Page 26 of The Leaving Kind

“God, where do I come up with this shit?”

Movement outside the kitchen windows caught his attention. Victor glanced up from his sketch pad and nearly swallowed his tongue. A shirtless man stood at the edge of the patio, wiping his forehead with a rag. No, with his shirt.

Who had invited this Adonis to pose in the sunniest spot of the backyard? And when?

The shirt slid down to reveal brown hair, dark brows, and eyes Victor knew were brown. It was Cam. On his patio. Again. Without a shirt.

Cam tucked the shirt into the back of his belt and leaned to collect a shovel from the— Oh! The wheelbarrow of mulch. He was spreading the mulch. Right. Victor had hired him to do that. And apparently, he was doing it shirtless.

Oh my. Victor fully acknowledged his shallow nature when it came to men. He had a penchant for certain features and characteristics. He was willingly swayed and manipulated by his idea of beauty. But Cam was more interesting than beautiful. The clothed version, anyway. This shirtless wonder with muscles shifting beneath his shoulder blades and flexing across his back with every swing of the shovel?

Breathtaking.

Cam had broad shoulders and narrow hips. If he were to turn again, Victor planned to check whether one of those remarkable V shapes dove beneath the waistband of his jeans. The afternoon sunlight played off the hollows of his ribs as he lifted the shovel. Lean musculature contracted and released.

His skin wasn’t uniformly sun-kissed. A scattering of moles, likely from sun exposure, dotted his spine, and a tattoo completely covered the back of his left shoulder. Victor couldn’t quite make it out but guessed the regular lines at the top and the bottom were letters and numbers.

When Cam turned to dig the shovel back into the wheelbarrow, Victor lost his breath in a very real sense. Where the shirt had covered him before were scars. A large, painful-looking ridge twisted up over Cam’s ribs, and there were two marks in front of his left shoulder. At a distance, they resembled small splotches of wet paint. One almost star-shaped and shiny. The other spoke of a deeper, angrier wound. Both of them obviously—

Victor’s stomach pinched. He swallowed.

What did it mean that the man in his backyard had been shot at some point in his life? Shot twice. And what had caused the larger scar, that awful line over his ribs? Victor squinted. Were those other marks scars?

He thought back to the few times he’d been face-to-face with Cam, and the brief stories he’d read in the other man’s eyes. The kindness and empathy but also the hint of brittleness. Victor had been working with at-risk youth for over a decade, and while Cam was years beyond the usual age of his charges, his attachment to the periphery of Victor’s life started to make a little sense.

The stuff about making sure Victor hadn’t had a concussion? True. Absolutely. And Victor had believed the excuse the moment Cam had given it. But that wasn’t all, was it? Cam had suffered some tremendous loss. His scars might not be a part of it, but Victor wouldn’t be surprised if they were.

And now he was looking for ways to fill the empty spaces inside of himself.

Oh, yes. I know all about that one. Victor loved his children, but in his quieter and more introspective moments—all right, in his broodier moments—he did sometimes wonder if having them had been his version of filling space. The awful gaping hole left behind by the death of his father.

A sunny face intruded on his thoughts for a moment before Victor gently brushed him aside. He had other thinking to do. And sketching.

But as Victor picked up the closest pen and flipped to a fresh page of his sketchbook, a knock of certainty sounded somewhere inside his soul. There’d been a familiarity about Cam the first time they’d met. Victor had put that down to the highly emotional circumstances. Now, however, he suspected yet another abandoned child might be seeking a home.

Not that Cam was a child, or abandoned, or in need of a place to stay.

It was all just a feeling, but Victor lived by his emotions. His art—his best art—came directly from what he felt.

And right now? He was not feeling the movement of the wind through trees.

But as he sketched the first outline of the man in his garden, a new sort of movement rippled through his torso, from the base of his skull, down his spine, and around his ribs, where it tightened into a squeeze. Gasping softly, Victor put the sketch pad down.

There was a reason he stuck to landscapes. To abstract concepts. He didn’t love his trees in quite the same way he loved the humans surrounding him. But when he painted them, he could pretend he did. That they were the be-all and end-all of his existence. His family, his precious children, the best friend a man could have, his parents.

Victor closed his eyes against the bright yellow of a name that always left an ache across his heart. He could paint the sun, but never Sunshine—the one who’d left him behind.

Swallowing old pain, Victor turned away from the kitchen and the invitation to try, one more time, to paint past that particular block.

The following Monday, Cam sauntered through the office door shortly after 8 a.m. and stopped at the coffee maker. Noting the level in the pot, he filled a second cup for Luisa, doctored it with cream and sugar, and carried it over to her desk. She didn’t look up, and cold fingers of dread pinched a path down Cam’s spine.

He set the cup in front of her and sat on the couch along the wall. “What don’t you want to tell me?”

Luisa continued to stare fixedly at the monitor in front of her, though Cam knew for a fact there wouldn’t be more than two or three orders listed there. Well, he didn’t know for a fact, but he could guess with a reasonable certainty. He’d been trained to read patterns, after all, and he was good at it.

Or he had been.

He’d also learned to read faces, and Luisa wasn’t trying to hide what she felt. Remorse, fatigue, and perhaps relief.

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