Cameron Edison

Havermouth, Present Time

Aislen picked up a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of wine from the local drive through liquor store on her way back to the house. She had spent less than a year living there, so it did not feel like home, she thought as she pulled up in the driveway, but it was a near to home as she had.

Like many of the houses in the town, it was centuries old, the brickwork showing a craze of cracking from the house settling onto its foundations. The walls were thick and the windows small. There was a small bullnose veranda out front with a beaten up looking rocking chair on it.

Unlike its neighbours, it did not have a pretty little garden. Patrick Carter had been a busy man, and after the separation he appeared to have, quite practically, cleared out the garden beds and gravelled over top. Practical, but f-king ugly, she thought with a sigh as she opened the car door and got out, wondering what she would find inside.

It was a tiny house, and the inspection didn’t take long. There was the small master bedroom in the room to the left of the front door, and a tiny lounge room to the right. The furniture in both hadn’t changed from when she had lived there. Her bedroom remained untouched, just as she had left it, if somewhat dustier. She stripped the sheets and remade the single bed, before dumping her suitcase on it.

The kitchen/living area took up the rear of the house, looking out onto a back garden which had received the same treatment as the front, rendering it into an ugly desert terrain in which a few determined weeds were fighting for survival.

She put her art supplies onto the dining room table and checked out the fridge. It had only been a week since her father’s death, and even the milk was still in date. The fridge was quite barren, a saggy bunch of carrots in the crisper, the milk on the fridge door shelf, some butter, and condiments.

The freezer, however, was well supplied. She picked out a frozen meal, started the oven, and shoved the foil tray in to heat, and then found a wine glass and took it, the bottle, and the cigarettes out onto the porch.

She didn’t smoke often – mostly only indulging after she’d had a particularly vivid dream of the Triquetra and had craved the taste of Rhett’s mouth. Seeing his picture hanging in the lawyers’ office where Heath worked had reminded her of him, and she had bought the cigarettes as a result. She poured a wine and lit a cigarette, rocking slightly on the chair as she considered what to do.

She did not know why she looked up, but she found Cameron standing on the pavement before the house. He had been for a jog, his burnished curls damp with sweat, his grey top clinging to him wetly, and his long legs displayed in a pair of running shorts. For a long moment, they stared at each other, and then she lifted the cigarette to her mouth and took a drag.

“I’d offer you a glass of wine,” she said as she blew out the smoke. “But it’s an odd thing to chase a run with.”

“You shouldn’t smoke,” he said opening the rusty little gate and crossing the gravel. “It’s not good for you.”

“You guys were the ones who taught me to smoke,” she reminded him.

“You look different,” he frowned slightly as if puzzled by how she was no longer the eighteen-year-old innocent that they had contaminated. He stepped up onto the porch. She could smell the clean salty scent of his sweat and watched a bead of it follow the hollow of his collar bone and then track down to the scooped neck of his running top.

“It has been five years.” And it had, perhaps, been unwise to spend them celibate, she acknowledged to herself ruefully. Cameron had filled out in the last five years into the height that he’d had at eighteen, and the finished result was divinely lickable.

“You look like Rhett,” he took the wineglass and the cigarette, taking a mouthful of one and then a drag from the other.

“I’m not sure if that’s an insult or not,” she observed as he passed back the wine glass. He took another drag of the cigarette before passing it back. Very unhealthy to be fantasying over her exes, she told herself as she finished the cigarette and flicked it out onto the gravel.

“Invite me in,” he said.

“Let me guess,” she used her toe to set the chair to rocking again as she leaned her head back against the head rest. “The three of you have a game, a dare, to see who can f-k me first now that I am back in town. The more things change, the more they stay the same, hmm?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “A few years away, and you suddenly seem to think that you’re an A grade f-k, Morgana,” he sneered the name. “F-king you was always about as lively as f-king a blow up doll. All the right pieces in all the right places, but - ”

“You’d know all about blow up dolls, I’m sure,” she interrupted and blew him a kiss. “Bye Ken. Why don’t you plastic-fantastic yourself out of here and leave the grown-ups to enjoy the sunset.”

“I’m not the one who’ll be f-king a battery operated toy tonight.”

“Darling, they are usb chargeable nowadays,” she drawled. “Get with the times. Ta-ta now, off you waddle.”

He glowered and strode away. It was a mighty nice arse, she thought as she watched it leave. “Such a pity,” she sighed.  She doubted, very much, that his normal exercise routine would take him past her father’s house. His use of her new name meant that Heath had called the other two members of the Triquetra after she had left the lawyers’ office. Cameron had probably been running laps around the house, hoping for the opportunity to speak to her.

Which meant, she added ruefully as she took another mouthful of her wine, that whatever there had been between the four of them as teenagers, it wasn’t over, not for them, and not for her. “F-king hell,” she groaned, closing her eyes, and letting the rock of the chair sooth her. It was just a matter of time until Rhett put himself in her way.