I shook my head. “Thanks, but I can’t let you do that. It’s too much.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. It’s so nice of you to offer me something so huge,” I said softly. “But I can’t accept it.”
“Okay. But if things get worse, promise me you’ll think about it again?”
I nodded and squeezed his forearm. “I will.”
Trina’s eyebrows suddenly shot up. “Shit,” she muttered. “Don’t look to your left, Laney.”
Unfortunately for Trina, the absolute best way to make someone look to the left was to tell them not to do it. I snapped my gaze to the side, and my heart sank as I saw Hunter striding into Café Seven.
He spotted us and started heading over to our booth.
Trina jumped up and ran over to intercept him. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she said, hands on her hips. “I told you to stay the hell away from her!”
Hunter looked past her and called out to me. “Laney, can you just—”
Trina shoved him in the chest, cutting him off. “What part of ‘stay the hell away from her’ do you not get?” she said.
Hunter let out a short sigh and focused his gaze on her. “Trina, I’m sorry, but this needs to be said. For once in your life, shut the fuck up.”
Trina’s mouth fell open, and she stared at him with wide-eyed disbelief.
Hunter seized the opportunity to talk to me again. “Laney, I really need you to listen to me,” he said.
I dropped my gaze. I could still see him, but I refused to meet his eyes or even look anywhere near his face.
His voice softened. “Can you at least look at me?”
I kept staring at the table next to him, jaw clenched. The places where his hands had touched me yesterday burned with a desperate need to feel him there again, but I knew I couldn’t act on those feelings.
He let out a sigh. “You said you trusted me yesterday. Now you won’t even look at me or listen to a single word I have to say.”
Adam stood up. “That’s not fair. Things were different yesterday,” he said icily.
Hunter ignored his brother and kept his focus on me. “Laney, I know how bad this looks. I know you think it was me, and I know you have a good reason for that. But I swear, it wasn’t me.”
“Bullshit,” Trina hissed, holding out her arm to stop him from coming any closer.
“Trina, for fuck’s sake,” he said, glaring at her. “I just need ten seconds, okay?”
She glowered at him and looked pointedly at her watch.
“I know I’ve done shitty things to you in the past, and you only told me about the video a few days ago, so it makes sense that you’d assume I did this,” Hunter said, looking over at me again. “But it wasn’t me. I swear. Someone is obviously trying to drive a wedge between us, and it’s working.”
“Okay, it’s been more than ten seconds. Feel free to fuck off now,” Trina said with a sneer.
Hunter ignored her and kept going. “You need to know that your secrets have always been safe with me, Laney. All of them,” he said. “I know you don’t believe that anymore, and I know I don’t even deserve for you to believe it after all the shit that’s gone down between us before these last few days. But it’s true. I wish you could trust me again and see that.”
A tear slid down my cheek. I briskly wiped it away, being careful to avoid moving my head. I still couldn’t bring myself to look at Hunter. If I did, I might start to believe him again.
That was more dangerous than anything.
“I’m not going to give up on you,” he went on. “I’m going to leave you alone now and give you some time to cool off. But I’ll never give up. When you’re ready to talk, I’ll be waiting.”
I finally looked up at him. When I met his eyes, I saw a flash of real pain behind them.
Don’t believe it, I told myself. He’s a fucking good actor. You know this. You can’t fall for it again.
“Leave,” Trina said, crossing her arms.
He nodded and lifted his palms. “Don’t worry. I’m out.” His gaze flickered between my eyes for a second longer. Then he dragged in a deep breath and turned away. “Bye, Laney.”
With that, he was gone.
3
Hunter
I stepped into the rain with gritted teeth, heading for the car. There was a horrible feeling inside me. Like someone had driven an ax into my chest and split my fucking heart in two. Every muscle in my body was tense, strung so tight that I was close to snapping. I felt like a drug addict coming down after a binge, unable to get more of his chosen drug.
It wasn’t the worst day of my life, for obvious reasons, but it still ranked pretty damn highly. Just this morning, I was buzzing with excitement, ready to walk into school with my arm slung around Laney. Ready to crush my lips on hers in front of everyone so they knew she was mine and mine alone.
Now the day had taken the worst possible turn, and I was stuck out here in the car, listening to the rain pounding on the windshield while Laney cried in a dingy coffee shop.
She wouldn’t even look at me when I entered the place a minute ago, but I could still see her. Her eyes were filled with so much sadness. The rest of her, too. It radiated off her, pouring all through the room and wrapping around me in dark tendrils, gripping my heart in a cold vise.
I wished she would jump up and hit me, kick me, slice into me with her words. Anything that would mean she was at least acknowledging me. But she didn’t. She just sat there looking utterly defeated, refusing to meet my gaze. I wasn’t sure if she’d even taken in any of what I had to say.
I knew I shouldn’t have followed her and her friends into town after I saw them leaving campus—Trina had made it very clear to me earlier that I needed to give Laney time and space to process the horror of what happened in the auditorium—but I couldn’t stay away. Not without letting her know that it wasn’t me behind the whole thing.
It was obvious why she thought it was me, and I couldn’t blame her for that. She trusted me enough to tell me about the sickening video from her past, and within two days the whole school had seen it. If I were her, I’d think it was me too.
But it wasn’t.
There was a time in my life when I may have considered sinking that low to get back at her, but that ended on Sunday. Now I knew the truth about her, and I would never hurt her like that. Never.
Besides, if I actually was some sort of fucking sociopath who wanted to paint her as the school slut for some reason, I could’ve just sneaked a camera into her dorm room last night and filmed her when we went for round three. But I didn’t, and I had no desire to do such a thing, because I cared about her.
I sucked down a ragged breath, and my shoulders hunched as a cold sense of powerlessness flooded through me. One of the worst parts about all of this was that Laney was suffering, and I couldn’t even comfort her because she thought I caused that suffering. It fucking killed me. My fingers ached with the need to stroke her hair and pull her close to me, but a thick, silent wall had gone up between us as soon as she turned to look at me in the auditorium and decided I was guilty.