And at the end of the day, that was the reason why I sought him out again and again.
Mercer clicked her tongue. “You might not be using him, but are you sure he doesn’t see you as an easy target? Are you positive he isn’t using you?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that. My instincts said Huck had no reason to use me or mess with me. In fact, it would’ve been super easy for him to let me go when I tried to leave this morning. But he had sharp edges and hidden agendas now that hadn’t been part of who he was back when I knew him best, so there was always the possibility he was playing me. Even if that was the case, I’d rather lose to him than win with anyone else.
Instead of answering, I deflected the question back to her. “So, you’ve been MIA again. Did you get things sorted with your new guy? Did you talk to him about the issues you were having?” Her love life might be messy, but it was bound to be less complicated than mine. “You met Huck. How about I get a chance to meet your mystery man? You said he wanted to tag along last time we hung out.” I lifted my eyebrows at her. “I promise not to embarrass you the way you embarrassed me just now.”
She snorted and stepped out of the backroom, flipping on the lights in the rest of the store as she went. “I wanted to see how Huck would react when he was on the spot. That boy is ice cold, though. I can’t imagine anything that would rattle him.”
He’d been pretty shaken up when he heard just how bad things had gotten with Sawyer, but I didn’t tell her that because I realized she was trying to flip the conversation back to focus on me. She obviously didn’t want to talk about whatever was going on with her new man. It wasn’t like her to be so secretive.
Her evasion made me worry even more about how she was really doing.
I shot a hand out and caught her arm. This time when her bracelets jangled, they sounded less cheery and more ominous. She pulled free and frowned at me. “Think you need to be worrying about what you’re going to do and not worry so much about what I’m doing. After all, this is far from my first relationship, and we both know you have absolutely no clue what it is you’re doing with Huck.”
I couldn’t hold back a startled gasp. Mercer never spoke like that to anyone, but especially not to me. She always handled me like I was something fragile. I put a hand to my chest and blinked, not only because her words and tone stung, but also because a loud bang of thunder echoed through the small building. With Huck gone, and with her being so defensive, all the fizzy, fun feelings began to dissipate, and my lingering fear of storms was starting to creep back under my skin.
I held up my hands in a gesture of surrender. “All right, I get it. I won’t ask about the guy or your relationship anymore. Just know that I’m here if you decide you want to talk to me about why you’ve been acting so weird lately. You’ve been there for me, no matter what. It’s the least I can do in return. I just want to be the kind of friend to you that you’ve been to me.”
I yelped and did an embarrassing little hop-skip thing as another crack of thunder rattled the walls and windows.
Mercer sighed and gave me a look that I couldn’t really read. I hated that there seemed to be this gap building between us that I couldn’t figure out how to cross. “No one’s going to come in with the weather being like this. How about I keep the closed sign out, and we hide out in the back and watch Netflix? I’ll order delivery, and you can play hooky from school in style. It’s been a while since it was just you and me on a rainy day.”
It’d been a while because we both had boys on the brain, but for very different reasons. I thought I would never know what it was like to have my own life without Huck’s help. Mercer seemed to have sacrificed her happy-go-lucky lifestyle for the new man in her life. Come to think of it, I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen her with one of her signature smiles that lit up the whole room.
While I would rather have been alone to weed through all my rambling thoughts, I forced a smile and nodded. “Sure. That sounds fun. You always make rainy days better.”
Or, at least she had. Today she looked like she was going to her own execution rather than sitting down to binge something with me.
I guess it wasn’t only me and Huck who had a change of heart recently.
Huck
“Do you really think someone was in the house last night?”
Harlen looked pissed as he asked the question. Vernon looked concerned. Both ambushed me as soon as I walked in the front door, soaking wet and still reeling from everything that had gone down between me and Ollie over the last handful of hours. From waking up alone, to chasing after her in the rain, to realizing I wasn’t going to be able to let her go again; it was a lot to absorb. It had taken me a very long time to get to a point where I finally felt like my life wasn’t in a constant state of flux, but now I was standing right back on the edge of a cliff of uncertainty. Logic told me I needed to back away as quickly as possible, but my heart wasn’t having any of it. My heart wanted me to jump.
I rubbed a towel over my head to try and dry my hair. I’d needed a shower to chase away the chill of not only jogging home in the rain, but also the one that made the only place that ever felt like home feel tainted. It felt like my sanctuary had been corrupted and violated. It felt like all the shadows had once again found their way back into my world.
“I don’t know if someone was in the house last night, but if we didn’t fix those stairs, and Mr. Peters didn’t touch them, I think it’s safe to say someone was in here tinkering around with things that would make it easier to come and go without being noticed.”
Harlen let out a growl that rumbled from low within his muscular chest. “Fuck that. Do you think your brother hired someone to track Ollie down?”
Vernon scowled and ran a hand over his white hair. “But that doesn’t make any sense. Why would he wait until Ollie found you to fuck with her? If he really wanted to mess with her or scare her into going back home, wouldn’t he have done that when she first got here? She was all alone then. This guy sounds like a certified psychopath, but he doesn’t sound stupid. In fact, he seems far from it.”
I finished getting dressed and shifted my worried gaze between the two of them.
“When I tell you that Sawyer is obsessed with Ollie, I don’t think you understand just how perverse and twisted he is.”
I hadn’t even known the level of his depravity until I overheard her pleading with our landlord earlier. I wanted to say that nothing about my half brother could surprise me anymore, but I was wrong. He hadn’t just gone off the deep end; he was drowning in a sea of blackness and sinking underneath waves of unchecked mental illness. I was horrified I never realized what he was doing to Ollie’s mother. I’d always called him evil and told myself he was a monster, but it was more than that. It was clear his wiring wasn’t right, and no one in his life had tried to get him any help. He was sick, but the people who surrounded him enabled him, sheltered him, coddled him; they were the ones who had a special place in hell waiting for them.
“I think Sawyer was okay watching from a distance when she was on her own. He probably thought she would fail. I’m sure he assumed I would turn my back on her because it was no secret how hurt I was when she turned on me. Once she was under the same roof as me, I bet he lost what little is left of his mind. There’s no way he could handle the two of us rekindling any kind of relationship. If he had someone watching her before and feeding him information, he would need to know for certain what was going on between me and her. He’d have to see it himself.” Nothing else would suffice. “Ollie said he was watching her before as well.”