Chapter Fifty Six #2
“Look what the cat dragged in,” Luke said.
“Nice to see you too,” I muttered, but my mouth quirked.
Ben poured me a beer and pushed it across the table. “We heard you’re back for a minute. Figured that either means you’re avoiding the law or a woman. Your face says woman.”
Luke snorted. “If it were the law, he’d look happier.” He turned to me. “You look like shit. Girl trouble?”
We traded the low-grade insults that meant I love you in our family. The pitcher sweated. The jukebox switched to an old country song I didn’t know.
Ben’s voice shifted, serious now. “You gonna tell us why you’re really here?
I know you. I’ve never seen you like this.
You’ve been half alive for years, Hunter.
Divorce, deployments, the military grinding you down.
And now you’re sitting here looking like someone ripped your heart out.
That tells me you found something worth bleeding for. ”
His words echoed the fear that chased me: what if I’m not enough? I laid it out for them. Cami’s smile that unhooked something in me, Zeke’s side-eye and quiet courage, two little girls who thought my back was a jungle gym, the way my chest felt like it finally had instructions.
Then the fight. It started small, but underneath, I was wrestling with the fear of losing myself.
I picked at the softest spots because I was scared of being asked to be the man I said I wanted to be.
The worry that I’d fail them, that I’d come up short, wouldn’t let go.
Panic rippled through me, whispering that the easiest way to avoid more pain was to leave.
So I ran, caught a plane, hoping space would quiet the ache sitting heavy inside me.
“So,” Luke said, eyebrows up. “The great Hunter Bennett got himself tangled up in something real, huh? Never pictured you as the family type.”
Ben listened with his whole face, the way dads do when they’ve learned how to shut up and actually hear. “You love her,” he said. After slapping Luke in the back of the head like the older cousin he was.
I took a long drink. “Yeah.”
Luke cocked his head. “And she loves you?”
Everything in me flashed to the way she’d looked at me when I held the twins, how her shoulders dropped when I walked through the door with a bag of groceries, the night she fell asleep on my chest, and I stayed awake counting her breaths. “Yeah,” I said again, voice low.
“Then what the hell are you doing here?” Luke asked, not unkindly, just direct. “We both know fear’s loud. Doesn’t make it smart. And you running cross-country to ‘get space’….that’s not tactical, man. That’s just retreat.”
Ben leaned in, elbows on the table. “I had five kids in eight years. I never felt ready. Still don’t sometimes. But the trick is boring: you keep showing up. You say ‘I screwed up’ faster. You learn your tells, and you fix what you can fix. You don’t disappear when you’re scared.”
I picked at the water ring my glass had left on the wood. “I didn’t even come home after the divorce,” I said, surprised by my own confession. “And I came now. I don’t know what that says, but it doesn’t feel good.”
“It says you’re not done running yet,” Luke said. “But you could be. That part’s a choice.”
Silence shimmied in, not awkward, just present. On the TV, a hockey game halfheartedly fought itself into overtime. A woman at the bar laughed too loudly at something no one else heard.
Ben cracked a smile. “Also, we gotta say this for the record: three kids? You sure you’re not trying to get your ass kicked on purpose?”
I laughed, a genuine laugh. “You saying I can’t hack it?”
“I’m saying you can,” he answered. “But only if you want to.”
Luke knocked his knuckles against mine, a soft, precise tap. “And if you don’t go back and fix it, I’m flying out there, finding Cami, and telling her she can do better.”
I shot him a look sharp enough to cut drywall. Ben barked a laugh. The tension bled out of my shoulders by degrees.
We talked until the jukebox gave up and the bartender stacked chairs on tables with that gentle finality of small towns closing for the night. On the walk to the parking lot, our breath made ghosts in the air. Gravel crunched. Somewhere two streets over, a dog barked once and decided against it.
“You gonna call her?” Ben asked, hands jammed into the pockets of his Carhartt.
I looked up at a sky punched full of cold stars. “Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll book a flight in the morning.”
Luke clapped my shoulder. “Good. And Hunt?”
“Yeah?”
“When you go back, don’t show up with speeches. Show up with groceries and a plan.”
“Bossy,” I said.
“Effective,” he corrected.
Back at the house, the porch light was still on, because my mother never stopped believing I’d need it. I stood there for a long minute, the night pressing its chilled palm to my face. Inside, the clock in the hallway ticked steadily.
Back in my childhood room, I sat on the bed, pulled out my phone, and opened a browser.
One-way ticket back to California. The first flight I could get that wouldn’t send Mom into a full interrogation about why I was leaving at three a.m.
I booked it. Waiting for the confirmation ding to cast an echo in the room.
From the hallway, I heard the soft creak of the floorboard that always betrayed anyone moving past the linen closet. Mom’s small shadow paused in my doorway. “Booking a flight?” she asked, voice threaded with I-already-know.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good,” she answered, warm and fierce. “Now get some sleep. Tomorrow you’ll practice what you’re going to say. And then you say less of it and do more.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She smiled, the kind of smile that made men twice my size confess things. “There’s my boy.”
She padded away. I lay back on the bed and stared at the fan blades until they blurred.
I thought of the future I wanted, the one I’d been too scared to claim.
No more running.