13. Hunter
13
HUNTER
Now
R ight now.
Tomorrow.
Later this week.
Any of those would have been an acceptable answer to the question I posed to Rae on the night a slip of her tongue led to me finding out that her daughter is mine.
Mine.
Riley is mine.
She’s Rae’s, and she’s mine.
She’s ours.
I’d let go of the idea of sharing anything with Rae a long time ago, but now I’m consumed by it and thoughts of the little girl whose mother is still withholding her from me. She could have given me any answer. She could have said anything because anything would’ve been better than the silence I’ve sat in for the past forty-eight hours.
Silence I can’t touch or break because I don’t have any way of contacting Rae, and even if I did, I wouldn’t use it because I know this must be hard for her, too. For nearly a decade, she’s kept this secret, and it can’t be easy to come to terms with the fact that it’s all out in the open. My knowing, but most importantly my desire to be involved, has changed everything for her, and it will do the same thing for Riley. I keep reminding myself of that, hoping it will help me to be patient while Rae makes her decision, but patience is a hard thing to exercise when I’ve already missed so much of my daughter’s life.
“What happens if she doesn’t come around?” Nate asks, sitting cross-legged on the couch across from my desk while I pace in front of it. “What if she decides your past makes you unfit to be a father and says you can never be a part of Riley’s life?”
I shake my head, unable to even consider that outcome. “Rae wouldn’t do that.”
“Rae is a mother with a little girl she has to think about, that she has to protect. She’ll do anything to eliminate a threat, and that could easily include doing what’s necessary to keep you away from her kid.”
“Our kid,” I correct him, stripping the agitation from my tone because I know he’s just trying to push me to consider all possibilities, especially the most likely one. “She’s our kid, Nate. She’s my kid, and I—” I rub at the back of my neck “—I can’t miss anything else.”
“I hear you, Hunter, and I hope you don’t have to, but I want you to consider what might happen if things don’t go as smoothly as you want them to.”
Tired of pacing, I lean against my desk and blow out a breath. “I’m going to be honest, Nate, I can’t picture any scenario that doesn’t end with me being a part of my daughter’s life. It has to work out. It has to.”
Nate nods. “Then, for your sake, I hope it does.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me. I haven’t done anything but cave into your delusion, which isn’t at all my job as your sponsor.” He stands and stretches, wincing in pain. “You need a new couch, that shit is uncomfortable.”
I can’t help but laugh. “Taurin said the same thing.”
At the mention of my new live-in sponsee, Nate smiles. “How’s the kid doing anyway?”
“He’s alright, besides the whole mad at the world thing.”
Taurin’s only been staying with me for a few days, but I’ve already attuned myself to his anger. After the initial shock of having a roof over his head wore off, it set in. When he’s not in school, he’s pouting around the house. I got so tired of looking at him mope around and listening to him talk about how fucked up it all was, I made him come to work with me today just so he could be productive and pouty.
So far, it’s been working well. He’s committed himself to wiping off mats and other equipment as well as making sure the water bottles and other sports drinks stay stocked in the fridge. I told him if he keeps this up, he’ll have a permanent place at the gym. He smiled and said he actually wouldn’t mind that. It was the first real smile I’d seen from him since we’veknown each other.
As if we’ve spoken him up, Taurin comes striding through the door with a bottle of cleaning solution and a towel in his hand. Although he’s already crossed the threshold, he taps his knuckles on the door.
“What’s up, T?”
“Someone’s here to see you.”
“Well, I guess that’s my cue,” Nate says, waving to me on his way out the door. “Keep me updated, Hunter. Later, kid.”
“Will do.”
Taurin waves Nate off and turns to me. “Want me to send this guy in?”
“Nah, I’ll come down.”
“Cool.”
We leave the office together, and when we get to the first floor, Taurin chucks his chin in the direction of the man in a suit standing awkwardly by the front desk. I recognize him instantly as Rae’s partner , Aaron. I don’t know how he’s here or why, but I can only assume it’s to tell me to stay away from his family. I mean, that’s what I would be doing if I were him, facing the problem head-on, setting boundaries and expectations with no remorse or concern for the other guy’s feelings.
His posture is rigid when I approach him, and I intentionally keep myself loose so I don’t appear to be on the defensive. The last thing I need is to end up beating this guy’s ass and having that held against me, used as another reason to keep me away from my daughter.
“Aaron.” I pause just a few feet away from him and tuck my hands into the pockets of my shorts. “Good to see you again.”
“Is it?” He asks, placing his hands in his pockets, too. We’re a wild juxtaposition. I look like I just stepped out of a ring; he looks like he spends his days behind a desk. I’m covered in tattoos, and, from what I can see, he has none. There’s a calm, calculated air to him, reflected in his flat, frigid expression, while there’s a wildness brewing in me that’s just waiting to be invited out. It’s not just in my eyes, either. It’s in my veins, crackling like static on a TV with fucked up settings.
Aaron doesn’t know me, so he doesn’t know that the still, stoic expression on my face and the forced politeness in my voice is an act, one I might have to drop if he keeps talking to me like he’s fucking crazy.
“Right now, it is, but I guess that could change depending on how you say what you came here to say.”
