset, angry, objecting loudly enough that Ty cringed from where he lay in the bedroom.
“Shh!” That must be Cam.
“What? Why do I have to whisper?” Izzy—still not whispering.
“Because you’re hurting my head!”
“Well, that’s not my fault, is it?” Izzy again, marginally quieter. “Honestly, Cam, what is wrong with you? You look like shit!”
“People with hangovers generally look like shit.”
“Most people aren’t constantly hungover. Or drunk and on the way to hungover. You never used to drink so much.”
“And you never used to be so annoying. Wait, no, you’ve always been this annoying.”
“This isn’t funny.”
“Who’s joking? I’m not.”
Ty sat up slowly with a hand pressed against his temple. His clothes sat on the floor where he’d dropped them last night, next to the dirty sheets.
“I’m serious, Cam. I’m worried. And it’s not only me. Mom’s worried too.”
“You talked to Mom about me? Great. That’s exactly what I need.”
“What choice did I have? She says you won’t talk to her.”
“Maybe because there’s nothing to talk about!”
Ty cringed at the shout as he eased himself out of bed and grabbed his clothes. He shouldn’t eavesdrop, but it wasn’t like he could be blamed if they were yelling at each other.
A heavy sigh came from Cam. “I told you, Izzy, I’m fine. It’s been hard adjusting back, but I’m handling it.”
If what they were talking about had anything to do with what had happened last night, Ty wasn’t sure Cam was handling it very well at all. After slipping into his jacket, he opened the door and strode down the short hallway, making as much noise as he could to warn them of his approach.
He found Cam by his window sill, cigarette burning in his hand, and Izzy standing a few feet away, arms crossed. She whipped her head around as Ty entered. Her eyes narrowed.
“Tyler Ang? What the hell are you doing here?” she demanded, her glare so remarkably like Cam’s.
“Well, good morning to you too.”
“Wait, is this how you’re ‘handling it’?” She directed this at Cam.
Cam looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole with his smokes and a bottle of whiskey. “Izzy . . .”
“No, Cam. I’m being serious here. You do not look like you’re handling anything, unless you’re talking about his dick.” Izzy shoved her chin in Ty’s direction.
“Whoa.” Ty raised both hands, palms out. The last thing he wanted was to get dragged into the middle of a sibling argument.
By the window, Cam curled in on himself, his jaw ticking, brows drawn low over his eyes. Eyes that looked a little wild, like he was still suffering from the lingering effects of his nightmare.
“Maybe you guys should take a breather and cool off.” Ty didn’t like the way Cam’s hand trembled as he raised the cigarette to his lips.
“No, you stay out of this.” Izzy turned to him, hand waving in the air. “I’ve heard of your reputation, and that’s not anything that my brother needs right now.”
His reputation. What reputation? Ty’s hackles rose.
“Jesus, Izzy. Not you too.” The words were muffled behind Cam’s hand across his face.
“Cary’s told me all about you,” Izzy continued, arms crossed again.
“Yeah?” Ty bit out, forcing himself to keep his hands by his side. Stay cool. Stay collected. “And what exactly did he tell you?”
A smidgen of doubt flashed across Izzy’s face before she pressed her lips into a thin line and lifted her chin. “That you’re a slut.” She didn’t sound entirely convinced, despite the sting of her words.
The cold shock of humiliation sliced through his veins. Yeah, he slept around. But everyone did. That didn’t make him a slut. It took everything in him not to storm out of the apartment.
“Oh my god, Izzy.” Cam straightened from his position by the window. “What the hell?”
“That’s what Cary said.”
“Who the hell cares what Cary said?” Cam’s volume was rising now. “He can say whatever the fuck he wants. In fact, you can say whatever the fuck you want too. I don’t give a fucking damn.”
Izzy took a step backward at Cam’s shouting, her eyes wide with a touch of fear. Despite her earlier accusation, Ty found himself stepping forward, putting himself between Cam and his sister to try to lessen the jolt of Cam’s words.
Cam went on. “What does it matter who I’m fucking? Maybe I’m a slut too. Maybe it’s not only Ty. Maybe I’m fucking every guy I can manage to pick up off the street.”
Ty flinched at those words, even though he was pretty sure they weren’t true.
