Bedtime Story - Two

Daisuke · #1 March 3rd, 2007, 06:39 PM

- [COLOR=#800080]Prologue[/COLOR]
- [COLOR=#800080]One[/COLOR]
- Two
- [COLOR=#0066cc]Three[/COLOR]
- [COLOR=#800080]Four[/COLOR]
- [COLOR=#800080]Five[/COLOR]
- [COLOR=#800080]Six[/COLOR]

Two

The baby was crying. Again.

Spencer. His name was Spencer.

I sat up in bed, hugged my knees to my chest. Had I cried that much when I was brought home from the hospital? And every night, my parents just let him cry longer and longer. They shouldn’t have given Mrs. Poole the week off.

“No, their our sons, and we can take care of them.”

They should have known better.

Spencer wailed, and I sighed, reaching for my sunglasses. My hand knocked against my inhaler before finding them. I hooked the frames over my ears and slid to the floor, crept out into the brightly lit hallway. The volume of the cries doubled.

Covering my ears, I went into his room, peered between the bars of his ivory crib. “Why are you crying? What’s wrong now?”

If anything, he just wailed louder.

I looked around, grabbed a step stool and pulled it to the crib. I reached inside, felt his diaper. “You’re dry.” I touched his nose, like I’d seen the neighbor do with his dog. “You feel okay.”

Spencer hiccupped as his cries died to whimper.

Surprised, I tilted my head to the side. I hadn’t been near him much in the last few days. My parents and a host of visitors had been cooing over him, edging me into the background. Now, though, it was just the two of us.

Blue eyes stared back at me as we got our first really good look at each other. I realized the adults were right.

He was a beautiful baby. Rosy cheeks, bright eyes, a full head a blond hair. Was that right? Were new babies supposed to have that much hair? I’d seen pictures of myself when I was brought home. I didn’t have any. And I was a lot smaller. But then, everyone did say I was born early. Maybe that was why.

I pulled my fingers from his nose and rested my chin on the railing of the crib. “You’re probably hungry. Seems like you’re always hungry.”

His soft cries floated around me. I stared at him a moment longer before stepping off the stool and going to the small refrigerator in the corner of the room. I pulled out a bottle of breast milk, placed it in the microwave on the counter beside it.

Frowning, I tried to remember how long my mother usually set the timer, then pushed the buttons. I watched the bottle turn on the plate for a while, and when the bell dinged, I took it out.

Mother did something here, what was it?

Oh, check the temperature.

I fastened a nipple to the bottle, shook it up, and squeezed a drop onto my wrist, just like I’d seen her do. It felt warm. Nice. Out of curiosity, I licked the milk off my skin.

My nose wrinkled, but I took the bottle to Spencer. “Here,” I said, trying to stick the nipple into his mouth.

He wriggled and moved his head away.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” I tried again, missed again. “Take it.”

His crying started to get louder.

I blew out a harsh breath, irritated with my parents and missing Mrs. Poole as I tried to remember how my mother went about this.

“Oh, you want me to hold you, is that it?” I reached in, realized it would be awkward with the bottle in my hand, and placed it next to a rocking chair my mother had bought last week. Returning to the crib, I slipped my arms around him and lifted him out, grunting softly. “Wow, you’re heavy.”

For the first time, Spencer went quiet.

Carrying him to the chair, I climbed in, settled him into my lap. I reached up, got the bottle, and touched the nipple to his mouth. “How is this? Better?”

His lips parted, and he eagerly sucked on the nipple.

It was... cute. I smiled. Almost without knowing it, I started to rock us back and forth. “You’re mine, you know. Mother and Father gave you to me.” I bent my knees, forming a cradle with my body so I could stroke his hair. “It looks like they’re about to fade away from this place again, but don’t worry. I’m good at taking care of things. I take care of my room; I take care of my cubby at school. Even Mrs. Poole says I practically take care of myself. I’ll take care of you too, Spencer. Always.” I lowered my head, kissed his cheek even as his little sucking noises filled the air. “I promise.”

*****

“Liar.”

This time, it took me longer to pull myself from the story. “What?”

Spencer pushed himself up on his hands, a hulking wall of muscle before me. “You never... That never happened.”

“It did. Quite often, actually.” I forced a smile. “Even when Mrs. Poole returned, I was usually the first one at your crib when you cried. No matter the time of night. Only school kept me away.”

