Love, Laughter, and Happily Ever Afters Collection (82 page)

He’s so fucking beautiful. And he just doesn’t understand.

Hunter takes a ragged breath. “The last time I saw you, we were great, and now you’re spitting mad and screaming at me. The least you can do is tell me why. What happened?” He exhales. “What did they say at the interview?”

I feel a flush of shame. I didn’t want him to see this side of me, the messy fucking failure, but now I’m laid bare, raw and hurting right in front of him. “The same thing everyone’s been telling me, my entire fucking life!” I slam the portfolio down on the rough-hewn table, watching as loose-leaf pages slip out the side. A freeze-frame photograph of all my stupid ambitions.

“I’m a joke,” I tell him, my voice twisting. “He didn’t even look at my stuff for more than a second. Why would he? I’m nothing. It’s all a joke!”

Hunter’s face changes. “Brit, that’s not true!” He moves closer, but I can’t listen to any more of his lies. I grab my sketchbook, the drawings I labored over so carefully, sketching and shading long into the night. I open the book and start ripping, tearing the heavy pages from the seam. “What are you doing?” he cries, reaching for me, but I pull back.

“You didn’t see the way they all looked at me!” I cry, ripping at the book again and throwing the torn piece to the floor. “He’s right, I was stupid, stupid to even think—”

“Brit!”

Hunter grabs me by the arms, crushing me against him.

“Let go of me!” I struggle, trying to push him away, but he holds tight, solid and strong, and I’m trapped in the warmth of his embrace. “Let me go!” I feel a sob rising in me, and I try to bite it back. I can’t be the girl who cries all over the damn place, I’ve got to keep it together, the way I always do.

“Shhh,” Hunter holds me to his chest as I gasp for air. “It’ll be OK, I promise you. I’ll make it OK. Just tell me what to do.”

He’s trying to calm me, I know, but his words are like salt, rubbing raw in my open wounds.

Trusting him is what got me into this mess; believing even for a second I could rely on someone else. “I knew this would happen,” I wrench away. “God, I knew it.”

“This is just one setback,” Hunter promises me. “You’ll see, we can try again, send out more applications—”

“There is no ‘we’!” I yell. “You think I haven’t done this before? Haven’t applied to all these places, tried my hardest to make it work? I’ve been sending out letters for months now. Nobody wants me!”

Hunter catches his breath. “You didn’t tell me.”

“Because I didn’t want to see that look on your face!” My voice twists.

“What look? Brit, what are you talking about?” He’s so confused, he doesn’t even realize.

“That one,” I tell him, feeling it like a punch to my gut. “Right there, in your eyes, when you realize what a mess I am. What a fucking joke.”

“That’s not true, Brit.” Hunter takes a step towards me.

“You said I wasn’t broken,” I accuse him angrily. “That I was perfect.”

“You are!”

“Then why are you trying to fix me?” My shout rings out in the darkening room.

Hunter stares at me, realization dawning in his eyes. “Is that what you think this is about?”

“Do you know what it feels like, being told you’re nothing?” I challenge him. “No, of course you don’t. You’ve never failed at anything in your life.”

Something flashes across Hunter’s face. He clenches his hands into fists at his side. “This isn’t about me. This is you, trying to find some excuse to push me away again.”

My mouth drops open in amazement. How can he try and turn around and put this on me, after everything? “This is all you!” I cry, “Trying to play the hero, to fix the fucked-up girl no-one else can love! And you want to know the worst part?” I demand, “For a moment there, I believed you. I believed in us. I thought we could just put all the bullshit and the real world aside, just be us. Be Susie and Bob, on that beach again. You and me.”

“We can be.” Hunter comes forwards, catching my hands in his. “Listen to me Brit, the things you’re saying, you’ve got it all wrong.”

“No!” I cry, furious at myself for believing in him. I snatch my hands away, even as his touch rolls through me, a glimpse of treacherous sweetness I can’t let myself surrender to.

“This is crazy!” Hunter yells back, his frustration boiling over. “You keep pushing me away. I don’t understand what’s going on in your head.”

“You can’t.” The space between us is a chasm, bigger than he’ll ever know. “You can’t ever understand what it’s like for me. You’re the golden boy, remember?” I look at him, golden and gorgeous even in a damp shirt with water dripping down his face. I shake my head, turning away from his glow. “God, why did you have to be so fucking perfect?”

