Page 13 of Hunter

I turn on my heel before he can answer, shoulder screaming with the movement, and shove my way out the door into the cool night air.

My hands are shaking. My chest feels too tight.

And all I can see behind my eyelids is golden curls, light-blue eyes, and chipped black nail polish that somehow didn’t tremble once while I tried to tear him down.

Fuck.

I hate him.

Chapter 6

Charlie

The door slams behind Hunter hard enough that the cheap frame rattles.

For a second, the whole room feels too quiet. Someone coughs. Elena crosses the room and takes my hand again. She’s been doing that the last few sessions. I think I remind her of her son, who she lost to suicide. Her thumb strokes the back of my knuckles as though she is trying to remind me I’m safe.

I’m safe.

But my pulse is fluttering anyway. And it isn’t from fear.

Tim clears his throat gently. “Okay…let’s take a breath, everyone. That was a lot of energy. We’ll process it next time if anyone needs to.”

I nod like I’m fine. I even manage a small smile for the group as people start gathering their things. But inside my head it’s loud.

Hunter.

Six feet of rage wrapped in burnt edges of self-hatred so thick I could almost taste it. Dark messy hair, hazel eyes that looked more dead than alive when he first walked in. Fresh gauze peeking out from under his collar as if he was daring anyone to ask about it. How his voice dropped when he called me a twink like it was some sort of insult.

And still…God help me, he was beautiful in the worst way. Ruined and stubborn and somehow still magnetic.

I hate that he’s my type.

I thought I was past this. Thought the city and the pole and the quiet mornings with Sofia had sanded down those sharp edges in me; the ones that still reach for damaged men like they’re the oxygen I need to survive. The ones that whisper maybe I can help even when I know better.

Apparently not.

Because when he leaned in close, towering over me with that mean glare and those broad shoulders tense as though he was one breath away from exploding, something in my stomach flipped. A curiosity and heat burned through me in equal measures. The same stupid flutter I used to get right before I let someone too broken get too close.

The whole reason I ended up in conversion therapy in the first place.

Broken boys still in the closet trying to break me, too. Being labeled gay in my small hometown had been an embarrassment for my preacher father. And he and my mother looked up the best conversion therapy in the country and drove me fifteen hours before dropping me off in Texas.

I can still feel the dust on that long dirt road. The way the car smelled like my mother’s perfume and my father’s aftershave. How they didn’t even hug me goodbye, just handed me my duffel bag and told me this was God’s plan to make me whole again.

Whole.

They tried so hard to carve the softness out of me.

Prayer. Ice baths. Hours on my knees while they had me shout scripture until my voice gave out. Hands on my shoulders, on my thighs, “guiding” me back to righteousness. Every touch felt like ownership.

They made me have fake conversations with my mother, my father, other people in my life, while they tried to make me hate them for what they let me become.

But the worst nights—the ones that still make me wake up crying—were when the “counselors” decided words and cold water weren’t enough. They wanted proof I didn’t like dick.

So they brought in boys from the program. Older ones who’d already “graduated.” Made me watch while they touched themselves. Made me touch them too, under their supervision, while they prayed over me and told me to feel the disgust. Told me if I got hard it was the demon, and if I didn’t it was proof the program was working. They’d stroke me themselves sometimes, clinical and cold, checking for any reaction like I was a broken machine they could fix with the right amount of shame and embarrassment.

“See?” they’d whisper while my stomach heaved. “This is what you want? This is sin. Feel how wrong it is.”