9. Hunter
9
HUNTER
Now
T here’s a rhythm to the gym.
It’s the crash and slap of padded gloves. Strained breathing and exerted grunts that are layered on top of the sound of bodies being slammed into mats. It’s a melody I’ve grown accustomed to, one I depend on to keep me grounded when things outside of these doors are all flipped around.
I’m leaning on the metal railing that lines the lofted space I use to keep an eye on things when that rhythm changes. When the air turns thick and everything goes quiet because all of my senses have tuned into the woman striding into my gym like she owns the place.
Not the place, just me.
At first, I think my eyes are playing tricks on me, but then she looks up, using her hard-earned knowledge of my favorite hiding place in the gym to scope me out. When our eyes meet, she’s not at all surprised to find that I’m looking at her, and I’m not shocked by the fact that being held in her gaze for more than a second takes my breath away.
We meet at the bottom of the stairs, and even though she sought me out, she seems thrown off by my proximity. Not uncomfortable, per se, but not fully settled in my space. It reminds me of the way strangers deal with me. The way all of their movements are slow and cautious, like their entire body is preparing for the moment when I decide to use my strength and size against them. Rae slides her hands into the back pockets of the jeans that are clinging to her long legs and toned thighs like a second skin. She’s paired them with a buttery soft sweater and a pair of ballet flats. The corners of my mouth quirk, remembering a time when I would pester her about the irony of being a ballerina in ballet flats.
“Don’t,” she warns me, her eyes narrowed.
“I wasn’t.”
Silence settles between us, loud and uncomfortable. I don’t know why she’s here, and I don’t know how to ask her, so I just wait for her to say something else. Instead of speaking, she looks around, marking the changes I’ve made over the years. I don’t call them improvements. I never do because every updated mat or fresh coat of paint takes this place further away from what I built with her at my side.
“It looks really different in here,” she says, finally, turning those eyes back on me. They’re a luscious brown, deep and earthy like wild clay pulled from the bed of a winding river, and I’ve missed them so fucking much.
“Do you want a tour?”
Suddenly, all I want is to give her one. To walk her through the changes I’ve made to the gym in the hopes that it’ll lead to a conversation about the changes I’ve made in me. I’d lead her through the five thousand square foot addition at the back of the warehouse and tell her we use the open space in the middle for everything from Zumba classes to goat yoga and that the rooms around the perimeter are rented out to content creators who specialize in fitness and want somewhere safe and comfortable to record their workouts.
I’d take her to my office and let her see that nothing much has changed in there because I won’t let it. She’d see that my desk is still the same, a relic of our past, of a time when she’d perch on the edge and distract me from paperwork with nothing more than her smile. She’d see that the ceiling tile with the messy, lopsided, black heart with our initials in the center is still there, too.
She’d see everything, and maybe it’d mean nothing to her, but she’d still know there hasn’t been a single day that’s gone by where I haven’t tried to find a way to hold on to her, to us, even though she let me go.
“No, that’s okay.” She tucks a curl behind her ear, and I remember what it was like to feel the delicate coils slip between my fingertips. “I wasn’t planning on staying long.”
“I’m surprised you came by in the first place.”
“Why?”
“Because of the way you burned rubber to get away from me at the cemetery yesterday.”
“Right.” Her tongue darts out of her mouth, skating across her bottom lip before being replaced with the blunt edges of her teeth. “That’s actually what I came to talk to you about.”
I’m not quite sure where this conversation is going, so I forgo a verbal response, opting for a dip of my chin that tells her to continue. Rae gazes heavenward, taking time to gather her words, which is how I know I’m not going to be a fan of what she has to say.
“I need you to stay away from me,” she blurts, catching me completely off guard. My head snaps back as if I’ve been struck, and a laugh spills past my lips.
She needs me to stay away from her ?
Still laughing, I turn my head to the left and then the right, double-checking our surroundings before I respond. “You realize you’re standing in my gym, right? That you came here and sought me out, not the other way around?”
I mean, obviously, I’d thought about seeking her out. Actually, after I wrapped things up with Taurin—leaving him at Waffle House despite my better judgment because he insisted his parents were on their way to pick him up—I drove around town aimlessly, hoping to run into her again, but she doesn’t know that, which means this conversation is as random as it is uncalled for.
“Of course, I know that, Hunter.” Rae rolls her eyes, and a shiver runs down my spine at the sound of my name on her lips. Maybe she’s right to be warning me away. “I’m just trying to be preemptive, to rid you of any ideas about looking me up or showing up to my house or contacting my kid.”
My brows fall together as a mixture of hurt and outrage filters through my body. “You think I’d do some shit like that? Just pop up on you or, worse, freak Riley the fuck out by showing up at her school and saying, ‘hey, I used to be in love with your mommy?’”
