“Don’t fuck this up. I’m giving you a diamond opportunity here, MacLaine. She better be nothing but fucking ecstatic next time I come around to see the pair of you.” She ushers us to a table that she’s now dragging me towards and Hunter follows at my back.
The skin between my shoulder blades itches, tingling with hyperawareness of how close he is. My mind doesn’t want him, but my heart longs for him to speak to me, to ask for my forgiveness, and my skin just wants his own skin to glide along mine.
Katie settles us in the booth, looks back to the dance-floor and gives somebody two thumbs up and a victorious smile. Tommy and Josh have been acting weird all night, could they be her co-conspirators? Assholes, the both of them.
“Play nice, and I’ll be back in twenty to check on you. Sweetie,” she says to me, tapping her nails across the wooden surface of the table, the sound drowned out by more Greek music and shouts from our party. “Make me proud.”
With that she walks away, and I can’t bring myself to look up at him. Suddenly, the skin on the back of my hands, the map of veins is the only thing that’s interesting. I can’t speak, or think of something to say. I can’t think at all.
I’m just a throbbing mass of pain without any of the physical wounds or blood to go with it. I hold my breath, let it out slowly to try and breathe through it.
“You... you look good,” Hunter says, voice deep and as magical as I remember it.
I want to scream at him for not telling me the truth from the beginning, for making me fall in love with him and Matty, for letting me fall in love with him when he probably was with Aly his whole fucking time. Bile rises hot up in my throat, and I’m so ashamed the burn to my cheeks doesn’t rival that heat that seems to envelop my entire body until all I want is for a hole in the ground to open up and swallow me whole.
In my misery, a part of my brain registers what he said. After all night getting complements, I’m just good in his eyes. Not amazing, not great, not a Greek goddess. That pisses me off and despite the ache in my chest that I want to rub away but refuse to do, there’s now a fire in my blood, and I can hear it pounding in my ears as I clench my teeth together.
“Good to know,” I say, voice calm but strained. I don’t know if he can hear it over the music blaring in the background. Instead of looking at him, I let my gaze float to the dance floor, where my friends are having a good time, totally unaware that a bomb is about to go off in the form of me bursting into tears and attempting to punch Hunter.
I really wish I was dancing, taking another shot, drinking another glass of wine. Anything is better than sitting here with him, being forced to face all the hurts I wanted to forget tonight.
“Why are you here? Why did you come here?” Yup, still studying my hands, tracing the veins with my eyes, admiring my badass black diamond (not real) ring.
“Would you look at me, Sera, please?”
He had to use the please. Frak. And he thinks it’s going to work on me. Bastard.
I lift my head, and wince when I get a look at his beautiful blue eyes. They stay locked on my mouth for a few seconds too long, and to torture him and myself, I lick them deliberately, slowly and watch his face get taut, the muscle at his jaw twitching.
I wait for him to talk. He’s the one that hurt me, not the other way around.
“I came here tonight because I asked Katie to set this up for me.”
I frown, trying to recall when, if ever, I gave him her number.
He smiles, and I feel it devastate my resolve, my wall of barely there civility. He can still do that to me, with just a smile. I really am enchanted; I find myself wanting to do whatever he wants, if he would just make the pain go away.
Hunter settles deeper into the booth, crossing his arms in front of him on the table. I look down at his reflection in the glossy varnish of the table – doesn’t even come close to doing him justice. Bastard, bastard!
“She called me, something about snooping in your phone for my number. Doesn’t matter at this point, I’m here now. With you.” He takes a deep breath, his chest expanding, making the material across his shoulders and torso go tight. I never even got to taste and touch him like I wanted to, like we were going to before everything went to shit. I never got to do anything I wanted to do before he betrayed my trust and humiliated me. I’m so happy that I never told him that I loved him. Once those words are said, they can’t be taken back.
Hunter keeps talking and I drag my eyes away from his body to look him in the face.
“I want you to know that I’ve been cut out of my mother’s will.”
