Page 45 of Hunter

My heart is beating faster again, but it’s not panic this time. It’s something else. Something that tastes like the moment right before you loosen your grip on the pole and hope gravity doesn’t fuck you over.

I flip to a new page in the sketchbook, the paper rustling loud in the quiet between us.

“You gonna keep watching me from a distance?” I ask, keeping my tone light even though my chest feels tight. “Or are you eventually gonna admit you were following me today?”

Hunter’s head turns slowly. His eyes meet mine—dark, tired, and far too honest.

He doesn’t deny it.

He just holds my gaze and says, “Would it scare you if I was?”

The fountain keeps splashing. The city keeps moving.

And I sit there on my favorite bench, charcoal hovering, heart hammering, trying to decide if the answer is yes…or no.

It doesn’t scare me.

That’s the part that fucks me up the most.

A slow, dangerous flare of excitement curls low in my stomach, hot and sharp, the same rush I get right before I drop into a hard spin on the pole. The danger of it—knowing he’s been watching me when I thought I was alone, knowing he showed up exactly when I needed someone, and he’s probably been doing this longer than he’ll admit—it lights something up inside me that I haven’t felt in years.

I should be freaked out. I should be backing away, telling him to stay the hell away from me, reminding myself of every red flag waving in my face. Instead, I feel alive. Seen. Wanted in a way that makes my skin prickle and my breath catch for entirely different reasons than the panic attack.

I swallow, forcing my voice to stay steady even though my pulse is racing.

“No,” I say quietly, the word slipping out before I can overthink it. “It doesn’t scare me.”

Chapter 18

Hunter

“No,” he says quietly, the word slipping out like he didn’t mean to let it. “It doesn’t scare me.”

The second it leaves his mouth, something ugly and sweet twists in my chest. Charlie’s sitting there on that bench with his sketchbook open in his lap, cropped black shirt riding up just enough to show that strip of pale skin I can’t stop noticing, his eyeliner a little smudged from the panic attack, and he’s telling me that me following him doesn’t scare him.

Fuck.

I should feel relieved. Instead, I feel the obsession sink its teeth in deeper.

I’m becoming obsessed with him. With the way he moves through the world like it hasn’t already tried to chew him up and spit him out. With how bright he still is even after everything those bastards probably did to him. With how he can have a full-blown panic attack on a street corner and then sit here ten minutes later with the sun on his face as though none of it happened.

I want to protect him from all of it.

From the random preachers who think they know best and the dark shit that still lives in his head. I want to stand between him and every single thing that ever tried to make him smaller.

And I know how fucked that is.

We’re strangers. And I’m an asshole most of the time—it’s my default setting. I’ve got scars on my body from the fire that killed the last person I tried to “protect,” and I’m already attempting to do the same shit with him.

But Charlie is nothing like Robby.

That realization hit me hard last night, and it’s still sitting in my chest like a live coal.

Things with Robby were sharp edges and loud fights and make-up sex that was more like punishment. He was fire and chaos. He always gave as good as he got. Toward the end, he cheated on me more times than I can count, which I tried to drown out with liquor. He said he cheated because I drank, but I didn’t start drinking until after the first time I found the evidence. I’ve spent months convincing myself the good memories were the whole truth. That he was the love of my life instead of the longest bad habit I ever had.

Charlie is… different.

He’s a little sassy and full of confidence that hides the pain I know he must live with. He’s soft in the places Robby was jagged, bright where Robby turned everything dark. He feels everything and lets it show instead of turning it into a weapon. And right now, he’s sitting here telling me that me following him doesn’t scare him, even though we both know it probably should.