11. Hunter #2
Her bottom lip trembled once before she bit it hard.
"I know, Hunt. I know I came in too fast. I know I didn't listen.
I know Dorothy Sullivan thinks I'm a New York idiot in expensive shoes, and the worst part —" Her voice broke.
She caught it. Swallowed. When she spoke again, the raw was still there, but the steel was back underneath it.
"The worst part is she's not wrong. I performed instead of being present, and I lost them before I opened my fucking mouth. "
The jukebox played something slow and tinny into the silence.
She was heaving for breath. I was heaving for breath.
We were standing apart in a packed bar and breathing as if we'd just run a mile, and the air between us was so charged that if someone had struck a match, the whole building would have gone up.
Her eyes searched mine. Held. Her tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek. Her jaw worked. And then her mouth did the thing — the shift, the fire rearranging itself into something sharper.
"Dorothy Sullivan's glasses should be classified by the Geneva Convention," she said. "That woman is committing psychological warfare on an unsuspecting population, and nobody is doing a damn thing about it. Somebody needs to file a report."
My mouth gave up. The twitch I'd been fighting broke into a grin — a real one, full, the kind I didn’t give in public because I never had reason to. It cracked across my face before I could catch it, and her eyes lit up when she saw it. Her own grin answered — wide, bright, devastating.
I shook my head. "You're a pain in my ass, you know that?”
Her grin went nuclear. She tossed her hair back, cocked one hip against the bar, and looked up at me through her lashes.
"Count yourself lucky the pain in your ass is this hot."
I barked a laugh. Couldn't help it. The sound came out of me from somewhere deep and surprised us both.
The Blackwood corner had gone silent. Every single one of them staring.
Wyatt's voice, low, to Clay beside him: "I didn't know he had that in him."
“Me neither.” Clay’s mouth was hanging open.
Beer forgotten in his hand. Maggie was frozen with her whiskey at half-mast. Jack had his hand on her back and his eyebrows somewhere near his hairline.
Callie was watching me with the quiet recognition of a woman who'd seen this exact moment happen in her own fiancé.
I turned to face them.
"Show's over, folks." I held Maggie's gaze. "Close your mouth, Mags."
Maggie's mouth snapped shut. Clay made a strangled sound. Wyatt shook his head slowly, a grin spreading across his face that said he was going to be talking about this for years.
I turned back to Jessica. She was still grinning. Still flushed. Still doing something to me that I was going to be dealing with for the rest of the night. I slung my arm around her shoulders — pulled her into my side, her warmth bleeding through my shirt.
"Come on." I steered her toward the bar. "I'm buying you a drink."
She leaned into me. Her hand landed on my chest — flat, warm, her fingers curling into the fabric of my shirt. She looked up, and the grin softened into something private. Something that was just for me, just for the three inches of space between our faces, and it hit me harder than the grin had.
"Best fake boyfriend in the state of Texas," she whispered.
"Don't push it."
"Too late. Pushing it is what I do. You said so yourself. Loudly. In front of witnesses."
My arm tightened around her shoulders. Her body pressed closer.
The bar settled back into its noise — jukebox, laughter, the clink of glasses — and the family returned to their conversations with the practiced ease of people who had absolutely no intention of letting this go and every intention of pretending they had.
Later, the apartment was dark when I came up the stairs.
I crossed to the sink, got a glass of water, and stood at the counter, staring out the window.
I didn’t even taste the water as I drank it, because the argument was still moving through me — not the disagreement, not the words, but the collision underneath the words.
The feeling of pushing against something and finding it pushing back.
Her chin had come up. Her eyes had gone glassy for half a second when she'd admitted she'd been wrong, and then her mouth had curved when she'd caught my jaw twitching, and the three of them together had reached into me and pulled at something I had spent ten years sealing shut.
My hands kept moving without me. I gripped the glass, let it go, gripped it again. The same hands that had been steady on the wrench all afternoon and steady on her waist all evening were not steady now.
I set the glass down and pressed both palms flat to the counter and let my head hang between my shoulders.
The flush that had climbed her neck in the bar was still behind my eyelids.
Her voice cracking was still in my ears.
The way she had turned the crack into a joke about Dorothy Sullivan's glasses before anyone else in the booth could clock the crack at all was still sitting warm and alive in my chest. Nobody else in the world would have caught the crack, and nobody else in the world would have known to cover it the way I had covered it.
The wanting and the fighting were running in the same channel. I could feel them in the same place — the same heat, the same source — and I had been pretending for ten years that they were two different things.
But pretending was no longer available to me as a strategy.
The fire I had let out in front of my entire family in a public bar an hour earlier hadn’t gone back where it came from.
And I knew it wouldn’t. It had been there simmering under the surface since the night she walked through my mother's front door in those red heels and called me by the name nobody else used.
What had happened tonight was just my head finally listening to what my body had been trying to tell it for weeks.
I lifted my head. The apartment was quiet, the way it had been for as long as I had lived in it.
The quiet wasn’t the comfort it used to be.
I had been telling myself for months — years — that the stillness was enough.
But the stillness stopped being enough since the moment she came home, and I was done pretending it had.