Well, there’s a fucking white flag.
My mouth hangs open. “What the fuck?” I slam my fists on the table, watch his eyes open wide, his eyebrows high-five his hairline. “You do not lead with that fucking little fact three weeks after you cheated on me with her, MacLaine,” I grit out through clenched teeth.
Oh, he doesn’t like that I called him by his family name. His body gets tight, and he narrows his eyes at me, like I’m the one that caused all the problems here. I flash my teeth in a predator’s smile, but he just keeps looking at me with those gorgeous blue eyes like he can read my soul, like he can see through my mask and look at the well of pain I’ve carried with me all this time.
I have an awful feeling that he can make me better. But I don’t want to be one of those girls, going back to the object of their pain, staying because he makes them happy for fleeting moments. Christ, he’s the first man who’s ever paid attention to me, what else did I expect? Of course I’m one of those girls.
Hunter pulls in a breath through his nose, his chest expanding. I’m deaf and blind to everything else that’s going on around me. My alcohol high is gone, leaving me to deal with stark truths and sobering thoughts with no fog to help me hide from them.
“I miss you,” he says on the exhale, like it’s torn out of him. I hate that. I hate that sound of it being pulled out of him, like I don’t merit to hear it.
I snort, trying to look mean. I just want him to hurt like I’ve been hurting all this time. I’m sure it’ll make me feel better. It has to.
“Yeah, you look real broken up.” I shake my head, pay attention to the matter at hand. “What’s going to happen to Matty now? Why didn’t you just take the money?” I pull in a breath through my nose but it does nothing to calm me. I feel like an enraged bull pawing at the ground, ready to score someone with my badass horns. “Jesus, why are you here? I was having a good time. And you ruined everything. Matty’s not my problem. You’re not my problem anymore.”
“You’re not getting me, Sera.” His turn to flash his teeth. His turn to try and do the convincing. “I miss you, Matty misses you.” Bastard, bringing up the kid. “I want you back in my life. I need you back in my life.” He rubs at his head. He’s let his hair grow out, it hardly even resembles a crew-cut anymore, and I find myself loving it.
Traitor body, traitor brain. Stay focused.
“Well, I don’t want you back in mine, alright?” Goddamn it all to hell that was fucking hard to say. Like Harry Potter dropping the resurrection stone in the Forbidden Forest hard. Because I do, I want him back in my life. Making me smile, making me laugh, taking care of Matty, watching him grow up. I want all of that.
But I’m not going to settle for anything less than perfect. And Hunter is not perfect – he said so himself.
He gets close across the table, grabbing my hands before I can yank them back. Oh God, he’s touching my skin, interlocking our fingers together and damn if my dumb fingers don’t want to let go, winding themselves into his grip. I look down at our hands, and watch him put his forehead down to the pair of them, almost like he’s praying.
I look around, embarrassed, confused, searching for Katie. She has her back to me, clapping as Alex and Eli do dancing tricks until the crowd rewards them with shots. She’s not even doing proper surveillance. I mean, what’s the point?
“What... what are you doing? Hunter? Hunt?” I ask
, trying to yank my hands back, trying to get away from this. I don’t think I can watch him break down, my brave, strong Hunter who isn’t mine anymore.
He looks up at me, eyes bright, teeth clenched together. “I swear on my sister’s life that nothing happened with Aly that night. I swear I didn’t do anything. I fucking swear.”
I can’t swallow past the lump in my throat. God, he just swore on his sister’s life – that has to mean something, right? Please let that mean something. I just watch him, hulking shoulders blocking out a nice-sized portion of the table. I don’t know if I can talk. And I don’t even know if I’m being played again.
“Swear on your life. Swear on your life you didn’t touch her, you didn’t kiss her with the same mouth you kissed me with.”
His mouth twists into an ugly grin, a grin at his own expense. “I swear on my life I didn’t touch her. I just needed a ride to the hospital. Aly’s not for me, baby. You’re for me, and Matty. You’re it.”
