Page 58 of Hunter

Until we weren’t.

Someone saw us kissing behind the church one night. A deacon’s daughter. She told her father. He told mine.

My dad—Pastor Dale—didn’t yell. He didn’t scream. He just looked at me with this cold, disappointed disgust I still feel in my bones.

“You’re sick,” he said that night, voice flat. “But God can fix you.”

Two days later I was on a plane to Texas. A “special program” for troubled youth. Conversion Therapy. They called it spiritual restoration. I called it hell.

Elias never even got to say goodbye. His parents pulled him out of school and moved him to another state within the week. I never saw him again.

The last message he sent me before my phone was taken away was:

I'm sorry. I love you. Please don't forget me.

I never forgot.

But I learned something that summer in Texas, kneeling on rough carpet while grown men violated my body:

Love like that gets you sent away.

Love like that gets you broken.

I drop out of the spin harder than I mean to, landing with a soft thud on the mat. Lucy is right there, steadying me with a hand on my arm.

“You okay?” she asks, brow furrowed. “You went somewhere dark just now.”

I force a smile, wiping sweat from my forehead. “Just remembering why intense scares me. The last time I let myself feel something big… it ended with me on a plane to Texas while my dad told everyone I was ‘sick.’”

Lucy’s face softens with understanding. She pulls me into a quick, sweaty hug.

“That was then,” she whispers against my ear. “You’re not that scared kid anymore.”

I hug her back, breathing in the familiar smell of chalk and coconut body spray.

“I know,” I murmur.

But as we climb back up our poles for the next combo, I can’t shake the memory—or the fear that I’m about to make the same mistake all over again. Not that anyone can send me away this time. The feeling is close enough to the same that every flight or fight sensor in my body is going off.

We move into the next sequence—fireman spins, pole sits, a few messy attempts at more advanced tricks. My body knows what to do, but my head is somewhere else. Somewhere between the memory of Hunter’s mouth claiming mine on my doorstep and the old terror of what happens when someone sees too much of me.

Still… when I close my eyes and spin, I can still taste him. Still feel the way his hand cradled the back of my neck like I was something precious. Still hear the wrecked sound he made when I grabbed his shirt and pulled him closer.

I want him.

I want him so badly it scares me.

And that’s exactly why I should run.

Lucy swings around her pole and lands in front of me again, sweat glistening on her skin. She studies my face for a second, then gives me a small, knowing smile.

“You’re gonna see him again, aren’t you?”

I let out a shaky laugh and hook my leg higher, leaning back into another slow spin.

“Yeah,” I admit, voice barely loud enough to hear over the music. “I think I am.”

Chapter 24