by Cameron Dane
“Sarah…” Damn it. Alex felt like a parrot. And his hands felt completely tied.
“This is all I want,” she added quickly. “If you can’t give it to me, I won’t hate you. I will understand, and we’ll remain friends. But I just ask that you think about the Hunter I know you must have glimpsed at least once -- the man who went with you to help bury a friend. He’s worth the fight for him. I swear he is. Anyway” -- she smiled just a bit too brightly -- “thanks for letting me speak my piece. I’ll leave you to finish up. Bye.” She left before Alex could figure out what to say.
Alex yanked one of the kids’ chairs out from the media hub in the center of the room and sank into it. Good God. He’d once told Sarah he could give her anything as a thank-you. Nothing was too big or too much. Who the hell could have known she would ask for his recently bruised heart for her brother? He fingered his tender ribs.
For the first time in his life, Alex didn’t know if he could keep his word.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
After knocking on the door, Hunter followed Jace’s, “Come around back!” to the open gate that led to Sarah, Jace, and Jasper’s backyard. He would rather spend this Saturday afternoon doing just about anything other than shooting the shit with his sister and her two boyfriends, hoping like the devil nobody said anything that would send him into a tailspin. If he could slip into the black rage and beat up Alex, then, Christ, how safe was Sarah?
As soon as Hunter rounded the house, the voices died off, and the first bad shiver went down his spine. Jasper got up from the table, said hello, shook Hunter’s hand, and went inside. The fine hairs on the back of Hunter’s neck shot up on end.
He whirled on Jace and Sarah. “What the fuck is going on here?”
Jace stood and lifted his arm toward the house. “Why don’t we go inside?”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Hunter’s voice registered in such a growling, low tone it barely held sound. “You tell me what the hell is going on, and you do it right now.”
Sarah moved to Jace’s side. Her eyes, so big and full of love for him, only kicked up the swirl beginning in Hunter’s gut.
“H-Hunter” -- it crushed him to hear her stammer -- “it’s time for you to tell us what is going on with you. There’s no putting it off anymore.”
Hunter automatically dug for his pocketknife but came up empty. Shit. It was still wherever it had landed in Alex’s bedroom yesterday morning. Hunter’s good hand curled into a fist as a terrible panic triggered inside him. “I’m leaving.” He couldn’t even look at his sister.
“You’re not going anywhere.” Jace grabbed Hunter’s arm and jerked him to a chair close by. “If you refuse to do this inside, then we’ll do it right here. Sit down and listen to Sarah” -- true menace lived in the man’s voice and eyes, reminding Hunter that Jace had the capability of delivering violence too -- “or I will cuff you to something so that you cannot move.”
Everything in Hunter itched to charge at Jace, but he thanked God he still had enough control to recognize his sister right at Jace’s side and comprehend she could get hurt in a fight.
He snarled at Jace but took a seat. “You always were a bastard.”
Jace didn’t move an inch away. “I always told you I was.”
Sarah knelt in front of Hunter and rested her arms on his legs. “You know I love you. Right?” She picked up his hand with the scraped knuckles. “You know I would never do anything to harm you either. Right?” The brush of her fingertips over the evidence of how violent he’d become nearly undid him.
Visions of slashing his flesh with a knife did nothing to silence the chaos inside Hunter. “You don’t understand what you’re asking me to do,” Hunter said, his voice cracking.
Sarah only kept looking up at him with love. “Then you need to tell me so I can.”
WHEN ALEX SPOTTED Hunter’s truck, he almost drove past Sarah’s house without stopping. But the thought of tucking tail and running for a safer day never had appealed to him. Aside from that, what he had to say affected Hunter too.
Before Alex could get up the porch steps and knock, Jasper swung open the door.
“Hey, Jas. Is Sarah busy?” Alex asked the lanky cowboy. “I need to talk to her. And Hunter too.”
“They’re workin’ somethin’ out right now.” Jasper kept looking over his shoulder. “It ain’t a good time.”
Right then a familiar voice rang through the house, and Alex’s heart seized. “Working out what?” He pushed against Jasper. “What are you guys doing to Hunter?”
