I smiled tightly. “Fuck you, your money, and your last name, old sport. If I have to earn being your family, I never will be.”
We rented a car and drove the four hours back to Boston. Hunter was silent the entire time, save for the first ten minutes, when he rehashed everything that had happened with his father and brother in a strange, detached voice that didn’t belong to him.
“That’s how little faith they had in me.”
“You didn’t exactly give them prime reason to trust you before, though.” I argued their point, not necessarily because I agreed with them, but because I knew how miserable it would make Hunter to be estranged from his family. No matter the complexities of their relationship, he loved and adored Cillian and Gerald, looked up to them. He always wanted to be like them and never thought he could.
“You sound like them.”
“You mean, logical?”
He scoffed. “Did you know about my dad hiring yours?” He sent me a sidelong glance, scowling as he continued zipping through the open road.
“Are you insane?” I asked. “Of course not.”
“And if you knew?” he pressed.
I was hoping he wouldn’t ask that. I shook my head. “I don’t answer hypothetical questions.”
“Newsflash: you’re about to answer this one,” he shot back.
“You need to calm down.”
“What I need is someone on my fucking side.”
“I am on your side,” I growled.
“You’d be in my bed, if you were,” he had the audacity to say, no trace of guilt or remorse in his words. “Yet you aren’t.”
“That’s because I’m on my side, too.”
“Meaning?” He scoffed.
“Meaning I don’t want to be any more attached to you than I already am, because you obviously don’t feel the same.”
“And if I do?” he asked after a charged pause.
I shook my head. “You don’t. You’re incapable of that. You come from a long line of adulterers. How would you know any different?”
He sat back, shaking his head. I immediately knew how awful that sounded. How disgusting I was to him. “Cat’s out of the bag now. So if I’m a serial adulterer like my parents, does that mean you’re going to be carving people’s faces like a pumpkin like your daddy? Are we playing the gene game now? ’Cause rest assured, darling, we may not be the same brand of fuck-up, but we are both far from the realms of normalcy.”
I said nothing. He was right.
Hunter continued, “What would it take for you to know I’m serious about this? About us? A grand gesture? A binding contract? A fucking ring?”
“Maybe stop being ashamed of me. Of us,” I bit back. “That could have been enough.”
I referred to the night with Knight and Luna, to all the times he’d minimized whatever it was we’d had. I was sure he caught the reference.
Hunter got a text message. He opened it, driving.
“Fuck,” he muttered, throwing his phone to the central console as more text messages poured in, lighting his screen in white. His screensaver was a picture of a woman’s ass with the saying: Go hard or go home.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he punched the steering wheel, seething. “I need to catch a plane to London. Something came up.”
“What?” I asked, incredulous.
“Vaughn,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I’m dropping you off at home. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep my pants on while I’m there. As for you, try not to kill anyone, yeah?”
Now a week had passed since Hunter grabbed me by the arm and stormed out of the refinery apartments in Maine. It was the first time since he was a boy in the rain that I’d seen him truly broken.
I hadn’t heard from him since he’d left for London. I didn’t want to ask Aisling about him, but of course I couldn’t help myself. She said he’d gone for the weekend and hadn’t been picking up anyone’s calls. When I finally broke down and visited his apartment, he wasn’t there.
Not two days ago, and not yesterday, long after he was supposed to be back, according to Ash.
Hunter had disappeared, and with him, my favorite summer.
“Thank you so much for doing this. I know how much you loathe the media.” Vanessa Shieling of the Good Morning, Boston! show leaned forward and tapped my thigh, a veneered smile on her face.
There was something almost clownish about her Botox-enhanced perfection. Her carefully swept blonde hair was too shiny, too put-together. She straightened her back in her seat, brushing nonexistent wrinkles from her A-line red dress.
“How do you know I dislike interviews?”
She wasn’t wrong. The best part about retiring from archery was I didn’t have to talk to the media anymore. Because while Royal Pipeline’s refinery didn’t explode, the Junsu and Lana case did. The media wanted my side of the story. I refused, but then Crystal, whom I still had a contract with, argued that by not addressing it, I was letting the rumors about my own misconduct roam free.