Chapter 4
Taryn
I can’t stop staring at my stepfather.
Wait.
Ex-stepfather? Former stepfather? Does someone stay your stepfather if your mother leaves him first thing in the morning without telling anyone beforehand, and then gets a quickie divorce back to the city?
Because if he is my stepfather still, I probably shouldn’t be following the curve of his jaw like it’s some sort of path to the holy land.
Or noticing how his lower lip is slightly fuller than his top lip, the line of his nose straight and stern.
He looks older than he did when I last saw him, the lines around his eyes slightly deeper and his skin more weathered.
When he turned to me in the parking lot, his eyes weren’t as bright as they used to be.
They were quiet, distant, and sort of sad.
Like the last four years have been harder on him than he wants to admit.
I want to reach out and touch him, just to be sure he’s real. Maybe tell him that whatever it is, it’s okay. There’ll be light at the end of the tunnel. But his behavior hasn’t exactly been inviting.
When we left the station, I directed him right to Stella’s house, hoping she’d be there waiting for me, ready to laugh about the adventure we just had.
When we pulled into the large driveway, though, I found her windows dark, and when I used the route we always took when we came home past curfew, up the tree and through the window she leaves eternally unlocked, I found her rooms deserted.
No sign of the shoes she always kicks off in random directions.
No light on in the bathroom of her suite.
No scent of my friend in her room.
I’d frowned, wondering what the fuck she was up to, but then decided that she might have gone to Arden’s instead of coming home.
It made sense; Arden’s house was technically closer to the diner and might have been safer, considering her less-public connection to the mob.
Maybe the professor, whose name I’d already forgotten, had taken them both there and dropped them off.
Maybe they were sitting in Arden’s closet whispering to each other and waiting for me to contact them.
Though I didn’t have time for that. Gunner was waiting in the driveway, and I didn’t want to take time for anything more than dashing around the room, grabbing clothes and toiletries and swearing to Stella’s ghost that I’d repay her when I could.
I couldn’t risk going to my own house to get things—with my luck, my mother and Johnny would be waiting in my room when I got there—and I needed something to wear in Hawke’s Wood.
If Gunner agreed to take me.
I’d paused at that, thinking. He’d been all in when I called and asked him to come save me, and I’d thought for certain he was still the man who’d spent four years acting like I was his own child. I’d been sure he was on my side and wanted me with him.
But from the moment he saw me in the parking lot, I’d started thinking otherwise.
I’d put that aside and gone back to gathering clothes, intent on getting out of the Fontenot house and back into Gunner’s truck.
After all, at least he wasn’t part of the mafia.
That I knew of.
Now, back in said truck and heading for the Adirondacks, I’m wondering if I made the right call. Gunner is an iceberg, craggy and radiating sub-zero temperatures, and I’m starting to feel like this might have been a colossal mistake.
Maybe Gunner doesn’t want me any more than my mother does.
A sudden phone call interrupts my thoughts, and when Gunner hits the button to let the truck’s audio answer the call, a woman’s voice rings through the cab.
“Gunner! Where the fuck are you?”
She sounds nearly hysterical and definitely mad, and I find myself shrinking back into my seat, automatically trying to protect myself.
“Gabby,” Gunner answers, sounding both tired and annoyed. “It’s 5 in the morning. Where the fuck do you think I am?”
“Not in your bed, that’s where,” she snaps. “Where are you, and where’s your truck?”
Gunner’s eyes slide toward me and I remember for a moment how we used to share inside jokes about my mother, both of us laughing while the steam poured out of her ears.
I think I see a glint of amusement in Gunner’s eye and nearly cast him a grin, but then catch the frown on his face and stop myself.
Right. No inside joke, then. Whoever this Gabby is, we evidently don’t make fun of her.
Noted.
“I had a family emergency,” he says gruffly. “Had to come down off the mountain.”
“And you didn’t think you needed to let me know?” she asks sharply. “You just left your house and drove to God knows where without saying anything to me?”
This time when Gunner looks at me, I’m positive I can see something in his eyes. Not humor, necessarily, but something. A dislike of the situation and the need to find... what? Why does he keep looking at me like he expects me to save him from this woman I’ve never met?
