Red Moon Rising

18. separate

"I'm not trying to kill your family, Cam."

"I didn't mean that," he tries, a little more softly. "I think...If the elders matched us to someone else, then we need to try to trust them."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

I shrug, slapping my hands back against my thigh. "Fine. Go home. Cut me out. But I'm not running back to you, all right? The moment you realized you fucked up it will be too late."

"Layla..."

"No, don't act like that. I'm not the one being unreasonable right now." I rummage through the closet until I find his duffle bag, and Cam only watches as I set it on the bed.

"What are you doing?"

"Helping you leave."

"Won't you talk to me about this more?"

"What the hell is there to talk about? What else can you possibly say that is going to make this better?"

"I just want you to understand," he tries again.

"Well I'm not going to, so you're wasting your breath." I wish I had it in me to just shove his clothes into the bag, but I fold them and pack them tight and neat despite myself. He doesn't say anything as he watches me, and eventually he's standing beside me, helping me push him out the door. "How are you even going to get back there?"

"The blacktop heading north isn't in too bad of shape, and the highway department okayed the bridge that way."

"You've been paying attention. You've been thinking about leaving even before Peter..."

"I was afraid something else would happen. And then it did." He stares darkly at me and then glares into the duffle bag. "I should have just gone home after mom died. Maybe Peter would still be alive."

I bite my lip and shake my head slowly, but it's too difficult to hold back my words, and I don't really care to anyway. "That's bullshit, Cam, it really is. And you should have just told me you were thinking about it."

"You didn't want to believe in a curse."

"No, Cam, I was trying to keep you from feeling like you killed the people closest to you. But you're fucking off now so I guess that's not my responsibility anymore, is it?"

"I'm fucking off? You think I want any of this?"

"I think you're afraid, and I think you're jumping ship when times get hard." I turn away from the bed, unable to look at that fucking bag anymore. There aren't too many dishes in the sink, but I start washing them anyway. I want an excuse to not look at him.

"Hey." Cam's voice is biting and hollow behind me as he follows me across the room. "Times aren't getting hard, Layla. Mom and Pete are dead."

"Life is hard, Cam."

"Can you even look at me when you say that? Do you get how fucked up that is to say?"

I think I'm losing my mind a little bit. I do know how fucked up it is. I know exactly how fucked up every single thing I've said tonight has been. But this whole situation is fucked. His best friend just died and he's decided to leave me because of it. If Cam's dad hadn't tried to pin his mom's death on him...

But no, I don't think that would have solved it either. I think there was a part of Cam that was always looking out for signs of our decision being the wrong one. I don't think it was intentional—but how could he not, when his family cut him off and we were living out of a car outside of shitty little human town? Some part of me believed that Cam and I would always be enough for each other, that we could lose everything and in some way it wouldn't matter as much because we had each other. I don't want that to be wrong. I don't want to acknowledge that I was wrong.