He growled—low and dark—as he leaned forward. “If it’s true, then why didn’t you ever tell me about it before?”

“Because,” I said softly, “I didn’t want you to know that our parents let you cry. But you wanted the unabridged version of this story, and I’m trying to give it to you.”

His body fell still. Even his muscles seemed to grow calm. “You... You really fed me like that?”

“I changed your diapers too. Bathed you, as well. Under supervision, of course.”

“You were just a kid,” he whispered.

It surprised me, that he didn’t leap to defend our parents the way he always had before. “You were just a baby.”

Slowly, Spencer laid out on the hay again, curling his arm beneath his head as he stared at me. The simple action made some muscles elongate and others bunch into tight balls. “I wish I could have seen you.”

I watched him, remembering those days. “Do you remember when Mrs. Poole died?”

He shook his head.

Sometimes I wondered if I was the only one who did. “Do you remember the nanny we had after her?”

Spencer scowled, his muscles tensed and swelled. “I hated Cindy.”

I bit back a smile. “I wasn’t fond of her either, if you recall.”

His face brightened, and for a moment—just for a moment—he was the boy I remembered so vividly. “Skip to the day you let her have it.”

“You don’t mind?”

He grinned. “No way. That was just about the coolest day ever.”

My heart skipped a beat when I saw that smile. I wanted to reach out, ruffle his hair. But I didn’t want to break the fragile moment.

“You were six when...”

*****

I flung open the front door, stumbled inside. The left lens in my glasses was shattered, so I had to keep it covered with my hand as I stormed through the livingroom.

Cindy Sloan, sprawled out on the couch with a teen magazine in her hands, cast a disinterested glance at me. “What dog spat you up?”

Not bothering to answer, I strode past her, up the stairs to my room. I fumbled in my night-stand drawer for my spare glasses, threw the broken ones aside as I put them on. Then I limped to the bathroom in the hall, closed the door behind me, closed the slats over the windows. When there was only a thin stream of light coming from under the door, I carefully removed my glasses and looked at myself in the mirror.

My body shook with rage at the sight.

A long, oozing scar from my right eyebrow, down to my temple, almost to my cheek. A scrape along my jaw. My left eye was swollen shut and dark blue where Bruce Wright’s fist had collided with it. My entire face was covered in welts and bruises, and—if the aches were any indication—the rest of my body didn’t look much better.

My hands gripped the sink until my fingers turned white. I was half his size, and still he had two of his friends to hold me down while he used me as his personal punching bag. And why?

Because I wouldn’t give him my sunglasses.

I’d been beat up before. Being small, being pale, being the son of a perpetually absent billionaire—it was a fact of life. But this...

I’d never felt so helpless. So humiliated.

I stared at my misshapen reflection in the mirror, at my raven hair, at my pale, pale eyes.

“I am Cameron Heaton,” I whispered. I took a deep breath, repeated the words as I tried to drag back my battered pride. “I am Cameron Heaton.”

Someone knocked softly at the door. “Cam?”

“Go away, Spencer.”

“Are you... Are you okay?”

I blew out a long, measured breath. “I’m fine.”

“C-Can I come in?” His voice squeaked. “Please?”

Closing my eyes a moment, I swept up my glasses and put them on. “Alright.”

“Do you have your sunglasses on?”

A smile curved my mouth, and I turned to lean back against the sink. “Come inside, Spence.”

Spencer opened the door, padded inside. His bright blue eyes rounded when he saw me. “You’re hurt!”

I crossed my arms over my chest, thankful that my round cut glasses hid my black eye to some degree. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

He ran forward, grabbed my forearms. I was a little short for my age, and he was a little tall, so even though I was twelve years old, he almost came up to my chin already. “What happened!”

Lifting my hand, I threaded my fingers through his golden hair. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

“Someone hit you, didn’t they?” He hugged me tight. “Again.”

Pain lanced through me at his embrace, and I hissed.

He jumped back from me. “You’re hurt all over!”

“I’ll be okay,” I assured him, even though I wasn’t at all certain of that fact. The boys around me just kept getting bigger and I... I was beginning to realize the beatings were only going to get worse. I forced a smile, knowing that Spencer shouldn’t have to worry about his big brother. “What did you have for your snack today?”

