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The Jealous Captain
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2026-08-27 18:47:23"Richard, honey, it's past midnight."
Diane appeared in the doorway behind her husband, hair loose, wrapped in a robe, blinking sleep out of her eyes. Richard's shoulders dropped the second he saw her, whatever resolve had carried him this far dissolving into something more careful.
"I was just…" He glanced at Lena, then Cameron, and seemed to think better of whatever he'd been about to say. "It can wait until morning. Everyone should be sleeping."
"Richard." Lena's voice came out sharper than she intended. "You can't start that sentence and not finish it."
"I said it can wait." His tone left no room for argument, the easy, laughing father from dinner replaced by something colder. "Get some sleep, both of you."
He steered Diane back down the hall, and Lena stood there staring after him, chest tight with a dozen questions that had multiplied instead of shrinking.
Cameron touched her arm. "Lena…"
"Don't." She pulled back, suddenly exhausted by all of it, the almost-kiss, the almost-truth, the almost everything that kept happening in this house and never quite finishing. "I need to sleep."
She left him standing alone in the kitchen, and neither of them mentioned what had almost happened before Richard walked in.
*****
Her ex showed up four days later, and of course he picked the worst possible moment.
"Lena?"
She turned in the campus bookstore line and there he was, Ethan Cole, looking exactly like she remembered, tan and confident in a way that used to charm her and now just made her tired.
"Ethan. What are you doing here?"
"Transferred. Grad program, business." He smiled, the same smile that had gotten her through two years of a relationship that ended with him choosing a semester abroad over her without discussing it first. "I heard you moved. Big house, rich stepdad. Living the dream, huh?"
"Something like that."
"You look good." His eyes swept over her, lingering a beat too long. "Really good, actually. I've thought about you a lot since Portland."
"That's nice, Ethan." She grabbed her books off the counter, desperate for an exit. "I have class."
"Can we get coffee sometime? Catch up?" He caught her arm, gentle but insistent. "I made a mistake, Lena. I know that now. I'd like a chance to fix it."
She was still working out how to answer that when a shadow fell over both of them, and she didn't need to look up to know who it was.
"She said she has class," Cameron said.
Ethan blinked up at him, up, because Cameron had at least four inches on him and clearly intended to use every one. "And you are?"
"Someone who lives with her." Cameron's voice was pleasant in the way a closed fist is pleasant. "Which means I know when someone's making her uncomfortable. You're making her uncomfortable."
"I'm fine," Lena said, though her arm was grateful when Ethan finally let go of it.
"We were just talking," Ethan said, recovering his smile. "Old friends catching up."
"Looked like more than talking from where I was standing."
"Cameron." Lena shot him a look. "I've got this."
"Clearly." He didn't move, didn't back down an inch, and the tension between the two men stretched thin enough to snap. Ethan glanced between them, something calculating flickering behind his eyes.
"Wow. Okay." He held his hands up, backing away with a laugh that didn't reach his eyes. "Didn't realize the stepbrother came with claws. I'll catch you around, Lena. When you're not so closely supervised."
He walked off, and Lena rounded on Cameron the second he was gone.
"What was that?"
"That was me not letting some guy who broke your heart corner you in a bookstore."
"How do you even know he broke my heart? I never told you that."
"I didn't have to be told. I saw your face." His jaw was tight, something dark and unresolved simmering behind his eyes. "I don't like him."
"You don't know him."
"I know enough."
She should have been annoyed. She was annoyed, technically, buried under something else that felt suspiciously like being cared for, and she didn't know what to do with either feeling.
The party that weekend was loud, crowded, thick with the smell of cheap beer and somebody's cologne, and Lena was three songs into dancing with a guy from her stats class, harmless, sweet, entirely uninterested in anything but having fun, when she caught Cameron's eyes across the room.
He wasn't talking to anyone. He was leaning against the wall with a drink he wasn't drinking, watching her with an intensity that made her stomach flip and her feet stumble half a step out of rhythm.
The guy she was dancing with laughed, oblivious, spinning her once, and Lena glanced back to find Cameron gone from the wall.
He appeared at her elbow thirty seconds later.
"Mind if I cut in?"
The stats guy, sensing something in Cameron's tone that suggested this wasn't really a question, backed off with a shrug and a "yeah, man, all yours."
"I was having fun," Lena said, though she let Cameron pull her in anyway, hand settling low on her back, warm even through the fabric of her dress.
"I could tell."
"You don't sound happy about that."
"I'm not." He said it low, rough, honest in a way that startled her. "I watched you dance with him for ten minutes and wanted to put my fist through the wall. That's not a normal reaction to have about a stranger, Lena."
"We're supposed to be fake."
"I don't care what we're supposed to be anymore." His hand tightened at her waist, pulling her closer, close enough that she could feel his heartbeat hammering under her palm. "I don't like sharing you. Not with Ethan. Not with some guy from your stats class. Not with anyone."
Her breath caught. "Cameron…"
"I know it's insane. I know I have no right to feel like this." His forehead dropped toward hers, voice dropping to something rough and unguarded. "But I do. I feel like this. And I'm done pretending I don't."
The music blurred around them, the party shrinking down to nothing but the two of them and the impossible closeness of his mouth to hers, and Lena's hand fisted in his shirt, ready to close the last inch between them…
Someone screamed.
Not a party scream, a real one, sharp and panicked, from somewhere near the kitchen, followed by the sound of glass shattering and a crowd surging backward.
Cameron's head snapped up, every soft edge of him vanishing instantly into something alert and dangerous. "Stay here."
"Cameron, what…"
But he was already moving through the crowd toward the noise, and Lena caught one glimpse of what had caused the scream before the crowd swallowed him whole, Marco Ruiz, blood running from his nose, shouting something at a guy Lena didn't recognize, a guy who was backing toward the door with a look on his face that wasn't panic.
It was satisfaction.
And in the chaos, Lena's phone buzzed once in her pocket. A text, same unknown number, same cold certainty.
‘Ask Cameron who really started that fight. Ask him whose name Marco was shouting when he went down.’
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