A Missing Heart(29)

“Have a good time, bro. Call if you need anything,” Hunter tells me.

“And call me if you need girl advice; I’m good at that,” Ellie says.

“Yeah, find your wife when you’re five years old. I think that’s all the advice I’ll ever need from you, Ell.”

“Love you, AJ,” she says.

“Yeah, yeah, love you too, sis.”

“Peace, bro! Live it up. It’s your time!” Hunter shouts before the call ends.

Now that I got all of the goodbyes out of the way, there’s no reason for anyone else to ask me about Cammy because no one at school knows her. So it’s time to move forward and if she wants to move with me, she can; otherwise, I’ll set her free and all that crap I always hear about.

Hunter and Ellie’s call took up the rest of my trip, and I’m pulling into the campus full of thousands of lost looks—mine being one of them.

I park the truck and hop out, feeling my phone buzz again. Who the hell is it this time? Everyone has said good luck and goodbye. I take it out and see Cammy’s name light up the screen. My fingers can’t move fast enough to press accept.

“Hey,” I say eagerly.

“I’m so sorry I’ve been so hard to talk to this past week,” she says. “It’s been crazy here with orientation and meeting so many people, but I wanted to tell you good luck. Speaking from my week’s worth of experience, I know you’re going to have a blast.”

“I miss you, Cam.”

“AJ, I miss you so, so, so much that it hurts to see your name pop up on my phone.”

“It hurts to not see your name pop up on my phone,” I tell her.

“I know. I’m sorry. You know I love you. I know you love me. Let’s keep that and enjoy this time we decided to give ourselves.” I think she’s referring to us not running off together, rather than giving our daughter up for adoption. “No one knows our secrets now, and it’s kind of nice.”

“Yeah,” I agree out loud, but silently, I disagree. I know all of our secrets, and they will forever hurt me.

“Call me tonight and let me know how orientation went. But if you end up going to a freshman welcoming party or something, you don’t have to worry about calling me. I want you to have fun.”

“You got it,” I say, taking my first load of bags out of the truck’s bed.

“Love you, AJ.”

“Love you, Cam.”

With the bags slung over my shoulders, I make my way to the dorm I was assigned to and head up the five floors to room 5-0-5 where I should meet some dude named Brink.

The second I walk into my new ridiculously empty room complete with four white ceramic walls and two prison-looking beds, I see…Brink, and I’m foreseeing exactly how the next eight months of my life are going to play out. I place my bags down on the emptier of the two beds, and he tosses a beer into my hands before he even introduces himself. “Thank the f*cking holy college grail, you look like a normal son-of-a-bitch. Please tell me you’re a normal son-of-a-bitch?”

“We can go with normal,” I say with a raised brow. “You?”

“Normal here too.”

“Then, I guess neither of us has a thing to worry about.” I crack open the beer and plop down onto my mattress, downing the thing faster than necessary, but using it as an ice breaker. “One thing, though…”

“Yeah?” he says, slugging his beer.

“We gotta work on your taste in beers.”

He laughs and shoves me in the shoulder. “Hells to the yeah, you’re a f*cking normal son-of-a-bitch. That was a test, just so you know. No one really drinks this shit. Oh man, this is gonna be a good f*cking year.”

As I’m getting settled in, I watch the people pass in the hallway since Brink has our door propped open with a shoe wedged under the door. For some reason, I didn’t think the dorm was co-ed, but I’m seeing that is, in fact, the case. Unless, I’m wrong and we’re in the wrong hall because I see a whole lot of chicks straggling by, and most of them stop to say hi. It’s like the friendliest place on earth here.

“Like I said, it’s going to be a good f*cking year,” Brink says as he slips out into the hall to watch the passing blondes with short skirts find their rooms.

I grab the small photo I have of Cammy and I kissing from my bag and shake my head at it. Man, this isn’t good. I shake my head, knowing this is the beginning of the end. Powering off my phone, I slip it into my back pocket and tell myself things are definitely changing now.





CHAPTER NINE


It’s days like today where I realize, I had no right being a father at seventeen. I can hardly manage my life at twenty-nine. Though, if I had my daughter today, maybe my life would be different. Maybe Cammy would be here. Maybe, I would be happy.



ONCE TORI GOT home, I realized my anger was not going to subside, and the only thing I can ever think to do when I feel this way is take a long, burning-hot shower. The steam doesn’t exactly clear my mind but it releases the tension running through me. There isn’t a goddamn day where I don’t wake up and wonder where I went wrong—where we went wrong. She looks at Gavin as if he were no more than a mistake. Regardless of my strong desire never to have another child again, there hasn’t been one second when I thought of Gavin as a mistake. He was supposed to be in my life, and that’s the only way to look at it. How can she look at him differently? I can’t understand and it’s killing me. It took her almost three full minutes to tell me she did love Gavin, but I swear it sounded more like a question than a definitive, immediate answer.