Unbroken

This is dangerous, Skye!

What are you doing, Skye?

Are you going to stop?

No, I said, over and over again. I wouldn’t stop. I’d never stop. I loved them both the same. He didn’t understand—no one did.

I was right. The whole trailer park heard. They had front row seats to the madness. In the next hour, a neighbour warned they’d called the cops for noise disturbance. Kurt drove off minutes before they showed up at our door. By then, Mom and me were sitting on the front porch, detached, nodding that everything was okay, that Kurt was just angry.

Everything is falling apart…

It was so hard not to break.

“You’re unbroken,” Leo had told me once.

But I didn’t think that was true.

“How long are you going to keep this up?” Mom wondered when they finally left, her voice hollow. “When will it end, Skye?”

“I’m not creating trouble,” I uttered, helplessly. “I just keep walking into it, Mom. Everyone’s pissed at me no matter what I do.”

She just looked at me and said nothing.

*

Hunter’s mobile home was in repairs all throughout summer. The company in charge included a very reputable fire damage contractor. At the time, I sort of knew the bikers were behind it, but they never showed up or anything, so I couldn’t know for sure. It was a quick reconstruction, one that I watched with a hidden smile on my face.

Kurt was enraged, silently fuming. I was sure everyone was sick of his shit, so he kept it bottled in, smoking as he watched the workers come and go with that loathing in his gaze.

And then it was done, and my Hunter returned like he’d never left. He strode past my house, eyes on the windows like he was searching for me. He was big, had just turned seventeen before we did, and his body was filling out; you’d mistaken him for an adult from afar, but his face still held hints of how young he was. I wanted to wave at him, squeal and run out to welcome him back. But Kurt stood on the porch, watching him disappear with his mom down the trail.

“I’ll fucking burn it down, I swear to God,” I caught him growling at my mother just then. He didn’t know I was feet away by the entrance door, waiting for him to leave for work. “I swear, Maddie, I’m going to make sure it’s ashes this time…”

A cold feeling washed over me as my heart skipped a beat.

He didn’t outright admit he burned it down the first time—

But I started to think maybe he did.

Tears slid down my cheeks. I should have been happy—and I was—but Kurt cut a hole in my chest just then, and he’d never know it.

My relationship with Kurt would never be whole again.