Jasper took hold of Alex’s arms and became an impenetrable wall. “Sarah and Jace are tryin’ to help him. If you think you’re gonna go bust it up, I gotta tell you I’ve taken down bulls that weigh a helluva lot more than you. It ain’t gonna be nothin’ to tie you up if I have to.”
“You guys don’t understand what is going on inside him,” Alex implored, flashing back on yesterday morning. “He doesn’t want to talk about it, and he could hurt someone in his effort to keep it hidden.”
“I’m here for extra muscle if Jace and Sarah need me. And every minute I spend talkin’ to you” -- Jasper’s muscles strained, but he effectively kept Alex on the porch -- “is a minute I ain’t usin’ to keep watch over them.”
Instinct and years of business training allowed Alex to back off and lift his hands in surrender. “I understand you, but you have to understand that Hunter is very important to me.” Zeroing in on what he knew of Jasper, Alex changed his tact. “Just like you need to be here for Sarah and Jace, I need to be here in case Hunter needs me.”
“All right. But we’re watchin’ from inside,” Jasper said, still not letting Alex over the threshold. “We’re not gettin’ in the middle of them unless there’s violence. I will not think twice about trussin’ you up if it looks like you’re gonna try to make a run for them.”
“I just want to be close by.” For Alex, nothing mattered more than having Hunter’s back. “I need to.”
“Then let’s go.” Jasper led Alex into the house.
“YOU HAVE TO let me leave.” Hunter pleaded with his sister. He looked at her pretty face and could only see Alex’s bruised one layered on top of hers. “I could lose control and hurt you.”
Shaking her head, Sarah squeezed Hunter’s hand. “You would never lay a hand on me.”
“And I would never let you,” Jace added. He squatted down and got into Hunter’s space too. “I’m here to protect Sarah as much as I’m here to help you.”
“You should ask Alex what I’m capable of doing!” Hunter ripped his hand out of Sarah’s and scraped his palm into the arm of the chair, trying to find a sharp corner he could use to dig into his skin. “I didn’t want to hurt him, but he’s pretty damn beat up right now anyway. I lost control, and I feel one step away from losing it again. I always do.” When Hunter couldn’t find a loose nail or sharp edge in the chair’s arm, he turned to Jace. “If you really want to keep Sarah safe, you have to let me go.”
Sarah touched Hunter’s cheek, and he reared. She stayed with him and drew his focus back to her. “I know what you’re trying to warn me about,” she shared. “I’ve seen Alex. He didn’t say a word against you, but he didn’t have to. I know you’re the one who beat him up.”
Oh Jesus God. “I didn’t want to.” Shame shoved its way into the turmoil inside Hunter, vying for its space to eat at him until only a gutted carcass remained. “I swear I didn’t. I never wanted to hurt him. I-I-I --” Hunter’s love for Alex pushed at the demons inside, feeding them more power. “You need to give me a knife.” The heat and the red clouds -- the same as happened at Alex’s -- crept deeper and deeper into every corner of Hunter’s being. “This isn’t working, and it’s going to get bad fast.”
Sarah kept hold of Hunter’s face and dragged him back to her every time he tried to break her stare. “What’s going to get bad?” she asked. “Why will it?”
Her hands on him, the gentle kindness in her touch, worked on Hunter lik
e acid, burning him clean through. “There’s too much pain” -- he clawed the chair with a death grip to keep from ripping Sarah’s arms off so she would stop touching him -- “and I can’t shake it. I can’t feel. Feeling is bad.” He looked to Jace again, willing him to understand. “Give me your knife.” He practically wheezed trying to speak. “I know you have one on you somewhere.”
Jace held a piercing stare on Hunter that felt like drills boring holes right into his brain. “Why do you want my knife?”
Blackness started edging into Hunter’s peripheral vision, signaling the end of his control. “Because I might kill you or her if I don’t get it.” In a last-ditch effort, Hunter shoved the chair backward instead of forward and managed to surge to his feet without hurting Sarah. “Go away. Now.”
On Hunter in a flash, Jace wrestled him to a tree. “We’re not leaving you. Get used to it.”