When I say her daughter’s name, all of her features go still. She takes a step back like the small space between our bodies poses a threat to Riley’s safety, and it’s so incredibly hurtful that I take a step back, too, reeling from the pain of watching the woman I once dreamed of building a family with physically recoil at the thought of me knowing anything about her kid.
I scrub a hand over my face and sigh. This is what addiction has earned me: distrust and skepticism. I’ve dealt with it before and talked my sponsees through their encounters with it as well, which means I know that being angry won’t help. Using, but especially relapsing, breaks something fundamental in relationships, and as the addict, it’s your job to try and repair it.
Most of the time, it’s not a wound that’s easily healed. It takes time and consistency, and with Rae, I have neither of those things. All I have is my word, and I already know it doesn’t mean shit to her.
“I’m a lot of things, Rae, but I’m not, nor have I ever been, a stalker or a creep. I would never do anything to make you, your family, but most of all, your daughter, feel unsafe. You have my word that if I ever see you out in public, I will turn and go in the other direction before you even know I’m there.”
Rae is stoic as she studies my features, almond-shaped eyes flitting from one part of my face to the other in search of sincerity. She must find what she’s looking for because she swallows and nods.
“Thank you,” she says before turning to leave just as quickly as she came.
“Heard you kind of lost your shit in a meeting the other week. The fuck was that about?”
Nate poses the question seconds after taking a seat across from me with a cup of coffee in one hand and a chocolate croissant in the other. He’s been out of town dealing with some family stuff, so this is the first face-to-face sit-down we’ve had in weeks. I’m not surprised that he’s chosen to kick things off by calling me out about the way I acted when I ran into Rae on the first day of what I now affectionately refer to as ‘Hell Week.’
“Who said that?”
He chomps down on his pastry, chewing thoughtfully before saying, “Everybody. The question is, why didn’t you say anything to me about it?”
I shrug and take a sip of my water. “You were dealing with family shit, I didn’t want to unload on you.”
“So you chose to unload on a room full of your sponsees instead?”
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like that.”
“How was it supposed to happen then?”
“The way it always does.”
“Meaning?” He lifts a brow, and the strands of silver that have just made it to the top of his face after months of staging a coup to take control of the hair hugging his chin dance under the fluorescent lights above us.
“Meaning, I was supposed to keep my shit tight, hold space for the meeting attendees and save all my trauma for you.”
Nate dips his head in a faux bow. “I’m honored to be the keeper of your trauma.”
“Of course you are,” I toss back the last of my water and shake my head as memories from the meeting weeks ago assail me. “I fucked up, huh?”
“What makes you say that?”
“I mean, you just said that’s what everyone else is saying, so…”
“That’s not what I said.” He takes another bite of his pastry and washes it down with coffee before continuing. “ I said everybody was talking about how you lost your shit.”
“Right, which means that I fucked up.”
“Hunter, since when does having a moment of vulnerability constitute a fuck up?”
That question gives me pause, which is exactly what Nate hoped it would do. His smug smile tells me as much.
“I guess never?”
Nate lets out a loud, boisterous laugh. “I mean, I’m sure there are some occasions when it does, but this definitely isn’t one of them. A fuck up in our world is a relapse; anything else, including crying about your ex in front of your sponsees, is just a part of being human.”
“I didn’t cry.”
“That’s not what I heard.” I flip him off, which does nothing except make him laugh. “Seriously though, Hunter, you’ve got to stop holding yourself to this impossible standard of perfection. You’re an addict. The people you sponsor are addicts. That means they know, first and foremost, that you’re not perfect. Hell, they probably prefer it.”
Despite hating being called out in such plain terms, I find myself nodding and thinking of the conversation I had with Taurin after the meeting I’d written off as a failure. I took him to the same Waffle House I take all my sponsees to—the one where I met Rae on the night she saved my life—and we talked about how frustrated he’d been with all the examples of perfection during recovery that he’d been subjected to during his other attempts to get clean. He told me my impromptu share had made him stick around to hear more, and then he’d ask me to be his sponsor.
Watching him battle his way through turning days of sobriety into weeks is the one good thing that’s come out of Rae’s return to New Haven.
“Hey, kid, I’ve already told you one time that you can’t do that in our bathrooms!” The loud and sudden outburst causes everyone in the cafe to turn towards the sound. Nate and I watch along with every other person in the building as the manager marches someone out of the back, where the bathrooms are, toward the front door. From where I’m sitting, I can see that the person is young, a teenager by the looks of it, but their face is obscured by the hood slung over their head. They say something to the manager, their voice too low for me to hear from this distance, and the guy shakes his head in disgust.
“I don’t care. That’s not an excuse for you to use our facilities like your own personal bath house.”
