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Too Close
publish date:
2026-08-26 06:47:00By the time Lena made it to her first class Monday morning, she'd been tagged in fourteen different posts, three of which had already surpassed a thousand likes.
‘Cameron Hayes has a girlfriend??? and it's his STEPSISTER???’
‘okay but the way he looked at her tho’
‘not me shipping my favorite hockey captain and his stepsister I'm going to hell’
"You're a ‘phenomenon’," Priya said, scrolling through her own phone with unrestrained delight as they walked to lecture. "There's already a ship name. People are calling you two 'Camena.'"
"Please stop talking."
"I can't. This is the most interesting thing that's happened to me all semester." Priya held up her screen, a photo from the team dinner, Cameron's hand at Lena's back, both of them laughing at something out of frame, looking entirely too comfortable to be fake. "You sure this is pretend? Because you don't look like you're pretending."
Lena didn't answer. She didn't trust herself to.
The possessiveness started small.
At the campus coffee shop Tuesday, when a guy from her media ethics class struck up a conversation in line, Cameron materialized out of nowhere with two coffees and an arm looping easily around her waist, introducing himself with a smile that had teeth in it.
"Just being thorough," he said afterward, when she called him out. "Girlfriends get coffee brought to them. That's the bit."
"That's not the bit. The bit is standing near me at parties. The bit is not glaring at every guy who says hello to me in a coffee shop."
"I wasn't glaring."
"You were absolutely glaring."
"He was standing too close." Cameron's jaw was tight, eyes fixed somewhere over her shoulder, refusing to meet hers. "I don't like it."
"You don't like a lot of things lately."
"I don't like the idea of someone else…" He stopped himself, exhaled hard, dragged a hand through his hair. "Forget it."
"No, finish that sentence."
He wouldn't. He walked her to her next class in silence instead, hand brushing hers the entire way, neither of them commenting on it.
Wednesday night she found him in the kitchen at 1 a.m., shirtless, hunched over a textbook with three energy drink cans lined up beside him like fallen soldiers.
"You're supposed to be a hockey star, not a library ghost," she said, padding in for water.
"Sports psych final's in two weeks." He didn't look up. "Coach benches anyone under a 2.5 GPA. Doesn't matter how many goals you score."
"I didn't know that."
"Nobody does. It's not exactly the highlight reel." He rubbed his eyes, exhausted in a way she hadn't seen on him before, no smirk, no performance, just a tired twenty-two-year-old drowning in a textbook. "People think this is easy. Practice, games, glory. Nobody sees the 4 a.m. workouts or the tutoring sessions I beg for because reading comprehension was never my thing."
She sat down across from him without really deciding to. "Why not just tell people that?"
"Because the second I look human, I stop being useful to anyone." His voice was quiet, raw in a way that made her chest hurt. "My dad needs the golden son. The team needs the captain. Everyone needs Cameron Hayes to be exactly the guy on the poster."
"What about what you need?"
He looked up at her then, something unguarded in his expression that she'd never seen before, not the arrogance, not the smirk, just him. "I don't really know anymore. Nobody's asked me that in a long time."
"I'm asking now."
The silence stretched, comfortable and terrifying all at once. He closed the textbook slowly, like he was setting something down he'd been carrying too long.
"I trust you," he said finally. "That's the honest answer to whatever you were actually asking. I don't trust people, Lena. I haven't since I was fifteen and figured out that everyone wants something from Cameron Hayes." His eyes held hers, steady, unflinching. "You're the first person in years who's looked at me like you don't want anything at all. Just, me. Whoever that is underneath the highlight reel."
Her throat tightened. "Cameron…"
"I know this was supposed to be fake." He reached across the table, fingers brushing hers, slow enough that she could've pulled away and didn't. "I know we agreed on one week. But I don't think I know how to fake this anymore. Not with you."
"You're supposed to say things like that when there's an audience," she whispered. "Not at 1 a.m. in an empty kitchen."
"Maybe that's exactly when I mean them the most."
He stood, rounding the table slowly, and she rose to meet him without deciding to, some magnetic pull neither of them fought anymore. His hand came up to cup her jaw, thumb tracing her cheekbone, and this time there was no rink, no fall, no accident to blame it on, just the two of them, inches apart, breathing the same unsteady air.
"Tell me to stop," he murmured, echoing the rink, echoing every moment they'd almost had and pulled back from.
"I don't want to."
His forehead dropped to hers, close enough that his lips brushed the corner of her mouth, testing, waiting…
The front door slammed.
They broke apart just as Richard's voice boomed through the foyer, home early from his business trip, laughing on the phone with someone. Cameron stepped back so fast he nearly knocked over an energy drink can, and Lena pressed a hand to her chest like she could physically hold her heartbeat still.
"That was close," Cameron breathed.
"Too close," she agreed, though some reckless, aching part of her wished his father had come home five minutes later.
Richard's footsteps grew closer, and Cameron grabbed his textbook, plastering on a casual expression that fooled absolutely no one who'd seen his face thirty seconds earlier.
"Cam? You still up?" Richard appeared in the doorway, phone still pressed to his ear, and stopped short at the sight of them both flushed and too far apart to be innocent. His eyes narrowed slightly before he covered it with a smile. "And Lena. Good, actually, I need to talk to you both. Sit down."
Something in his tone made Lena's stomach drop.
"Talk to us about what?" Cameron asked slowly.
Richard set his phone down, his easy smile fading into something far more serious.
"About your mother," he said, looking at Lena. "And about what really happened to her ex-husband's career fifteen years ago. I think it's time you both heard the truth, before someone else tells it for me.”
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