My heart’s stopped beating. Blood pounds at my ears, at my temples, and my mouth is Sahara dry. God, I want to believe; I want to, I want to.
“Sera,” he continues, spearing with the look in his eyes. My breath hitches and that ache in my chest blooms wider, stronger, unfurling like the petals on a flower to encompass my entire body. My fingers flex in his, and he puts his mouth to them, kissing our combined fingers. The feel of his warm mouth brings back memories of those lips on mine, his taste, even the sounds he makes when I do something he likes. “I love you.”
I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. Where is all the air in this fraking place?
“You- you don’t mean that.”
His mouth thins out to a grim line, and his blue eyes harden, looking at me hard.
“I love you, Sera, and I’m going to keep saying it until you fucking believe it.”
I can’t think. God, his words, they hit me in the heart and that pain, that constant pain that I’ve lived with for the past month dies a little. The pain was an all-consuming fire and his words of love are like a vacuum, starving the pain until it withers away.
“Say it again,” I order, daring to believe him. Could he really not have cheated on me? I mean, even in this tricked out body, could I ever compete with the beautiful Alysha?
“I love you.” I want to ask: how can you love me when you don’t even like yourself?“Again,” I say, pulverizing his fingers in my grip. “Say it again.” I need to hear it, over and over again so it’s a given truth, rather than a question about how he feels about me.
“I love you, baby. I bloody love you,” he says, letting me hold onto his fingers with mine. I look down at our hands, notice my knuckles have flashed white, and slowly ease up on my Hulk-like grip.
“You’re only saying that because I lost weight.” The reflex is automatic; I deflect what he says he feels for me by cheapening it with how I look in this moment. His fingers spasm in my grip this time around, like he’s unsure whether to pull away or not.
“You sure don’t look like you could haul my ass to the hospital now. Too scrawny.”
I lift my head, eyes wide. “Are you making a joke? At a time like this?”
He grins, kisses our fingers again, crushes his mouth to them with more than a hint of desperation. My heart does a fluttery thing, like the way a piece of silks floats its way down in the air to gently fall to the ground.
“I’m going to start feeding you pancakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner for the next few weeks. We’ll sort you out.”
I sputter, trying to start a conversation. “What? You can’t just expect that you tell me you love me and everything is okay?” I watch his mouth twist into something ugly, something forlorn and broken I don’t know what to do with it. “Why didn’t you come with me to the hospital?” I whisper, and it’s a miracle he even hears me.
The question was meant for him to go back into his bubble in space, not come closer into mine and smack a hard kiss on my mouth. My heart does that fluttery thing again, and the way he grins at me, I feel it between my legs.
“I was pissed. Thought I would cool off.” Now he does move back in his space and can’t meet my eyes. “I was wrong to yell at you. But fuck, you shoulda seen you, giving it right back to me. We’re going to have problems whenever you get mad at me, baby. I wanted to haul you on my bed, and let you use me. I was wrong to yell at you,I was wrong to get pissed at you wanting to take care of Matty when I didn’t want you to.”
My blush is back, except now it’s covering every single inch of my body. Every centimetre of exposed skin tingles. My nipples get hard underneath my bra, a surge of wetness coats my awesome Loki panties.
Hunter stares at me with that determination like he had in the hospital, all that time ago. “I promise for the rest of my life, I will show you how much I love you, how much I want you in my life, in my... son’s.”
Oh yeah, that. “Why did you lie to me?”
“I never lied to you. I told you I don’t lie. You forgot.” People say shit like that all the time, and they never mean it. “I never called Matty my son. That first night, when I came to get the movie – I told you he was my nephew. But I’m the only parent he’s ever known. I’m his Dad, even though I’m really his uncle.”
Right. “You could have told me. You should have told me.” I couldn’t care less if Hunter is Matty’s biological dad or not.
“I couldn’t talk about it. My sister... she died because of me.”
I freeze, hardly even dare to breathe. This is the puzzle that is Hunter MacLaine.