Hunter’s face changes. “You keep saying that.” His voice is like ice.

“It’s the truth, isn’t it? Your perfect face, and your perfect family, and your perfect life.”

Hunter’s eyes meet mine, so full of bitter fury, I catch my breath. “You want to know what kind of man I really am?” he demands, his voice rasping with tension. He crosses the space between us, grabbing my shoulders. “You want to know the truth?”

“Hunter,” I gasp. His face is dark, like a stranger’s, and his fingers dig painfully into my shoulders. I try to shake loose. “Hunter, you’re hurting me!”

“You keep saying I’m perfect, but it’s all a lie!” His eyes blaze into mine, tortured and bleak. “Every day, I have to pretend. Well, I’m sick of pretending, I can’t do it anymore, not with you!”

“Hunter…”

“Jace is gone,” he confesses, his voice broken.

I gasp.

“He’s dead, Brit, and it’s all my fault.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

HUNTER

I WATCH HER FACE change as my words sink in. Brit furrows her brow, confused.

“Hunter?” she whispers. “What do you mean?”

Brit blinks, staring at me with those beautiful dark eyes. A moment ago they were aching with anger and hurt, I would have done anything to make it go away. Even telling her my darkest secret. But now, I wish I could take it all back, have her look at me like a hero again, no matter what the price.

“I killed him.” I say it again, letting the words falls to the floor between us: the dark bitter truth I've been hiding so long. “My brother is dead, Brit, he's been dead three years now. Jace is gone.”

I sag back against the wall, feeling the fight drain out of my body. A moment ago, we were screaming and yelling, consumed with passionate anger. Now, everything’s changed.

Nothing will ever be the same.

“What happened?” Brit finally asks. She sinks down into the nearest chair—halfway across the room from me, I notice through the dull ache already blossoming in my skull.

She can’t wait to get away from me.

But it’s too late to take it back now. She wanted the truth, and now I’m going to give it to her. I take a deep breath and brace myself.

“It was Christmas break,” I start, my voice hoarse with the words I've kept inside for so long. “A few months after that summer here. I was back from college, and Jace was working with Dad at the firm. We all went out to Aspen for the holidays. My parents rent a big house there every year,” I explain, feeling numb. “All their friends have places too. It's one big parade of cocktail parties and lunches, but, me and Jace would always have a good time. Go skiing, hit the bars...”

My voice falters. I look up, over at Brit, trying to see a sign in her expression, some kind of understanding, but instead her face is blank. Empty. Waiting.

I clench my jaw, and force myself to keep talking. “So one night we were out, meeting some other kids in town. Jace knew some people from college. Everyone was drinking, having a good time.” The words stick in my throat, and I have to catch my breath. “Except, I wasn’t supposed to be drinking.” I force the confession out. “It was my turn to drive, and Jace wanted to cut loose. He'd only been at the firm a few months, but already, Dad was piling on the pressure, long hours, too much responsibility. But Jace never complained,” I remember quietly. “That wasn’t his style. He just took it all, he wanted to make Dad proud.”

Just talking about it, I can see his face so clearly. I feel the pain clench in my chest, that bitter ache that haunts me, every minute of every day. The darkness, so deep I think I could drown.

“He was the good one,” I choke out. “He would never have...” But I'm getting ahead of myself now, so I force myself to rewind in the story. I have to be clear, I have to tell her every word, every failure. Every way I fucked things up.

She needs to know everything I am.

“So we partied,” I tell her, hollow. “Jace went hard, I mean, really tore things up. There were girls, there are always girls, but he was really going for it. We both were.”

My voice drops and I look away. This part shouldn't be harder, or feel more of a betrayal than everything else I’ve done, but it is. Even that night, every other girl I looked at, flirted with, or slipped my arms around in a casual embrace—it felt like I was cheating.

On Brit.

She’s still sitting there, across the room from me, way out of reach. She hugs her knees in to her chest and doesn't look at me. I'd give anything to know what she's thinking—just a glimpse of the truth—but this isn’t about me anymore.

“I was... in a different place, back then.” I explain slowly. “Not like when you met me. It was my first time away from home, my parents, all their bullshit, and...”

