Page 11 of Hunter
I need to get outta here. I need to lie low and stay at school for a while. Bangers aren’t dumb enough to step foot on school grounds. At least they aren’t in the Bronx. You don’t step foot on the Rose Hill campus.
I’ll be safe at HU. I’ll hole up in the library or the Tutoring Center. If I go now, I can even find a place to rest until morning. This is exactly why I carry all my shit with me. I never know when I’ll need to run.
“You need to move, I need to get back to campus, I can’t be here.” He’s in my fucking way. I don’t like this room. It’s small and has no windows. It looks halfway decent and clean. All I’ll do is dirty up the place.
“At what?” He pauses, frowning as he checks his fancy-ass Apple Watch, “2:11 in the morning? Not a fucking chance.” I scowl right back. I don’t like his fucking tone or appreciate how fine he looks when he tries to tell me what to do.
His stupid face is all over campus. Taunting me. HU has a bunch of its precious athletes on banners, and he’s one of them. Everywhere I go, there he is.
Evidently, he and his team are good or something. I don’t fucking know. I could give two shits about sports. The only thing that I know about hockey is that the Rangers play at the Garden. And that's only because the head Coach’s son went to Kings Prep. Dumbass tried to swap pills for tickets once.As if.
¿Por qué me mira de esa manera? Why does he look at me that way?He fucking stares. And not like everyone else does. A lot of people look at me like I'm trash that should be buried in a Jersey landfill. They turn their snotty little noses up at me and talk shit. They point. They laugh.And then I hex them all.
I grew up surrounded by violent men who believed in God. The X would shoot to kill while wearing Jesus around their necks and pull the trigger with the same fingers that they would dip into holy water before making the sign of the cross.
The church on our block was just as corrupt.Padreproved that everyone had a price. He had no problem cleansing the souls of gangbangers who killed the same people that he said funeral masses for.
The OG’s made sure to stuff the church donation envelopes and keepPadresupplied with all his favorite things. Benzos being one of them… and blow jobs from teenage girls being the other.
God never listened to me. He didn’t protect me when I was sent toPadre. He didn’t listen when I begged for the bad to stop. But Lilith and Hecate did.Mis diosas siempre escuchan. My goddesses always listen.
The Goddesses listened when I fantasized about a fire burning him alive and taking the church down with him. I wanted nothing more than for this, “House of God,” to burn eternally in fucking hell.
Firefighters said it was an electrical fire in the walls that took the building from the inside out. He was in a benzo-induced sleep and didn’t wake up when the smoke alarms were going off. I hope he fucking burns forever for what he made me do to him. He’d bless the top of my head while holding me down on my knees.
Padrewas the first person I hexed using witchcraft. I was thirteen, and being abrujaseemed fitting. I checked out every fucking book I could on witchcraft. I learned. I studied. I practiced using salt packets and the motherfucking moon. It wasn’t a phase. It stuck.
I started wearing all black. It’s a part of the X colors, so there were always black clothes in the hand-me-down piles I got. The OG’s thought I was being loyal. I was… just not to them.
This is really when people started looking at me like I was a fucking problem. But not Hunter, this motherfucker looks at me like I’m some fucking equation he’s trying to solve.Buena suerte, pendejo.
It makes me angry. He’s got no right to figure me out. I’m not a fucking book for him to read. I’m not anything to him, and he’s nothing to me. All he is is a fucking wall that I need to go through. And I need to go now.
“MOVE!” I spit out while trying to shove him outta the way. He doesn’t budge, and his eyes stay focused on me. He may be guarding the door like he's brave or something, but he’s no fucking white knight. I don’t believe in fairytales. I believe in me.Sólo yo.Just me.
This privileged pretty boy has no fucking idea what happens in the real world. He gets to walk outta here and go home. He’s free. And my freedom’s in fucking limbo the longer I’m back here.Él nunca entenderá. He will never understand that.
“I SAID MOVE!” I push my palms as hard as I can into his stomach. His rock-hard stomach, and he doesn’t even flinch.Where’s his fucking shirt? Who wants to see all these fucking gross-ass muscles, inked-up skin, and veiny tattoos?¡Yo no! Not me…
“And I’m saying no.” He grabs my wrists with a gentle, but firm pressure that I surprisingly don't hate. ¿¡Por qué carajo es así?! Why the fuck is he like this?!“I’m not letting you fucking leave, when whoever you’re running from is out there.”
“You don’t get a say,” I snarl in his fine-ass face. He doesn't even look fucking real, that’s how dumb hot he is right now.
“And you don’t get to run away from me,” he snaps back.¿Qué carajo significa eso? (What the fuck does that mean?) From him?! The fuck?!This man has lost his fucking mind and is about to make me lose mine.
“From you?! What the hell does that—.” A knock on the door has me biting my fucking tongue, instinctively holding my blade out and thinking the worst. Because they know what I did and they know I’m in here.
I also realistically know that gangbangers wouldn’t knock if there was something they wanted on the other side of whatever was in their way.
But he doesn’t know that as he turns around, acting like my personal bodyguard. No one’s ever put themselves between me and someone else before. I’ve always faced the world on my own. I’ve never had anyone try to physically protect me from anything, anywhere, at any time.
And that's how I feel when his big ass body is firmly between me and the next knock, blocking me from whatever danger he thinks is lurking on the other side of the door.
SEVEN
“Hunt,”Alv says from the other side while knocking twice.
“I’m gonna open the door for Alvi now, you can put that away,” I tell her while chin pointing to her knife. She doesn’t move to listen to my command.
