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It wasn't that he couldn't talk, that there was something that had happened to his tongue, to his vocal cords.
He chose not to.
Because he stuttered.
Seeing the recognition hit, raw vulnerability plastered itself over Cam's face, his eyes uncommonly open, bared to me.
It was clear that this was not something he did, sharing this part of himself. I couldn't help but wonder how many he had shown it to. If I had to guess, not many.
And he had decided to trust it to me as well.
"Cam..." my voice whispered out of me as his hands suddenly released me, making me think - with a sinking stomach - that he was going to run off. Until they rose, his thumbs softly wiping the tears from my cheeks in such a sweet, gentle gesture that my heart felt constricted in my chest. "It's okay," I told him when he'd finished, looking at my eyes again with that aching openness in his eyes. "You don't have to tell me," I added. "It doesn't matter. You don't have to talk. I like you whatever way you feel comfortable," I finished, arms going around him, giving him a reassuring squeeze like I had needed when I had shown him my truth.
"I-I w-w-w-want t-to t-tell y-you."
I was pretty sure it was right that moment that I fell in love with him.EIGHTCamdenAn entire life.
That was what I needed to tell her.
Decades of shit - good, bad. Let's face it, mostly bad. Except for my girls, then my club.
I hadn't spoken more than a few dozen words a year since I was maybe a little kid.
It was going to take a million of them to cover it all. The idea should have been daunting, terrifying.
Yet all I felt was an odd sense of peace as I opened my mouth to start.
Just like with Annie, the beginning was both the easiest - and the hardest - part.
Because in the beginning, I had known things that became foreign to me as I would grow older.
Comfort.
Security.
Love.
I was the product of a backseat of a limo tryst on prom night. My father's prom. My mother was sixteen. Young, infatuated, not confident enough to demand protection.
I didn't remember those first two years. No one really does. The years when my mom had still been around. I didn't know if she was the one to wake up with me at night, to hold me on her shoulder and bop around, to feed me, to nurse me when I was sick, to fret about my milestones. Or if she had always been disinterested, always felt a disconnect from herself and the life she had helped create.
All I knew was that when I was two, when she was legally old enough to do so, she packed a bag in the middle of the night and took off.
I couldn't help but wonder if she hadn't had my grandparents around, if she still would have left. Left a screaming infant in a crib, hungry, scared, completely alone in the world.
It wasn't a question I would ever be able to ask her.
Luckily enough, I had grandparents.
The good ones.
The ones who stepped up.
Even though they were old.
Even though they had already raised their kid.
The arthritis in my grandfather's hands from years doing line work at a factory didn't stop him from picking me up, throwing me over his head, and catching me as I squealed. It didn't stop him from throwing balls in the backyard with me. It didn't stop him from holding my hand on the way to my first day of school as I tried to have a stiff upper lip and not cry at the idea of being away from him.
My grandmother I always thought of as small. Looking back, she couldn't have been more than five feet tops. And judging by the pictures of her with my mother at her high school graduation, my height must have come from my father.
The deadbeat he was.
But my grandmother had been small in all ways - short, slight, quiet. I remembered standing on a backward kitchen chair at the kitchen island, watching as she whisked the ingredients for pancakes in a big metal serving bowl, and wondering how her little wrists didn't break with how fast she whipped the batter around. Her gray hair had been kept long, but always clasped in a barrette at the nape of her neck. And I don't know if I ever had a memory of her not wearing one of her kitchen aprons. She had a collection of them in different colors, patterns, some with pictures, some with sayings.
Apparently, she had been an attorney when she met my grandfather in her thirties. They spent years trying to get pregnant, only managing to do so when my grandmother was forty-one. She'd promptly quit her job and thrown herself into housewifery and motherhood, never looking back.