He nods and begins to glance around the gym. “This is a nice little place you’ve got here.”
“Thanks. Rae said the same thing when she stopped by a few weeks ago.”
That’s not exactly true, but I say it just to get a rise out of him. His eyes flash with an anger that tells me he didn’t know about the visit Rae paid me, which suggests that despite the fact that he’s trying to come here and act as her representative, she doesn’t tell him everything.
I would feel smug about that, considering that I can remember a time when there was nothing in this world I didn’t know about Rae, but in the wake of finding out about the biggest secret she’s ever kept from me, I don’t feel smug at all. I just feel lost.
Not as lost as Aaron is, though. He looks completely out of his depth in here. Not just because he’s wearing a suit in the middle of a gym on a Sunday afternoon but because his eyes are shifty and his posture is lined with uncertainty. Because he’s just now realizing that coming here to threaten me was a mistake.
“You need to stay away from her.”
Right. This old song and dance again.
“Is that what Rae told you to tell me?”
“Stop saying her name.” His jaw tenses, which is all the confirmation I need to know that Rae isn’t aware that he’s here. “You two had your time together, and it didn’t work out because you weren’t man enough to keep your nose clean.”
Even though he doesn’t come right out and say it, I hear the knowledge of my struggles with addiction wrapped up in between the lines of the insult, and it stings because the only way he could have that information is if Rae gave it to him. Funny that she felt so comfortable giving him my truths when she didn’t deem him worthy of holding hers.
“She’s moved on now,” Aaron continues. “We’re happy and building a life together, and one day soon, we’re going to start a family. I’m sure the last thing you want is to be the pathetic, druggie ex who doesn’t know when to let go.”
I bristle internally when he says he and Rae are going to start a family. What kind of shit is that to say when you’re with a woman who already has a kid? Does he not consider Riley his family? Does he not look at her as his child? What kind of fucking asshole is Rae dealing with?
“My only interest in Rae is the access she might allow me to my daughter,” I respond, catching us both off guard. The statement doesn’t feel completely true. I love Rae. I’ll always love her, but Riley is my priority.
Knowing her.
Loving her.
Showing up for her in all the ways the jackass in front of me probably hasn’t.
“Oh,” Aaron says, all the wind he’d been using to puff out his chest slipping out of him alongside the word. “She told you about Riley.”
Now, I’m really confused.
“You didn’t know?”
It takes a second for Aaron to recover and process my question. When he does, he chooses to lie, badly. “Of course, I knew. Rae and I talk about everything.”
The other night, for the briefest of moments, Rae and Aaron looked like the perfect couple. Maybe it was their proximity to Mallory and Chris or Dominic and Sloane—couples who are in possession of the communication skills Aaron is trying to attribute to him and Rae—that fooled me, or maybe I’d just given them too much credit, but now I see the reality of them, and I can’t look away.
“So she knows you’re here?”
“We discussed it, but I didn’t tell her I’d decided to stop by today and tell you to stay away from her.”
“And Riley,” I add, because I really can’t believe he doesn’t know that she’s the priority here. Rae is a grown woman, and she’s more than capable of setting boundaries with me if she needs to. She knows I will respect them. Riley is the vulnerable party. She’s the one who needs to be protected in all this.
“Right,” he says, annoyance bulging his eyes for a moment before he squares his shoulders and commits to acting like he cares about my daughter. “You need to stay away from them both. They’ve been just fine without you all this time, and I’ll make sure that never changes.”
When Rae came here to tell me our lives had to stay separate, she spoke with conviction that came from a place of selfless concern for her kid and left me with no choice but to yield to her demands. Today, Aaron stands in front of me speaking with that same conviction, except his comes from a well of self-serving entitlement. He hasn’t spent a single second talking this over with Rae or thinking about what this conversation might mean for her or Riley. All he’s thinking about is himself and how to protect what he has with Rae.
And all that makes me want to do is tell him to fuck off.
For the first time since I stood in front of him, I move, taking three steps forward to close the space between us. I loom over him, large and imposing and proud to be a big, scary motherfucker who can hold his own in the ring and out of it when necessary. Aaron tries to meet my gaze without adjusting his stance at all, but he’s too short to make it happen, and I take great satisfaction in watching him tip his head back to fully witness the murder in my eyes.
“I’m gonna say this once, and then I want you to feel free to get the fuck out of my gym.” I peer down at him, laughing internally at the false bravado he’s projecting. “Whatever Rae and I decide to do about our daughter will be our decision. Not yours. And if I have it my way, I will be a very active part of Riley’s life, which means I’ll be a part of Rae’s life, too. You might feel like you’ve got a leg up on me because you’ve been around, and I haven’t, or because you’ve never struggled with addiction, and I have, but I want you to remember something.” I lean down, placing my mouth near his ear. “You can recover from drug addiction. They have a whole twelve-step program for it and everything. But last I checked, there’s no cure for being an insecure little bitch.”
With a single finger to his chest, I send him stumbling back toward the exit, and he glares at me as he leaves, but he doesn’t say another word. I watch him go, wondering how the fuck Rae ended up with an asshole like that.