Page 55 of Hunter
“Your man, that’s who.” I’m all in. All. Fucking. In. And like I told her earlier, I’m taking her stubborn ass with me.
“Is that what you think you are? My man?” I swear her eyes just sparked into a five-alarm fire.That’s it, burn me alive, Ed.
“Yeah, baby, I am. And that makes you mine.”Mine. Mine. Mine.And she’s the one thing I don’t want to share with anyone ever. The flames in her eyes are just for me.
“I don’t belong to men anymore,pendejo,” she lifts her defiant, dimpled chin with that hard head of hers. The conviction in her voice is iron-clad, and I want to smash through it to show her that I’m worthy.
“We belong to each other.” Her face softens, and I know I’m getting somewhere. Every conversation is a chance for me to tell her what she never expected to hear from a man that she never expected to care about her.
“And Ed, when the time comes, and it will,hermosa, I’ll be the one to undress you, and when I do, it’s going to be like I’m unwrapping a present that’s just for me. Because that’s what you are, baby. You’re mine.”
THIRTY
When my grandmother’scar service picked me up in the city, I was so broken that I was convinced that there were pieces of me scattered all over New York. I felt dead even though I was breathing. I was going through the motions and also frozen in time. I couldn’t believe it. My world had been destroyed, and here I was, being driven to my new life in a top-of-the-line luxury car.
The Kings Prep underage sex scandal ended up making national news after my father was found dead in his bed. Insteadof calling to console me over his death, my grandmother sent a courier letter to let me know a car would be arriving and to pack up whatever it was that was worth saving. All I took was my Louis trunk that I had filled with all of my things from Gabe. Nothing else was worth taking.
When my father was caught in his office bathroom, flushing cocaine down the toilet in a white collared shirt and nothing else, I felt embarrassed and hurt. I knew my Dad liked to socialize with Coke, vodka, and women. I just didn’t know how much he was doing and how young the women actually were.
He reassured me that he’d have the best lawyer and legal team in all of New York defending him, and he did. They got him out on house arrest, and he was serving his time out on Long Island, where we had our summer estate. And then he killed himself.
His lawyer had called and said he’d received videos of him and underage female students from Kings fucking in his office at school. My classmates, even some of my friends, were sleeping with my Dad, and now they wanted to cash in. They demanded money, but there were too many girls coming forward and not enough zeros in his trust to cover them all quietly.
My grandmother refused to bail him out, and instead of wiring him the money, she told him that he wasn’t worth saving. He overdosed that night.
All of this happened within weeks of my boyfriend getting arrested. It was like a part of my body had been amputated without any anesthesia. The pain of him being locked away was so unbearable that I agreed to my grandmother’s terms; she’d get her legal team involved if I agreed to move out to Havenwood and into her estate.
She also made me promise her that I’d apply and go to my grandfather’s alma mater, HU, once I got settled. If I did this, then she’d let me live in the brand new townhouse they haveright downtown, and she’d give me access to my trust when I turned twenty-five, instead of thirty-five, which was how old she was when she inherited hers.
So that’s what I did. I got in the black SUV to go to Virginia, while Gabe was sentenced to do sixteen to eighteen months in a low-level security prison in Connecticut. He got out in fourteen for good behavior.
I was already distraught, but when we drove over the George Washington Bridge and into New Jersey, I started to crash out in the backseat of that luxury car. I felt like I was about to have a full-on manic episode that was heavily mixed with this intense heartbreak over being separated from my soulmate and this tightly twisted grief over my father dying. New York had started to become bad for my recently diagnosed schizoaffective disorder, and I was hanging on by a thread without Gabe.
My grandmother insisted that I start to see a psychiatrist as one of her terms. I only agreed, if she agreed, that Gabe could come live with me in Havenwood when he paroled out, which she did, and he now has.
She’s always had a soft spot for him and would say that he reminded her of her first husband, who also grew up in a rough neighborhood. She called him the true love of her life. And I’m finally reunited with mine.
Even though Gabe’s home, I still think about when he wasn’t. It washerfault that he had to leave me. She took him away for no reason. She didn’t care who she hurt, and sheknewshe would be hurting me the most.
Valentine Garcia built the bomb that blew my world up. She knew that it would be life-changing for me to lose both of them. It didn’t matter to her that she was taking away my father and my boyfriend. We didn’t have to be friends for her to know that. She just didn’t care that she was cutting my heart out. But everyone says I’m the one who’s all fucked up.
And I am. Seeing Valentine again has flipped on every switch inside of me. I’m so triggered that I can’t think straight. Everything is crazy in my head, and I really think seeing this bitch has thrown me into another episode of full-blown unmedicated mania. I honestly thought I was hallucinating at first.
She disappeared right before everything happened with LatinX. She threw the grenade and ran. I know it was her. I can smell the betrayal. How could she do that to her cousin? He didn’t deserve that. He didn’t deserve any of it.
I was barely sleeping and would stay up all night, writing in those spiral notebooks. There would be pages of my own theories that always led to her, along with chunks of paper that simply had his name written over and over again.
I had no idea that she was alive and well here in the Havenwood Hills of Virginia, and going to school at HU. I had looked for her all over the internet. I couldn’t find anything on her. There was no social media, no public records, nothing. It was really like Valentine Garcia had died.
She didn't, though; she just reinvented herself into someone new. It didn’t matter; she could call herself whatever she wanted. I know who she is, and I know what she did.
She lit a match and set my world on fire. Now all I want to do is burn Edison Santos at the stake and make sure that Valentine Garcia really does die this time.
TRENTA Y UNO
He insistedon walking as close to me as he possibly could when he followed me out of the cafeteria. He had my bag on his back and didn’t stop to talk to anyone who tried. Instead, he kept all his attention on me.Doesn’t he care that people are lookingat him like he’s fucking crazy? Does he realize he’s walking next to me? Didn’t he notice that I was wearing the same clothes as yesterday? Isn’t he like… embarrassed?
“Shut it down, Ed,” he had said to me while we walked toward the library.Doesn’t he have things he'd rather be doing? Isn’t there other people that he wants to be around? Like his hockey team? He really just wants to sit in there with me?