“I was diagnosed with diabetes when I was eighteen. She thought she would get it, too, but she didn’t. She didn’t need to follow me around, you know?” He’s struggling with something and suddenly I’m an anchor to the present moment while he goes back through his memories, telling his story.
“After the first month of taking injections, of getting beaten up daily with the sugar spikes and lows, I went to a Timmy’s and bought a dozen donuts. I took them to my room in my parent’s house and ate every single one.”
“You wanted to kill yourself?” My fingers twists in his.
He shakes his head. “It wasn’t about ending my life, it was about showing the doctors, my family, myself that I was okay. That I didn’t have diabetes. I ended up in the hospital, nearly went into a coma because of it. The whole thing ruined my sister. And I didn’t help matters. She was my twin.” He takes a deep breath, blue eyes intent on me. “I got into drugs, drank heavily, just punishing myself for not being normal, for being sick. Diabetes... you can’t even imagine what it’s like to have a part of yourself give up on you. It screws with your head, just fucks with you in ways I didn’t even know until my sister died. Jules.... she tried to get me out of it, tried to get me clean until one of my druggie buddies took a liking to her and ruined her life.
“She was so smart, hilarious and sweet. She would’ve been a great Mom once she got clean. And she would have loved you, loved the way you take care of her son.
“Because she followed me around, because I was a spineless fuck that thought drugs and drinking were a better way of dealing with my fucked up body, I got my sister hooked into drugs. I was out of my mind with my own misery, I couldn’t see what was going on around me, I wouldn’t see because I was a selfish kid who should’ve known better.” His voice is so hard and mean, the way he talks about himself.
“By the time she was twenty-five she was a full-on junkie until she OD’d in an alleyway while Matty was in his crib at my parent’s place. That night I became a father and I wanted nothing to do with him. Nothing at all.
“I was so fucking angry. Why couldn’t I have gotten her help, why didn’t she just listen to me once I got clean?”
I close my eyes, hiding from his pain.
“Sometimes, listening is the hardest thing to do when you don’t believe a word someone says,” I tell him, throat thick with his pain. And aren’t I doing the same thing? I’ve been too scared to listen to him, really listen
. I’ve been to scared to listen to myself. I know who he is, and I know who I am.
“I’m so sorry. About everything. God, I love you.”
He doesn’t ask if I love him back. He doesn’t even look at me with a pleading look, and he doesn’t wait for an answer. He just gives me the words, and promises to show me what he means. There’s a bravery in that, a courage that breaks my heart all over again. He ends up walking around the table, keeping our hands locked together, as if I’m going to run away. Hunter tugs our hands, and pulls me up out of my seat. Even with the heels I only get to his nose.
English music comes on, and I hadn’t even registered how long it’s been playing. The dance floor is completely crowded, and Hunter’s back keeps getting jostled. I watch my friends dance and shout and laugh at each other’s moves, trying to outdo the other in ridiculous dance moves. Tommy starts hip thrusting like he’s in A night at the Roxbury. I want to grin but my mouth won’t move.
“You can’t just show up and say a few words and expect everything to be okay.” I remember Aly’s laugh that night, like she won. I rip my hands out of his grip. “You need to get your life straight, Hunter, and I can’t do that for you. You need to help yourself first. I’m sorry.”
And with that I make my escape (on these stilettos, no less) to the bathroom. I refuse to cry out of principle. The fraking tears come anyway.
Katie finds me. She does something to the turning lock on my stall and pops the door open. One arm wrapped around the door, she leans against it and stares down at my pitiful form.
“How badly did I fuck up?” she asks, coming into the stall, leaving the door open and crouching down on her heels. She looks up at me with her chocolate eyes and reaches for my hands, squeezing them like she’s trying to give me some of her strength.
I can’t do anything but shrug. My throat hurts too much to speak right now, anyway.
“I really thought he didn’t cheat on you, and by talking it out, you’d guys be back together and all would be right in the world. You know I just had your best interests at heart, right? Fuck, I didn’t mean to do this...”