Page 25 of Still Missing You

Me. You could have had me, but you left me behind. I keep the thought to myself, though. There’s no point in rehashing the past. It’s water under the bridge now.

Dylan hauls himself to his feet, scoops up the pizza box and sets it on the dresser. Before facing me again, the few feet between us feels like miles, and despite promising myself to leave the past behind us, I blurt out. “I thought you were dead.”

He blinks, confused. “Me?”

“You left my place late.” After you dumped my ass. “And you never made it home. No one heard from you again. It was years later, back when I first started with the Burlington PD, that I looked you up and knew for sure you were still alive.”

Dylan sinks down onto the edge of the bed, as if his legs have given out from under him. He looks stunned, as if the possibility that I would have wondered what had happened to him hadn’t occurred to him. “Shit. Hunter, I’m sorry. I thought you knew and have figured it out.”

“Figure what out?” What’s he talking about?

“It was my parents. They’d been threatening to send me to one of those wilderness camps to fix my behavior.”

I knew about his parents’ plans for him. It was one of the reasons he’d agreed to tutor me. What better way to show his parents he’d turned over a new leaf and put the drinking and smoking and fighting behind him than to help a dumb jock figure out trig?

“There’d been a couple of black SUVs in the driveway when I got back from your place. I didn’t go home that night. I drove right past and kept on driving. After that, I had to keep a low profile until I turned eighteen. I couldn’t risk them finding me. Anyway, I thought word would have spread that my parents tried to send me away, and you would have known why I had to leave.”

“Shit.” I drag my fingers through my hair. “I didn’t hear anything when I got back to school on Monday. Maybe no one else knew.”

“Maybe.” His teeth tug at his bottom lip, his dark brows drawing together in a thoughtful frown. Then he smiles, his expression lightens, and I can feel it in my chest. “I spent years looking over my shoulder, afraid my parents would drag me home and send me away, but what if they never even looked? What if they were relieved I was gone?”

I remembered his parents. I only met them once, but they struck me as disinterested at best. I’d always believed that all their threats to send him to one of those wilderness camps had been more about curbing Dylan’s behavior because they’d been embarrassed, not because they’d been concerned about his welfare.

“I can look into it for you.” I’m not sure what to say. I’m not really his boyfriend. Hell, we’re not even friends anymore. “I could see if they filed a missing person report.”

He lets out a humorless chuckle, falls back against the mattress, and scrubs both hands down his face. “No, it’s fine. They’re not my family anymore, if they ever were.”

The sight of him stretched across the bed, hair falling back from the fine, straight lines of his face, shirt bunched up from his waist, exposing his smooth, hard stomach, makes my mouth go dry and my skin hot.

I want to kiss him again. I want to cover his body with mine, lick into his mouth while his slender frame wraps around me.

Fuck! What the hell is wrong with me? I’m a grown-ass man. How am I still lusting after Dylan Moore like a teenage infatuation?

I let out a slow breath. I’m tired, that’s all. I just need to sleep, and when I wake up, everything will be back to normal tomorrow, or as normal as it can be while you’re tracking down your ex-boyfriend’s friend.

“So how do you want to do this?” I ask, nodding at the bed. “Take turns sleeping on the floor and the bed?”

Dylan pushes up on his elbows. “We’re grown men. I think we can share the bed without something happening.”

I huff out a laugh. “What if I want something to happen?”

The words leave my mouth before I can stop them. Dylan goes still, and I want to bang my head against the wall. What the hell is wrong with me?

I open my mouth to try to play it off as a joke, but Dylan’s gaze meets mine, his guarded expression impossible to read.

“I’d be okay with that.”

Chapter Ten

Dylan

My words hang in the air, and for a second, I worry that I’ve made a huge mistake. Hunter stares at me with a wide-eyed, deer-in-headlights expression that would have been funny under different circumstances. Maybe he’d been making a joke, but if that’s the case, I don’t get the punchline.

“Are you serious?” he asks.

“Are you? Are you seeing anyone?” He’d been engaged the last time I tried to see him. That had been after he’d been shot, but I never worked up the courage to actually visit his room, not after I saw his fiancée in the hospital waiting room.

She’d been gorgeous and worried sick, and the last thing I wanted was to cause trouble for either of them. Not with everything they both had to be going through. So I’d slipped away, pretending I’d never been there. He’d moved on and built a life, and that was all I’d ever wanted for him.