I stop. I was about to say, ‘I was still hurting over you,’ but I stop myself just in time. It’s not fair to bring her into my crimes. She had no idea what the hell was going on, thousands of miles away from Beachwood Bay. I was the one who went off the rails trying to get by without her.

It’s the only lie I’ve ever told her, when I said I understood her leaving me there, the morning after our night together. The truth is, I couldn’t deal with it. I didn’t even know where to start. Our night together changed everything, and waking up with her gone, it felt like the only true happiness I’d ever known had been ripped away from me. Some cruel joke, to give me a taste of something that was never really mine.

The loss of her was absolute.

I knew I didn't have any right to expect more. We’d never even talked about what would happen in the morning, it was just a one-night thing. But that didn’t change the way I felt to find her gone, or my desperate, futile wishes to get it all back again.

I would have laughed over it, if it didn’t hurt so bad. Imagine me, pining away over some girl when I could have dated anyone on campus. But I didn't want them, I just wanted her. Brit haunted my dreams, until I’d wake up crazy with wanting her, the scent of her shampoo lingering in my dorm room, the touch of her skin still fresh against mine.

I told myself it was just because she was the first girl to reject me, the only one who walked away before I made that call. But the truth was, I knew, it was all about her. Brit. Only Brit. The one girl who didn’t care about my money or family connections, or even my charm. She’d seen something real in me, and once I'd known the bliss of that connection, everything else seemed like a cheap imitation, a mockery of real love.

I tried to forget her, bury those memories in beer, and partying, and even other girls. But nothing soothed the ache. Those first months of college, my heart was bruised and raw and hurting: caught up in anger and confusion, and regret for wanting something I couldn’t have—something she clearly didn’t feel in return, even long enough to stick around and say goodbye. By the time Christmas break rolled around, I was desperate to get her out of my system, any way I could.

“So I drank.” I pick up the story again for Brit, leaving out the reasons why. My words are hollow and bitter with self-loathing. “The one night I’d promised I wouldn't, I did it anyway. One beer turned into three, and then there were shots on the bar, and by the time we stumbled out into the snow, I was so wasted, I couldn’t see straight.”

Brit sucks in a shocked breath. “You drove?”

I shake my head. “Jace wouldn’t let me,” I tell her. “He was looking out for me, the way he always did. I’d already got some tickets for speeding, and Dad would have killed me...”

I trail off, realizing the bitter irony of my words.

“He took the keys,” I tell her, forcing the words out, knowing the worst is still to come. “He said he wasn’t as far gone as me. He always handled his booze better. So, I let him. We piled in the rental, and headed back to the cabin. It was dark,” I say quietly, seeing the scene all over again. The moonlight on the crisp snow; the black shadows of the trees blurring by as we drove faster and faster. “And the roads were icy. A deer ran out, and Jace swerved, and…”

This time, I can’t go on. The words stick in my throat, like if I don’t say them, they won’t be true. And God, I’d give everything I have—I’d lay down my life in a heartbeat—for it not to be true. For my big brother to still be here, for this pain in my chest to be just a dream.

I focus on my breathing, in and out, in deep, shuddering breaths.

“They said he died on impact.” I whisper it in the silence of the dark room. The sun has set, surrounding us with shadows, but neither of us move to get the light. Somehow it’s easier here in the dark, pretending like the world doesn’t exist outside. “I was knocked unconscious right away,” I add. “When I came around in the hospital, I barely had a scratch on me. Because I was so drunk,” I add, hating myself for every word, “my body didn’t brace for impact, I didn’t feel a thing.”

That’s the part I can’t get over, the cruelest irony of all. My brother was dying beside me, his body crushed and bruised and bloody, and I just drifted off to sleep, like it was nothing.

“He was there. And when I woke up, he was gone.” I tell her, broken. “Like someone ripped a hole in the world, and now nothing I do will ever… I can’t make it right. I can’t bring him back. He’s gone. Jace is gone, and it’s all my fault.”

A sob escapes me, desperate and rasping. I hate myself for it, for everything. I don’t get to grieve him, I don’t deserve the release. He’s my burden to carry with me, for every breath I breathe that he won’t; every beat of my heart that I took from him.