“Maybe I’m trying to make up for all those years of living like a goddamn monk.” The hand holding the cigarette stabbed the air in Izzy’s direction. “You have to learn how to mind your own goddamn business sometimes. This is one of those times.”
A quiet hiccup echoed in the silence left by Cam’s rant, and before Ty could say anything to try to deescalate the situation, Izzy turned on her heel and marched out of the apartment. The bang of the door when she slammed it shook the walls, and Ty cringed.
Cam collapsed back against the window frame.
“Well, that didn’t go very well,” Ty said, which earned him a glare. “You probably shouldn’t have yelled at her.” Ty didn’t want to examine why he was defending someone who’d called him a slut.
Cam stared vacantly out his window. “You should go.” He said this quietly, as if he’d used up all his energy in his rant.
“Are you sure?”
Cam didn’t look like he was in any condition to be left alone. His eyes drifted shut, and the sigh he let out sounded like it came from the deepest part of his soul, emptying him of everything he had in him. “Please. Just go.”
Ty was a fast learner—he didn’t need to be yelled at twice to know when to leave. “Call me if you need anything, okay?”
Cam didn’t respond, and after a moment debating whether it was a wise move, Ty let himself out of the apartment.
As he waited for the elevator to arrive, his mind replayed the moments right after Cam woke up and before his brain caught up with the rest of his body. Ty had seen the look in Cam’s eyes before. A long time ago.
It was one of his foster dads—he couldn’t quite remember which one; he’d been young at the time. The man had been a giant hulking thing with big muscles and a bigger presence that dominated every room he entered. But it was his eyes that stood at the forefront of the vague memory—the vacant, wild look in those eyes, almost like he was possessed. It was the same look in Cam’s eyes.
Ty’s fuzzy memory recalled that the foster dad had been a veteran of the Gulf War; Ty hadn’t understood it at the time, but it was obvious now that the guy had suffered from PTSD of some form. It wasn’t any stretch of the imagination to assume that Cam had PTSD too. All those aid workers, always talking about field cred and trying to one-up each other with the horrifying shit they’d seen over the years. Ty doubted that Cam’s nightmares and constant drinking would ever resolve themselves without professional help.
He rode the elevator down, crossed the lobby, and paused with his hand on the door when he saw Izzy on the sidewalk, arms wrapped around her midsection. She turned at the sound of Ty opening the door and quickly wiped at her cheeks, but that did nothing to hide the tears rimming her eyes.
“Hey.” Ty approached with caution, stopping a couple of steps away.
Izzy glared at him from under damp lashes for a heartbeat before her shoulders sagged and her expression softened. “Hey.”
“You okay?” Ty asked.
Her lips pressed together, and she straightened her back. “Yeah,” she said in a none-too-steady voice.
A beat passed in awkward silence between them. Ty juggled the urge to console with the fact that she’d called him a slut.
“Is it true?” Izzy studied him with a furrowed brow.
“Is what true?”
“That he’s sleeping around?” Izzy lifted her chin. “Is it true?”
“Are you sure I’m the one you should be asking?” Ty mimicked her pose, crossing his arms over his chest. “You know, since I’m a slut and all.”
Izzy had the decency to flinch at her word being thrown back at her. “Sorry about that. I was out of line.”
Ty took a deep breath and told himself to let it go. “I’ve been called worse.”
“So, is it true?”
Ty let out a dry chuckle. “I wouldn’t know for sure. But I don’t think so.”
“So, are you guys a thing?” She shifted to face him. With her arms crossed and feet hip-width apart, she looked like she was interrogating him, and doing a damn good job at it.
Was that what they were? A thing? What was ‘a thing’? “I wouldn’t say that.”
“Then what? Fuck buddies?” An elegant eyebrow popped up.
Ty shifted on his feet, wondering why that term rubbed him the wrong way. “Something like that, I guess. I don’t know. Maybe.” Jesus, he’d lost his ability to string a sentence together.
Izzy studied him for a moment longer while Ty shifted again, feeling like a child being scolded. “He wasn’t always like this, you know.” Her voice had lost the hard edge of her questions, and she ran a hand through her mane, rearranging her hair around her shoulders. “He used to be the happy one, and I used to be the moody one. If you can imagine that.”
She started down the sidewalk, and Ty fell into step next to her. “What happened?”
She flicked her eyes to him and then away, her lips pressed into a line. “He’d kill me if he found out I told you.”
