Page 51 of Revenge At Raleigh High
Cameron pauses, straightening up a little, a warning look on his face. Antagonizing him probably isn’t the best way to plant myself firmly into his good graces. He arches his eyebrows at me, and I arch mine back. I am the king of the sardonic eyebrow arch. Cam’s gonna have to practice some more if he wants to compete for the title. “What? You want me to apologize? Will that make your old skiing injury hurt less?”
“Jesus Christ, you’re anasshole, you know that?” he mutters darkly. “What Silver sees in you, I have no idea.”
There we go. Salty, salty Cameron. When he hits the heavy bag again, he puts a little effort into it. Enough that I can actually feel the hit through the bag. Not enough to make me stagger back a step, but it’s something.
“If I’m such an asshole, then why are you okay with me dating Silver in the first place?”
Cameron bares his teeth as he throws another punch at the bag. “Silver’s not like most kids her age. She’s smart. She knows what she wants. She’s also stubborn as hell. If I forbid her from dating you, in a year’s time she’d be shacked up with you somewhere fifty miles away with a newborn keeping her up all damn night and I’d probably never see her again.”
I’ll admit, the mental image he paints throws me for a second. “She’d never do that,” I say. “Sheistoo smart for that. We’d never just take off and leave. We’d never wind up with a kid like that, either.”
“Why not?” Cam asks sharply. “You don’t want children with her?”
I choke on a number of different responses to that question. The words are all bunched up at the back of my throat, stumbling into one another. If this is another test, like handing me a beer to see if I’ll drink it in front of him, then I don’t know what kind of warped, fucked up game this guy is playing, but I want out. Nothing I say here will ever be the right answer. “It’s getting real hot in here,” I say through my teeth. “Silver said you used to go to a Mauy Thai gym on the other side of town. Why’d you stop?”
Cameron’s eyes glitter as he drives a right hook toward the middle of the bag. “Shame you were so enthusiastic with all the ink. You could have been a politician later in life, the way you side step questions, Moretti. Quite the talent you’ve got there.”
“What do you want me to say? Yeah, I wanna knock up your daughter and fill an entire house with our kids? I’m seventeen. So’s Silver. Neither of us are thinking about that right now.”
“You’re just thinking about getting your dick touched as often as possible, consequences be damned, right?” I feel his hit this time. I’m pretty sure Cam imagined the bag was my head on that last one. A spike of anger licks up the back of my neck but I ignore it, shrugging it off. I’m used to people saying things to try and kindle my temper. Gary used to do it all the time. During the last few months under Quincy’s roof, I probably would have unleashed on him and gotten in a few good hits if he’d said something like that to me. This time, with Cam, I’m not going to do that. He’s so fucking worried about Silver. I’m betting he doesn’t even know what he’s saying half the time.
“I’m not gonna talk to you about my dick, Mr. Parisi,” I tell him.
“Ahh.” He stands up, straightening out of his fighting stance again, wiping sweat from his brow with the back of his forearm. “Back to Mr. Parisi, huh?”
“Until we settle on another topic of conversation that doesn’t make me think you might kill me, I think it’s probably for the best.”
He huffs out a breath of air that I think is supposed to be laughter. “Okay, okay. I’m sorry. I’m being an asshole, too. You must be rubbing off on me, Moretti. Come on. Let’s switch out.”
We both wrapped our hands before we started, so I’m ready to change up with him. Cam skirts around the bag, assuming the position I was just in. I lift my hands to my face, loosely fisted, raising my guard, and Cam laughs. “Oh boy. I can see we’ve got some work to do here, haven’t we? You need a bit of a wider…” he begins to say.
He stops trying to correct my stance with his half-baked Muay Thai knowledge when I unleash my first punch, pivoting at the ankle, knee, then hip, rotating, twisting, drawing power up through the floor, up through my body, and sending it snapping down the length of my arm as it impacts with the bag.
Cam staggers back not one step but two. He nearly crashes into the work bench behind him. “Ufffffuck,”he groans, his surprised exclamation transitioning into a surprised curse word. “I wasn’t expecting that.”
“Kind of the point, right? Take people by surprise, when it matters.” My loose, almost drunken style of fighting has shocked the hell out of more people than I can count. To this day, I’ve never lost a fight. I don’t intend on losing any in the future, either.
Cam nods, panting a little as he goes back to hold onto the bag. “Point well made,” he says under his breath. He’s not smiling anymore. Not angry either. His emotions seem to have fallen out of him altogether. “You know this might be the end for you guys, don’t you?” he says quietly. “If we do this, she might not forgive you for not listening to her.”
I chew on the inside of my lip for a second, turning that thought over in my head. I’ve already realized this. There’s every chance Silver will never speak to me again once my plans with Cam have come to fruition. “I know it,” I say after a while. “I’ve made my peace with it. I’ll never be okay without her, but she’ll be okay without me. She’s stronger than I am.She’dbe okay…and this needs to be done.” I say nothing about Silver’s murmured nightmares. I say nothing of all the other ways Jacob’s assault is still affecting Silver…sexually…even if she won’t admit it. Cameron just nods, as if he’s noticed his own list of changes in his daughter and he doesn’t want to talk about those either.
“What about you?” I ask. “She’s going to hate you too after we’re done.”
Cam just shrugs, jerking his chin toward the heavy bag, indicating for me to hit it again. “I’m different,” he says. “I’m her father. She can hate me all she wants. A daughter’s supposed to hate her father sometimes. Eventually, she’ll forgive me, though. She won’t have a choice. I’m her blood.”
21
SILVER
A ribbon of light spans from one end of Raleigh High Street to the other, small yellow fairy lights twinkling everywhere, wrapped around the trunks of the trees, individually wrapped around their branches. The storefronts have all been decorated, too. The edges of the windows in cafes, restaurants, and the boutique jewelry places alike have been frosted over with fake snow, and paper snowflakes have been taped and strung to the insides of the glass.
I remember making those snowflakes as a child in elementary school, folding the paper into little triangles and carefully using the tips of my scissors to snick out little pieces along the edge, creating a pattern when the paper was unfolded. We’d make hundreds of them at Raleigh Elementary, writing our names carefully in the middle of our snowflakes in looping pencil. One of the teachers would then go around Raleigh and distribute the decorations to the local store owners, and the children of the town would be taken up and down the high street by their parents to peer into all the windows. We’d all squeal, delighted, when we finally found one of our own snowflakes in a window, displayed proudly, our names pressed up against the cold glass.
Thomas Beekman, Aged 7.
Carlie Harrison, Aged 7.
Leoni Ali, Aged 6.
