Christmas at the Riverview Inn

One afternoon, after the ovens were turned off and the hills had cooled down, and Carlo had finished his second, or more likely third, bottle of wine, he’d grunted at Cameron to accompany him.

With another bottle of wine and the juice glasses Carlo like to drink from, they gathered up the week’s successes—the glass pieces Carlo hadn’t smashed off the blow pipe—and carried them in their arms up the crumbling stone steps to the top of the hill behind the house. Lizards scattered and grasshoppers bounced out of their way.

The air had smelled like rosemary and sunshine, and the light was syrup poured over the hills, and it was—for a moment—worth the burns and the work and the crap mattress in the guest room.

And then Carlo, taking a great swig of wine, started tossing the glass over the side of the hill onto the flat patio stones below where they shattered. Spectacularly.

“What are you doing?” Cameron had asked.

Carlo explained—in a voice that was passionate but slurred—that the glass was not perfect. And therefore worthless.

Carlo lit a smoke and reached for the pieces in Cameron’s arms. Cameron, exhausted and burned and a little drunk on the Tuscan sunlight, but just figuring out who he was as a chef and a man, tried to hold onto the lime green squiggle pieces in his arms even harder.

Because he was realizing that perfection was cold. And destructive. And he was about the imperfect. The messy and flawed. The welcoming and warm.

But the old man did not give up and there was actually a tussle. One of the pieces slipped out of Cameron’s hands and fell onto the rough stones they were standing on, and for one second it really seemed like it wasn’t going to shatter.

It held its shape despite the awful cracking noise.

Phew, he remembered thinking. I saved it.

And then it collapsed into pieces.

The scene in the Riverview was exactly like that moment.

No one said anything.

No one moved.

No one was even breathing. They were frozen.

And for a second it was like this wasn’t even happening at all.

Am I dreaming this?

Josie, standing near the door, looked like she wanted the floor to open up and swallow her whole, and he understood that desire so well he nearly said something about it. Nearly made a joke. Like everything that had happened between them hadn’t, and they were just the kids they’d been.

But then she turned away as if looking at him was too damn hard.

And he felt the echo of the slick shame he’d spent years dealing with. Faint, sure, but there all the same.

And Helen—who, it was good to see, was actually pregnant and not just throwing that card around willy-nilly, winced and lifted her hand in a tiny wave.

And the room absolutely exploded.

“Cameron!” Everyone was talking at once, yelling, running toward the door. Of course Alice was there first. He’d counted on that. Like walking into hostile territory and seeing one familiar face.

“What…what are you doing here?” Alice asked, holding onto him so hard he could feel the knuckles of her fingers wrapped in his shirt.

“A pregnant blackmailer was involved,” he said, smiling at everyone lined up over Alice’s shoulder.

“I can’t believe it,” Alice whispered, and he could feel her tears building in the hitch of her shoulders. “Why didn’t you warn me?”

“Come on, Alice,” he whispered in her ear. “This is hard enough.”

She sucked in a breath and stepped away, nothing but smiles. Helen was next. Delia. Patrick and Iris. The kids, none of whom were really kids anymore. Gabe. Jonah and Daphne. Garth, a teenager, tried to help him with his backpack.

“It’s heavy,” Cameron warned him.

“It’s a backpack,” Garth said with all the assurance of a teenager. Don’t tell me what I don’t know. Cameron remembered that feeling so well.

“All right,” Cameron said and shrugged out of the bag, which immediately toppled Garth over the edge of a chair.

“Holy crap, what’s in that thing?” Garth asked, wrestling it down to the ground.

“My whole life,” Cameron answered. Which sounded dramatic and like an exaggeration, but really wasn’t.

There were more hugs and some tears. With every hug, he found himself pulling deeper inside of his skin. Farther away from anyone’s touch.

An old survival skill.

But then there was Max.

And there weren’t enough survival skills in the world to handle Max.

“Son,” he said in a low murmur, and Cameron flinched just as Max came in for a hug. And the flinch froze Max in his place and maybe…well, maybe that was fine. For the best.

They were men now, no matter how much Max might want to “son” him. And what had happened between them in the past made it a little hard to hug the man now. He still remembered the taste of shame in the back of his throat, the way he’d been unable to look Max in the eye that night.