Terrified as his ring of sight got smaller, Hunter ripped open his shirt and tore into his skin without relent. He scraped flesh off his body in one long drag across his stomach and chest. Pain seared through his torso, and some of the blackness started to ebb. His heart still raced out of control, though, and he didn’t have anything near clear vision yet. Just as fast, he clawed his two fingers and thumb on his damaged hand through his skin in the other direction, arcing more fire and pushing more of the dark clouds away. Hunter dug again, trying to flay his chest open a third time, but Jace successfully captured his arms and held them down at his sides.
“Stop it.” Jace shook Hunter. “That’s enough. You’re not hurting yourself anymore.”
“Please.” Hunter folded over, with Jace still holding on to him, and sucked in deep gulps of air, desperate to cool down his system. With his focus on the flesh he’d just shredded, Hunter willed the stinging gashes to be enough for just a little while longer. Until I can get away.
“Look at me, Hunter,” Sarah said. She ran her fingers through his hair and even kissed the crown of his head. The gesture so reminded him of exactly something their mother used to do that a secret place deep inside Hunter shattered. “Look at me.”
“I can’t,” Hunter whispered, his voice stripped bare. “I abandoned you too many times. Every time I see you, I remember your little sixteen-year-old face and skinny body, and all I see is you taking care of Mom all by yourself because I wasn’t here. All I can imagine are all the doctors’ appointments you had to go to with her all alone and listen to stuff about your mother’s life ending because I wasn’t here to sit in that seat for you.”
Guilt pushed out tears Hunter desperately couldn’t afford to shed. But Sarah kept running her fingers through his hair, and the waterworks and words just kept gushing out of him. “Then after Mom died, I didn’t even stay to help you grieve. I dumped you on Jace again to assuage my conscience and I went away. Jesus.” Hunter finally reared up, just because he couldn’t bear her hands on him anymore. “I didn’t even come home to you when the military discharged me. I was too fucked-up in the head” -- he smacked his skull into the tree -- “to return to Quinten. I couldn’t face your heartbreak if you knew I was stateside and not with you, so I didn’t tell you. I let Jace live with that secret for me. I dumped that on my best friend.” He glanced at the man whose friendship he’d egregiously abused. “Big of me.”
Sarah swiped wetness from her cheeks. “Is this what you’ve been living with in your head the whole time?”
The laugh that escaped Hunter sounded insane, even to his own ears. “That doesn’t even scratch the surface.”
“Then don’t stop talking,” Sarah pleaded, grabbing his hands again. “We need to know everything.”
“I can’t. It’s too ugly. Please, Jace.” Hunter could hardly feel the scratches he’d just put on his skin, and he knew the shit storm would come over him again soon. “Give me your knife.”
“So you can do more of this to your body?” Jace yanked half of Hunter’s shirt away from his torso and down his upper arm, revealing more evidence of Hunter’s self-abuse. “No way.”
Shit. Hunter pulled against Jace’s hold on his arms, desperate to at least scratch himself again. “If I don’t hurt myself, I’ll lose it and attack you. It’s the only way to calm the chaos and the blackness and the violence inside.” He switched to curling his hand into a fist and started digging his fingernails into his palm. “I have to do it now.”
“Not anymore.” Moving into his space, Sarah took hold of Hunter and got up on tiptoes to put them forehead to forehead. “I love you too much to lose you when I just got you back.”
“You don’t have me back,” Hunter revealed, breaking down even more as blood trickled in his closed hand. “The Hunter you used to know is dead.”
“Then I want this new Hunter,” Sarah said, clutching him even tighter. “Whoever he turns out to be. I’m not going to let him alternate between hiding and self-destructing to the point where he doesn’t have a life. You did not survive all that time in Afghanistan and Iraq just to come home and die.”
“Too many good people didn’t.” Will and Trey constantly lived in Hunter’s head. “I watched too many soldiers better than me die. I can never get past that.”
“We’re not saying you should,” Sarah told him. “But you do have to find a way to live with it.”