“You aren’t my wife, Gabby, much as you like to play one. And I left at midnight. I assumed you’d be asleep. I’ll be home in a couple hours. We’ll talk then.” He jabs the button to hang up and then goes back to his dead quiet driving, re-erecting his walls brick by very quick brick.
Christ, this man is thorny. What the hell happened to him since I last saw him? What hurt him so much that he can’t even look at me?
Aside from my mother, I mean.
Does he blame me for what my mother did?
Hate me as much as he must hate her? The last time I saw him, my mother had decided she was done living in Hawke’s Wood, with a lumberjack-slash-professor-slash-furniture-maker who insisted on having family dinners every night.
She hadn’t liked living on the mountain, and whatever sparks she must have felt for Gunner at the start had turned into cold, dead ashes.
She forced me to pack all my things in the middle of the night, telling me we were going back to the city where things made sense, and had told Gunner and his son about it as we walked out the door.
I was sixteen. Old enough to know that I loved the Hawke men like they were family. Old enough to want to stay with them.
Too young to have a choice in the matter, though. Incapable of doing anything more than letting my mother move me from place to place without asking my opinion.
Again.
Still.
“Does Gabe know I’m coming home?” I ask suddenly, remembering that Gunner isn’t the only one I had to leave behind.
Gunner pauses for a long, heavy moment, and I bite my lip. Does he want me to just keep quiet? Or forget that Gabe exists? I can’t do either, if I’m being honest. I’ve never been the sort to keep my mouth shut when I have something to say. And Gabe was my best friend when I lived in Hawke’s Wood.
My only friend.
A stream of images rush through my brain, and I nearly smile at the pictures I see.
Gabe and me meeting on that first day, when I was only twelve and he was thirteen.
The awkward knowledge that our parents were married and we didn’t even know each other and tentative attempts at friendship in those first weeks.
Pancake breakfasts that we cooked ourselves when Gunner and Helen were too busy for us and nights spent on the roof of the porch, staring up at the stars.
Stuttered questions as we tried to figure each other out.
He was tall and gangly then, still half boy and half man and not yet sure of who he was.
He’d had sandy blond hair that hung in his eyes and blue eyes that sparkled when he laughed.
He hadn’t liked having a new woman around, though, at least not at first. His own mother had died three years earlier and he’d been furious with his father for bringing my mother into the house. He’d told Gunner repeatedly that Helen wasn’t his mother and that he’d never accept her.
But me?
He’d loved me. We’d danced around each other awkwardly for months, until one day when he found the neighborhood boys backing me into a thick copse of trees, intent on making trouble.
Gabe had come in swinging, his axe in his hands and his face furious, and made short work of them.
He’d driven them off the property, screaming at them that I was his sister and they’d better watch themselves around me from then on.
After that, we were inseparable. He never let me go anywhere alone, and if I needed to learn something, he taught me. Cutting down a tree. Taking care of a hurt horse. Finding the right path through a snowy meadow.
Kissing a boy.
I bite my lip at that memory and shift in my seat.
I’d just turned sixteen, and we found ourselves in the house on our own one dark, rainy night.
The power went out and we were bumbling around the kitchen, looking for candles, when I ran right into him and scared him.
He screamed, and then we both fell to the floor laughing at how ridiculous it all was.
Once there, though, the breathless laughter turned into something more intense.
Fingers accidentally brushing against skin, like someone dipping their toe into a deep, dark lake they weren’t sure they wanted to dive into.
A hesitant touch of a thumb against a bottom lip.
Eyes shining in the glow of the moonlight.
The air around us growing thick with something that had been building for at least two years.
The kiss was gentle enough to be chaste, if we’d wanted it to be. We could have drawn back and let it go at that. Pretended nothing happened and gone on living our lives like we’d never thought about each other as anything more than stepsiblings.
But that would have been a lie. The truth was in the long, lingering gazes we’d been sharing for a year. The secret smiles that told us both there was more than we were admitting. The driving jealousy when he brought a girl home or I talked to a boy for too long.
This was a pool we’d been thinking about for months. We just hadn’t said anything.