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When she came back, Tyler in tow, she was more than his sixteen-year-old self could have foreseen and all that a full-grown man could want in a woman.
Funny, smart, strong, loyal… and gorgeous, she was still gorgeous.
He shouldn’t have been surprised when the woman who was all those things wasn’t having him anywhere near the lines she’d drawn on the ground.
“He has men in his life,” she insisted. As if that were the only thing he’d said. As if she was latching on to the easiest thing to address.
“I didn’t say he didn’t, but guys need different types of men. No one can be everyone to anyone.”
“Don’t I know it.” She gave him a look, accusing him of having dropped that ball for her already.
“I was sixteen. Vivian, I thought we’d come back to each other after not being together for a few weeks. It was stupid, but I was feeling hedged in. I didn’t expect…”
Thatshe’dstart seeing someone right away. His stupid teen brain had assumed he’d go out with a few girls who flirted with him regularly, see what that was like, then be the big guy on campus who graciously took her back.
Because, again, idiot.
“Didn’t expect I’d get pregnant?” Vivian’s irate voice broke into his thoughts.
Cam was taken off guard by the anger in her voice.
“What? No,” he insisted as he struggled to align what he’d been thinking with what she’d just said. “I didn’t expect you toleave.”
He paced away, running a hand through his hair, tempted to yank it out at the roots.
Is that what she thought of him?
Sure, he’d been ticked off. They’d been waiting. He’d been ready to wait forever for her when it came to sex. And not in a pushy way.
His dad had sat him down when he was twelve and said, “Ever want to play a game with someone who didn’t want to play but you guilted them into it? How much fun was that?”
Then came the sex talk.
He never wanted to be that guy.
Especially with Vivian because she was special. She’d always been special.
“You were there and then you were just—gone.” He turned back to look at her. “How do you fix stuff with someone who just left?”
“Oh, and you couldn’t find me?” The snark was real. And the pain. He had to wonder how much that accusation weighted this conversation.
Cam felt like he was still stuck on repeat. “Again, I was sixteen. And an idiot. I feel like these two facts keep coming up and are given no weight. I mean, the idiocy of sixteen-year-old boys is extremely well-documented.”
Like in every way possible.
“You’re really using ‘I was an idiot’ as your go-to defense?” Vivian looked like she was about to blow a gasket instead of fix one.
“And then what?” Cam demanded, looking back at the past with eyes as clear as he could manage. Even as he said it, he remembered the truth. The one that still haunted him. “I find you and then you… come back and we go to prom? Youleft. I screwed up, but you left.”
Vivian stepped back, her face going blank, but not before she locked down the anger that flashed in her eyes first, a storm of green on gold.
“You know what? I don’t have time for this. I have a nine-year-old at home planning a revolt. I’d appreciate it if you’d send him home next time he shows up here.”
She turned to go and Cam saw everything from the past and the present slamming into one another again like a flash over of pictures where there should have just been one.
“Vivian, wait.” He tensed, as if this moment were the only chance he had. She stood, her back to him, and he added, “Can we talk about this?”
Her shoulders sagged as her head dropped back in defeat that nearly killed him before she braced and turned around, the same Valkyrie he was used to.