“You’re a confidential source.” Ty grinned, slipping into a familiar journalist mode. “Your identity is safe with me.”
She eyed him again. It took her half a block to start talking.
“He’d been working in the field for maybe two years? Something like that. I’m not too clear on the details, actually. He’s never told us the whole story. But . . . Look, he used to be this really out-and-proud guy, okay? He was the president of the gay-straight alliance at our high school, and he’d organize trips for everyone to go to the gay pride parade every year. All that stuff.”
They came up on a Starbucks and, without asking if Ty was interested, Izzy headed inside.
“Triple, venti, half sweet, nonfat caramel macchiato, please.” She rambled off the drink to the barista and pulled out her wallet.
Ty put a hand over hers, pushing the wallet back toward her purse. “Coffee, black,” he ordered.
“Oh, thanks.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“No problem.” Ty let his lips curl into his grin. “You were saying . . . Cam changed after he started working in the field?”
She nodded. “Not right away. It was after some incident with one of his local colleagues.” With their drinks, they sat at an empty table in the corner. “I don’t remember which country he was working in at the time, but one of his colleagues was gay. I think they became friends, but then . . .” Izzy peered at him and winced. “The guy died.”
“Oh?” Ty frowned.
“Yeah.” Izzy dropped her eyes to the coffee she held between her palms. Quietly, she continued. “He was beaten to death for being gay. I think it was his family or his community or something.”
He sat back in his chair and forced himself to release his death grip on the flimsy paper cup. That was it. That would explain Cam’s dreams.
She took a deep breath before raising her head, her eyes ringed with tears again. “Cam took it really hard. Knowing him—at least who he was back then—he might have encouraged the guy to come out, who knows.”
He took a sip of his coffee. The hot, bitter liquid burned a comforting trail down the middle of his chest, distracting him from the weird pressure he felt there. “He was different after that?”
“Yeah.” Izzy chuckled humorlessly and shook her head. “He got reassigned to a different posting after that. They wanted to get him out of the country, I think. Anyway”—she waved her hand in the air—“he basically had to go into the closet, which is ridiculous because Cam’s never been in the closet. We all knew he was gay since, like, forever.”
“And he’s never had counseling for that?”
Izzy shot him an incredulous look. “Cam? Ask for help? Please, are we even talking about the same guy?”
She had a point. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? Cam hadn’t gotten help back then, and who knew how many more traumatic events he had lived through since? It was a miracle he was still semifunctional after all this time.
“Okay, listen.” Izzy slid her coffee off to the side and put both elbows on the table, hands clasped together. “Maybe you guys are fuck buddies. Maybe you’re more, whatever, it doesn’t really matter.” She pinned him with a hard stare. “But Cam’s in a bad place right now, and he’s blocked all of us out. You seem to be the only one he’s let in, so if you do anything to hurt him, so help me god, I will track you down and end you.”
Ty should have laughed and brushed off Izzy’s threat, because he never expected to find himself as one of the few people in Cam’s inner circle. Sure, they’d hooked up a few times, shared things with each other that Ty suspected they hadn’t shared with anyone else in the world. But that didn’t mean they were a . . . what had Izzy called it? A thing? So he shouldn’t take the threat seriously, right?
Except he did. And he was sure that if Izzy had any doubts about his intentions toward Cam, she would track him down and end him. Whatever the hell that entailed.
“Look, I have to go.” She stood and adjusted her bag across her shoulder. “Thanks for the coffee. And don’t fuck up.” She strode out of the coffee shop like she owned it.
Alone at the table, he took another sip of his dark brew and placed the cup down gently, before rubbing his palms across the top of his thighs. As much as he wanted to deny it, Cam was somehow inching his way into the space Ty kept between himself and everyone else. He could already feel it reacting to the presence of a new person trying to slip inside.
It was that goddamn vulnerability, the touch of wildness in his eyes, the hint of a deeply broken soul that Cam tried so hard to hide. Why the hell he’d chosen Ty to open up to, Ty had no idea. God knew, he wasn’t all cuddles and warm hugs.
He stood and tossed his coffee in the trash. Out on the street, he flagged down a cab. As the cab pulled away from the curb, Ty reminded himself that he lived his life alone and independent, because he didn’t need anyone else. But even as he reminded himself, he had a sinking feeling that things were about to change.