I could see him, wearing only a tight pair of black boxer briefs, standing against the wall. His eyes practically glowed in the dark. His ripped, lean muscles stood out black and white in the night. His gun rested on the nightstand, easily within reach, cocked and ready.
“You hate me because of what I’ve done, but you don’t know the half of it. That’s fine. I can handle that.”
His breath on my skin. His hands between my thighs. Shivers running in cascades down my spine.
“Hate me all you want, but you’re going to come for me.”
His lips against my ear, my mouth.
The sweet pain of him pressing hard against me.
I won’t give in to you.
My gasp as he slipped the clothes from my body.
“I know what you really want.”
I don’t want you.
“I know how far you’ll go.”
Wave after wave of blinding pleasure.
I won’t give in to you.
1
Lacey
He’d been my best friend for years. That was how our parents met and started dating, actually, but more on that later.
We had homeroom together in eighth grade. Camden was quiet, maybe a little shy, but he was too handsome for his own good, even back then. People knew him, but he didn’t turn into the outgoing thief he was destined to become for another few years.
Back then, he was just Cam.
I’d never forget the first thing he said to me. It was two weeks into the new school year, and he hadn’t so much as looked at me before that.
“What’s your deal, anyway?”
I looked up and he was staring back at me, his piercing green eyes smiling but his face otherwise passive.
“What?” I asked, surprised.
“What’s your deal?”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about.”
He nodded at the pen I had been clicking incessantly. “You keep doing that every day, all morning long. Do you have OCD or something?”
“Uh, sorry,” I mumbled, surprised at how forward he was being. “I guess it’s just a habit.”
He looked at me appraisingly. “I’m Camden.”
“Lacey.”
Although he was probably being a jerk, there was something about him I couldn’t put my finger on. He could get away with being forward somehow, like what would normally be an incredibly rude question from someone else seemed perfectly okay coming from him. He just had a way about him that made people want to be close to him. Everybody knows someone like that, but with Camden it was always turned on and always turned up to the maximum.
He was like that with everything. Things came to him effortlessly, but Camden rarely seemed to care enough about anything to try hard. As that first year wore on, we talked every day during homeroom and quickly became friends outside of school. I wasn’t blind. I mean, I was young but I wasn’t stupid. I could see how attractive he was, even back then. But for some reason our friendship was just that, a friendship, and nothing developed between us that first year we knew each other.
Then things changed.
It was only a matter of time before people started noticing Camden. In ninth grade he hit his growth spurt and shot up to well over six feet tall. The muscles he became famous for seemed to sprout overnight, and he went from a normal but still handsome eighth grade boy to a lean and strong-looking man, practically in a day.
That was the problem, though. We spent so much time together, were such good friends, that I didn’t see it coming when he suddenly began to hang out with a rougher crowd. They smoked and drank and cursed and fought, and eventually they stole cars and sold drugs. I didn’t understand what Camden saw in them, but he became their leader, and eventually their scapegoat.
I was a good kid. I always had been. There was no question that I would go to college. And as much as I hated it, I had to admit that I didn’t fit in with Camden and his crowd anymore. I wanted to, but they just never seemed to like me, and I couldn’t make myself be someone I wasn’t just for the sake of people I didn’t really like to begin with.
We stayed friends. We still talked all the time. But slowly he became less like the guy I used to know and more like the person that would disappear one day into thin air without so much as a phone call.
I didn’t understand the change. For years I blamed myself. Maybe if I had reached out more, tried to talk to him more, tried to understand why he was doing the things he did instead of shying away from mentioning it, maybe I could have saved him.
That was probably wishful thinking, I know. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder what I could have done better to save Camden from himself.
That guilt was quickly replaced by anger. I was angry that he had abandoned his friends and his family. I was angry that he had abandoned me like I was nothing to him, like it was the easiest thing in the world to just up and leave town. He could have called or emailed or written, but instead there was only silence from him. After a while, we all assumed he was dead in a ditch someplace far away, and that anger only grew day by day.