I turn and see three guys coming out from the back door, two of them singing some song together, their voices carrying out across the yard.
Hunter and I have been in our own little snowglobe and now it’s suddenly shattered, breaking me from a trance.
And I’m tired of running.
Running from my own truth, hiding, and playing at secrecy.
I walk down and out of the gazebo, crossing the snowy lawn and nodding at the other guys.
They smile at me, all of them clearly drunk.
“Colson,” one of the guys says, reaching out to fist bump me when I get near.
I head inside the house, and walking in and seeing everyone dancing and socarefreejust makes me angrier.
After a few minutes I go out onto the front porch alone.
I have no idea where Hunter is. Probably still out in the gazebo alone, too, trying to think of ways to convince me I shouldn’t want him.
And that thought pisses me off more than any other.
No.
Hunter isn’t going to push me away.
That’s what he does.
He tries to hold a middle finger to the entire goddamned world, but I know there’s something more that he feels for me.
He has to feel this, too.
I loop around the side of the house, taking the stone pathway that leads back around to the backyard.
But as I loop under a cluster of trees, I realize that the three Double Daggers guys are still on the back patio.
And they’re talking about me.
24
Hunter
I was fourteen when I first heard the phrase “love is like a drug.”
But I always knew that violence is a drug, too.
I chased the easier one.
You can’t make someone love you, but you can always make them fight.
A fist on a face. A knife at a throat. Even a comment, said at the right time, will get you violence on demand.
Love? Love was impossible.
I’d never known it, anyway.
A mom who abandoned us when we were toddlers, a father without a soul. A brother who treated me like I was unwelcome, and a sister who loved me and then bled out in front of my eyes.
I vowed that if anyone ever deluded themselves into loving me again…
