Hush

Read Hush for Free Online Page B

Book: Read Hush for Free Online
Authors: Jude Sierra
the tension sits like a stone in Cam’s stomach. He shouldn’t have said anything.
    The stars are brilliant tonight, brighter than anything he’ll see in Chicago, for which he is thankful. Peyton is some­where under the sky, too. What does it look like where she is?
    Cam has so much to figure out—enough for him to feel he’s in a bit of a quagmire. If ever there were someone for him to talk to, it would be Peyton. But what would he tell her? That he kissed a boy and it felt like the Big Bang in his body? That he has no idea what that means?
    He’ll go back to Chicago in two weeks. And he’ll do what he does best: Watch and learn and slowly figure this thing out. And although he’ll make himself move past the emptiness Peyton’s absence leaves here under a hometown sky, he’ll pace each run­ning step to the beat of missing her; she’s always been half of a whole, and he feels her absence more here than he has in the months since he left home.
    It’s not just the worst memories that linger in the corners of the family home, the shouted arguments, the anxiety that coated them all whenever she ran away. Cam thinks of the thick ten­sion he swam through whenever she returned, or the incred­ible sense of loss that last time, when they’d finally come of age, and she had escaped the home that had always seemed to sti­fle her. Peyton had been born too free, and although nothing was ever wrong, exactly, their father’s rigid adherence to a certain old school culture and their mother’s too-easy acquiescence had always been too much for her. Peyton had confessed over and over, curled in Cam’s bed on late nights after having snuck back in, that she just couldn’t stand it anymore. Cam had felt this, too, since they were kids. The difference between them lay in the fact that he’d learned to rein in that chafing need to break away, and acted with a calmer, more controlled energy.
    When she left, a hasty one-line note on the kitchen table and a box of letters she’d been secretly writing Cam for over a year tucked under his bed, he felt her loss in the most visceral way, like a rending in his core.
    Somewhere, Peyton breathes air he’s never touched. She’s got a constantly shifting life that he never really understands. But although it aches, she’s there; and in moments like this, knowing that is the closest he comes to comfort.

Chapter Four
    Nate had set up a system early on, when they met. Socks on the door were too obvious, even though he thought they were slightly hilarious and had admitted he was tempted to go with a throw­back system. In this day and age, he said, texts should suffice.
    Cam had nodded and played along; at the time, he doubted he’d ever be in a position to avail himself of the system.
    And yet… something is awake now. Concrete. Cam wonders at himself. He watches, trying to pull himself apart into threads and pieces to understand what lies below. He looks at men and at women, assessing their faces and bodies, waiting to see if some­thing sparks in him, to see if he’s just been missing something this whole time in assuming he was only attracted to women.
    When he tries to examine this, he senses so much more below some surface he created inside himself: something alive and want­ing and bright, something confusing and tangled. Sometimes it’s too much to let himself dwell on it. It makes him feel unsteady and frightened; he’s not who he thought he was, and he has no idea who or why he really is.
    So he spends the rest of his summer working behind the regis­ter at a deli on Chadsworth, watching people come and go and quietly listening to their conversations. He comes home crowded with a press of feelings, with fleeting desires cultivated by observing faces and bodies and by small talk. He wakes in states of shaking arousal, with remnant images of bodies and hands on him, and indulges in furtive release when the intensity of layered desires begins to crest.
    And he runs. He lets

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