Glancing down, he scuffed his bare foot against the tile. “Cindy didn’t make me one.”

I frowned. “What? Why not?”

He shrugged.

Cindy had been our nanny for two years now; our parents had gotten her from the same agency that had given them Mrs. Poole.

But she was no Mrs. Poole.

Taking Spencer’s hand, I led him down the stairs and into the livingroom. “Cindy.”

She licked her thumb and flipped over a page in her magazine. “Yeah?”

“Why didn’t you give Spencer his afternoon snack?”

“I decided he didn’t need one.”

I snatched the magazine out of her hands and threw it across the room.

“Hey!” she yelled, sitting up. “What do you think you’re doing?”

Spencer scrambled behind me, twisting his hands into my shirt. But after what had happened to me today, I didn’t think anything could scare me. “You’re supposed to give Spencer a snack every day after school. It’s your job.”

She stood, towering over the both of us. “My job is to take care of you two as I see fit. And this one,” she pointed to Spencer, “eats way too much. I’m trying to keep him from getting fat, for his own good.”

I felt Spencer bury his face between my shoulder blades, and I stiffened. “If you’d take your nose out of those stupid magazines meant for people half your age, you’d see that Spencer is healthy and gets plenty of exercise, so he should be able to eat when he’s hungry.”

Cindy crossed her arms over her chest. “Listen, you little misfit, my word is law. What I say goes, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

Spencer pressed himself closer to me, trembling. I felt that sense of helplessness again, just like when Bruce Wright was beating me to a pulp behind the school. Only this time, my brother was getting hurt as well. My gaze dropped to the floor as I realized she was right, there was nothing I could—

No.

I am...

I am...

Some people have a moment: it defines them, shapes who they are for the rest of their lives. This was mine. I was not going to be a victim any more. If my body insisted on being weak, then I’d find other ways to be strong. I would always be in control of my destiny.

“I am Cameron Heaton,” I whispered.

Cindy’s voice held a trace of a sneer. “What did you say?”

“I am Cameron Heaton.” I lifted my head, embraced my birthright. “And you’re fired.”

She smirked. “You can’t fire me.”

“I just did.”

Her smile faded. “Stop playing around. You know only your parents can dismiss me from service.”

“And they will, once I speak with them tonight.” My tone was cool, calm. It was a tone the rest of the town would eventually come to know intimately.

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re just a kid unhappy with his nanny. What makes you think they’ll listen to you?”

“Because my father is quite fond of web conferencing, and during his last visit he equipped the computer in my room with that capability.”

Her skin went pale, and I kept speaking.

“Do you know what that means, Cindy? It means Father will be able to see my face. And when he sees it, he’ll ask what happened, and I will tell him that I was beaten at school today, and that you did nothing to help me even when I was two hours late coming home. I will also tell him how you made fun of my injuries when I finally did make it home, and how you made absolutely no effort to check and see if I might need medical attention.” I leaned forward and up on my toes, focused on the fear in her eyes. “Now, as absent as my father may be, there is no way he’ll stand for that. You will be fired, and you will never work as a nanny, as a secretary, as a janitor, or even as a sewage collector in this or any state in the union. I promise you, Cindy, that you will be one of those women whose entire life fits in a shopping cart.”

She fell back a step. “Cam, can’t we—”

“Don’t call me that. Ever.”

Her gaze darted to Spencer. “But you let him—”

“He has my permission.”

As Spencer’s trembling vanished, Cindy’s trembling was just beginning. “Cameron... even if you do get rid of me, there’s no telling what the next nanny will be like.”

I tilted my head to the side as a dazzling, insane idea came to me. “That’s right,” I said softly, my mind racing, “so I’m willing to make a deal with you.”

“Wh-What kind of deal?”

I drew Spencer out from behind me, looped my arm around his shoulders. “You’re no longer a nanny, you’re a babysitter. That means you’re only here when I’m at school. When I’m gone, Spencer is the center of your world—you feed him when he wants, you help him with his homework, and when that’s done, you play with him. When I come home, your day is done, and you leave. This is no longer your home. Understand so far?”

She gave me a hesitant nod.