“Hey.”
I don’t realize I’m standing until I look around and see that everyone I was just close to eye level with is now gazing up at me. The manager pauses as I cross the room, his features frozen in fear as I invade his space.
“H—how can I help you, sir?” he asks, tipping his head back to look up at me while the kid he’s still holding in his clutches goes completely still.
“Well—” I pause, allowing my eyes time to rove over his scrawny chest and find the name attached to his employee badge. “ Tim . You can start by letting the kid go.”
“Oh, sir, you don’t understand, this young man was?—”
“Doesn’t matter. Short of a few very specific things that would have necessitated a call to the police instead of a personal escort out of the building, there’s nothing he could have done that would make this public spectacle necessary, so let him go before I’m forced to remove your fingers from him myself.”
Most people take a threat of physical action from me very seriously. Tim is no exception. He peels the fingers of his right hand off of the kid’s arm and drops the book bag he was carrying in his left on the floor, then he turns and scurries away.
“I’m sorry you had to experience that,” I say, bending at the waist to pick up the book bag and pausing altogether when I realize that I recognize it and the pair of beat up Air Force One’s it’s sitting next to.
Snatching the bag up, I right myself immediately. “Taurin?”
He turns to me slowly, his eyes wide with fear and his shoulders slumped with shame. It’s been a few days since I’ve seen him, and while he never looks particularly put together, I never assumed he was unhoused.
“We should go before they kick us out,” Nate says, appearing on my left side while Taurin stands awkwardly to my right. It doesn’t take but a second for Nate to realize that something is off. “Everything okay over here?”
“Yeah,” Taurin says weakly, at the same time I say, “Hell, no.”
Nate huffs out an uncertain laugh, glancing over his shoulder at the counter where Tim is glaring at the three of us. “I think it’s safe to say that whatever is going on is going to have to get sorted out outside of here.”
Without another word, Nate strides out of the cafe, and I fall into step behind him. Taurin sighs and comes along, too, but I think it’s only because his book bag is still in my hands. We make it all the way to my car before Nate rounds on us with his brows lifted in a silent order for one of us to explain what’s going on.
“Nate, this is Taurin, my newest sponsee. Taurin, this is Nate, my sponsor.”
Nate extends his hand, leaving Taurin with no choice but to shake it. “Good to meet you.”
“You say that to all the people you watch get dragged out of cafes?”
“Hey.” I cut my eyes at Taurin. “Watch your tone, man.”
“It’s all good, Hunter,” Nate says, easygoing as ever. “We’re addicts, Taurin. I’ve met people under a lot worse circumstances and still said it was nice to meet them.”
Taurin’s eyes narrow into slits. “I’m not an addict. I’ve been clean for two weeks now.”
“Son, I’ve been clean for twenty-five years, and I’m still an addict. It’s just the truth of our condition. We’ll always be addicts even when we don’t remember what it feels like to be high.”
“Kind of wish I was high right now,” the kid mumbles under his breath.
“Don’t say that,” I growl. “Look, you’re angry and embarrassed because of what happened back there, but that’s not an excuse to be rude to someone who’s just telling you the truth.”
“Whatever.” He pulls his hood down further until it’s covering the sides of his face completely. “Can you just give me my bag so I can go?”
“Sure. I’d be happy to give you your bag just as soon as you tell me where exactly you’re going to go.”
Taurin shuffles his feet, kicking at the asphalt with the toe of one of his shoes. “Home.”
Nate and I exchange a look. Neither of us believes Taurin’s assertion, but as his sponsor, it’s my job to call bullshit on it.
“You just got caught washing in a public restroom, kid. Let’s try that again.” Nothing but silence greets me, and while I can feel frustration digging its claws into my chest, I don’t allow it to win. Instead, I square my shoulders and come back with a gentler approach that’s still rooted in reality. “How long have you been living on the street, T?”
Tears pool in the corner of his eyes, but he’s too stubborn to wipe them away. He’s also too stubborn to meet my gaze, but he does answer me. Eventually.
“Since the day we met.”
The moment the pain evident on his face causes his voice to fracture, my heart shatters along with it, and when he turns towards me, I open my arms on instinct, allowing him to find solace in the comfort of my embrace. It won’t do a damn thing to heal the pain of being abandoned, of being pushed away and discarded by the people who are bound by blood to see you through your hardest moments, but it’s better than nothing.
“My mom said I can’t come back home,” he whimpers. “The last time I used, I OD’d, and my little brother found me. I promised her I wouldn’t do it anymore, but she doesn’t believe me. She won’t let me come home. I don’t have anywhere to go.”
The offer comes out quickly, as natural as taking my next breath, as familiar on my tongue as it was the last time I extended it to a friend in need.
“You’re going to come home with me.”