Hunter could hardly hear Sarah over the roaring of blood rushing in his ears. “It’s not possible to live with so much death. At my hands -- at others.” He opened his mouth, but at first nothing came out. Finally, so terribly raw, he whispered, “You don’t know.”
Taking up point, Jace tucked in close to Hunter too. “You’re right. We don’t. But one of those therapists’ names I gave you is also an army veteran who has served in combat. You could open up and tell him anything without fear that he would judge you or wouldn’t understand. I think he could help you, Hunter, if you’d only let him. And we would be here to support you with however much or little you need all the way.”
“You can’t go on like this.” Sarah’s voice registered too high, and Hunter knew her throat was as tight as his was. “I know you don’t want to. I know you want to see a light at the end of the tunnel. I think this therapist in Billings might be it.”
Blood trickled down Hunter’s torso, over scars so recent they hadn’t yet healed. Yet the rage still kicked and punched at him inside, demanding more blood. His…or someone else’s. It would never stop.
“If I go on much longer like this” -- Hunter’s chest heaved with unspeakable pain -- “it’s going to kill me. I know it.”
“No way.” Jace took Hunter’s hand, smearing his palm into Hunter’s bloody one without cringing or loosening his hold. “You have too much to live for. Even if you can’t see it for yourself right now, we can see it for you. You have to trust us that we’re right.”
Sarah took a step back, giving Hunter breathing room, but her wonderful, loving stare kept him prisoner. “Understand something, Hunter. You didn’t abandon me. I’m very proud of the life you chose, and I could not love you more right now for having the guts to face what it has done to you.” A smile -- a wobbly one -- appeared. “Do you remember what you told me when I told you I was scared for you to enlist in the army because you’d have to hide that you’re gay?”
Hunter could still remember her dragging him into her pink bedroom and pushing him to sit on her bed. “I said it doesn’t matter.” For the first time in years, a story about Sarah didn’t overwhelm Hunter and shut him down. “I said that something in my soul I can’t ignore is telling me I have to serve.”
“Right.” With a nod, Sarah rubbed his upper arms. “And somewhere within everything terrible inside you right now still exists that truth. You answered a calling, and it beat the shit out of you. But you are strong, and you can get yourself back. Or better, create a new man who has the history of premilitary Hunter, soldier-in-war Hunter, veteran Hunter, and now cowboy Hunter. They don’t have to fight each other. With some help, I believe you can let all those parts of you live peacef
ully together.”
Exhaling shakily, Hunter used the tree for support. He felt like a boxer who’d gone ten rounds. Immediately thoughts of Alex tore through his gut and shoved him into the ring again. “I never again want to feel the way I did yesterday morning after I beat up Alex.” He would never forget that man’s mangled face or the knowledge that he’d used his fists to do it. Tears leaking, Hunter whispered, “I’m so sorry I hurt him.”
“Then let that be your place to start,” Sarah said. “If you can’t yet bring yourself to ask for help, just for yourself, then do it so you never have to fear hurting Alex or anyone else again.”
“I have the therapist’s number inside,” Jace added, clearly unwilling to give Hunter a chance to refuse. “Why don’t you give him a call?”
“I will.” If Hunter had any sliver of hope Alex could still find a way to love him, he had to find a way to become worthy of it. “I need to.”
“Good.” This time Sarah didn’t grab him. She simply held out her hand. “After you make that call, I want you to stay here. I want you to just sleep for twenty-four hours.” She studied him openly, in a way that still pushed at the demons within. “I can see how tired you are.”
His heart raced terribly, and dizziness threatened to topple him, but Hunter took his sister’s hand. “You have no idea.”
Jace slung his arm around Hunter’s shoulders. “Then let’s go.”
Hunter looked up and found Alex standing on the back stoop.
Jesus.
ALEX WATCHED HUNTER approach. The beauty, dignity, and strength in the man took his breath away. Alex had heard every word of this threesome’s conversation, and had pretty much held his breath the entire length of their talk. Alex and Jasper had even rushed outside when Hunter had started scratching himself. But Jace had subdued him so quickly Jasper had clamped a hand over Alex’s mouth and dragged him back into the house undetected.