“You won’t tell my parents any of this, and you’ll continue to draw your paycheck as our nanny. If we need you, you will make yourself available to take us to doctor’s appointments, dental appointments, and any other situations where a legal guardian might be required. The money our parents set aside for us stays with us. Apart from that, as long as Spencer stays happy and healthy, I don’t care what you do in your free time. That’s fair, isn’t it?” I lifted my eyebrows. “You’ll have time to read all the ‘Tiger Beat’ you want.”

Cindy didn’t answer for a long time, obviously shocked. I just watched her, waiting for her answer, wondering whether the fact she couldn’t see my eyes made me seem more than just a ‘misfit’ now.

I wondered if my sunglasses scared her.

“Alright, Cameron,” she whispered.

During my father’s short visits, I’d seen him in conference calls. I knew how something like this was supposed to end. “Glad to have come to terms. Just so you know, I’ll be making a video tonight documenting my injuries, so if Spencer ever seems unhappy, the unemployment line is just an email click away.”

She blanched.

“I’m home now, Cindy, meaning your day is done. I suggest you pack your bags.”

Her body started, and then she turned and scurried up the stairs.

When she was out of sight, I continued to stare forward, trying to absorb the events I had just set in motion.

Spencer jumped in front of me, his eyes wide. “C-Cam, what did you just do!”

I cupped his face in my hands. “Everything is going to be alright.”

“You just fired our nanny.”

Despite the pain in my face, I broke into a grin. “I did, didn’t I?”

He grasped my shirt. “Cam, we can’t live without grownups here! How’re we gonna take care of ourselves?”

“Don’t you see, Spence?” I stroked his hair. “We’ve been doing our own chores and most of hers for the last two years anyway. We can do this.”

His panic started to rise as he got to the heart of the matter. “Who’s gonna feed us!”

I laughed. “I will.”

“You can’t cook!”

My laughter came harder, swirled together pleasure and pain as my body shook with it. “Alright, so I’ll have to learn. In the meantime, I’ll have Cindy prepare things that we can warm up.”

“Cam...” He shook his head in awe and disbelief. “Cam...”

I glided my knuckles along his cheek. “You trust me, don’t you?”

He nodded, laid his head against my chest. “You always take care of me.”

“That’s right.” I ran my palm over his back. “And I always will.”

“Okay.” He took a deep breath, and the tension left his body. “Okay.”

Gently, I pushed him back. “Now, I’m going to wash up. Then I’ll come back and fix you a sandwich. Sound good?”

He nodded. “But what’ll we have for dinner? Cindy’ll be leaving in a few minutes.”

I paused, thought it over. “Want to order pizza?”

His face brightened. “Yeah!”

“See?” I said, growing more confident. “We can do this.”

He grinned, and I returned to the bathroom. After the lights were off, I removed my glasses and looked at myself in the mirror once again.

Things had changed today, and they would never be the same. I didn’t know what I would do about the bullies at school, and I didn’t know what I would do about the rest of the adults in my life, but I did know who I was now.

“I am Cameron Heaton.”

I smiled at my reflection. Soon, the rest of Crystal Springs would know it, too.

redkage · #2 March 3rd, 2007, 07:09 PM

I'm really likeing how this story is coming out, and like everyone else I'm waiting for the big growth spurt to kick in

Take your time and keep on writing. We'll be waiting~!

jsmith2300 · #3 March 3rd, 2007, 07:21 PM

Daisuke,

Oh, yes --- I can already tell I'm going to LOVE this story.

Cam (can I even call him that!?) is amazing. I loved his 'defining moment' and how he looks back on it for Spence's sake. He's terrifying and - yet - is a great older brother to Spence when they were younger. Makes me feel like an awful older brother now. Thanks!

Overall - as I mentioned above - I'm very much enjoying the story. I wonder what drives Spence and Cam apart? They seem so close. I'll be sad to read that part, I know. Brother stories are my favorites, and this one I can already feel will rank among the best.

Thanks! Looking forward to more when you can post!

--JSmith

PS, Cute pic! Dai is one of my favorite manga characters. He's ADORABLE!

muscl4life · #4 March 4th, 2007, 04:13 AM

Yes Daisuke this was really a great chapter. I loved how deep the bond between the brothers is, I hope you can manage to deliver the next installment soon...

Take care,

chocomus · #5 March 4th, 2007, 05:52 AM

I have to say that this chapter is a lot better than the other. I like it a lot.
And I agree with jsmith2300. Dai-chan is the cutest anime charater ever