Dare Me

“I don’t know.”

I gave him a weird look. “Okay.” He sat there for another minute. He sighed deeply and then finally spoke again.

“It feels bad when you’re mad at me. And I feel bad about the way Trish treats you. But I stick by her because I seen what she’s been through with my dad and I just want things to be okay. For all of us.”

“I know. We’re trying.” We’re trying. Our go-to line when everything felt wasteful and hopeless and we had nothing else to say. Never had words felt more empty.

“I just want to say I’m sorry, Lake.”

“You already did, Hunt.”

“Not just for today. For everything. In the past, the present and in the future,” he said. I frowned. Before I could ask what he meant, he ruffled my hair and left. And again, I was left with that shameful, lonely feeling of craving Hunt and wishing he would come back and say more. I sat up on the couch and watched his sunburned back walk away from me till it disappeared into the darkness. I lay there analyzing his words for twenty minutes before caving and knocking on his door.

He gave the “yeah” to come in and I went in to find him standing in his boxers in front of the fan, his crazy hair blowing with a life of its own around his head. “Too hot to fuckin’ sleep,” he smirked. I barely paid attention to his words.

“What did you mean before?”

“What?”

“Sorry for the past the present and the future.”

“Exactly what it sounds like it means.”

“There’s nothing more to it?”

“Like what?” He turned and held his stare at me over his shoulder. He gave me a weird look and then cracked a laugh. “No, little girl. There ain’t. Now you better get out of here so I can air out my big, sweaty balls.”

I rolled my eyes but by the time I reached the door, he came after me and caught me hand.

“You know what, I can explain it, actually.” Hunt pulled me closer. I stiffened when he held my cheek, unfamiliar with that kind of tenderness from him. “I just meant I care for you. And even though I do bad things, I don’t mean them. I wish I never had to make you feel bad. Sometimes I wish I could change the person I was, the decisions I made. You know I like you, Lake,” he said. “A lot.”

And then he jerked my forehead to his lips and pushed me out the door.

*

“You got a little crush, don’t you?” Shanna asked me as we sat outside her trailer with the puppies. She laughed at the look I gave her. “What? It’s okay. He ain’t blood. And he’s skinny but every girl here’s crushed on Hunt at some point. He’s a man’s man. I liked the way he got in Ricky’s face for you yesterday.”

He had finally defended me in front of one of his friends. Ricky, after drinking all day with Hunt in his room, came out of the trailer and a yard from where I was standing, started swaying as he took a piss. I reacted accordingly and he looked at me with glassy eyes, said, “You don’t like it?” and then turned enough to pee on my feet. Hunt had come out just in time to see it and sock Ricky in the face.

“That was appreciated,” I said.

“Mm-hm. He don’t do that for just any girl. He’s a good man for you. And he’s got those pretty eyes.”

I winced. I found Hunt’s celery green eyes kind of terrifying. They made him look all the more like a zombie when he was high and staggering around the house in slow motion.

“You don’t like his eyes?”

“They’re fine,” I lied. “But I can tell you honestly I don’t have a crush,” I said, wishing I hadn’t gone on and on to Shanna about how much I hated Hunt’s drug use. She rarely heard me talk about one thing for more than a couple minutes and I was running on ten with this subject, which drew her to the conclusion that I even paid attention to Hunt because I had a crush. To my own relief, I could comfortably tell myself that it wasn’t true. I didn’t have a crush on Hunt. There wasn’t a sexual attraction. I just needed his company and his one-liners in ways I wished I didn’t. They convinced me that somewhere in there, he was good. The excuses I constantly gave Hunt for his drug use took energy and I didn’t want to believe it was given in vain. I wanted to believe he was worthy and deserving of a new start. So I adjusted my thoughts and morals and did what I mentally could. “I hope you don’t actually think that, Shanna.”

She paused, stared into space and then suddenly burst out laughing. “Oh, Christ! Jesus Christ, of course you don’t have a crush on him,” she said, waving her hand in the air to shoo away her assumption. “Not with… you know.”

“With what?” I didn’t know what she referred to that had her doing a one-eighty. I knew it wasn’t the fact that Hunt was my stepbrother because she’d already acknowledged that and been unfazed by it.

Shanna shut up, looked in my eyes of pure wonder and backtracked. “What? Oh, nothing.”

“What were you…” My question trailed off because I could see Shanna decidedly moving on, focusing her attention on a bag of dog food. So I shut up. Maybe I didn’t want to know anyway. Glancing at my face, Shanna dropped a puppy into my arms to distract me from whatever thought she could see me having.

“Hey, you wanna make those margaritas?”