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He would let Garrett punch him again if this was the result.
“Yeah,” he said, and his voice sounded slightly thick. His cheek had taken the brunt of the hit, but his nose felt sore, too.
“I think you’re bleeding,” she said. “Do you want to go to the nurse?”
Bleeding? He touched a hand to his nose and felt wetness. Crimson drops clung to his fingers.
Clare was fishing through her backpack. “Here.”
Tissues. He held one to his face. This was just great. Maybe he could pee his pants next.
“You were going to fight him,” said Clare, her voice soft.
“I wasn’t going to let him kill me.”
“Aren’t you afraid of him?”
“I used to be,” he said honestly.
“Did your dad teach you to fight, too?”
“Yeah.” He checked the tissues. Ugh. “God, I look like a total wuss.”
“No way,” said Clare with a smile. “I think you look totally fearless.”
CHAPTER 3
The early summer air was soft on Hunter’s face as he trudged through the woods to the edge of the cornfield. He’d shoved some apples and two cans of soda in his backpack, along with a box of ammunition and two unloaded handguns.
Clare was walking by his side.
He was going to teach her to shoot.
His father’s lack of anger left him feeling more worried instead of less. The warning still rang in his ears, and he told his brain to knock it off. What could she be using him for? Shooting lessons?
Stupid.
She’d been mostly quiet on the walk to his house, and he’d been walking a cord of tension himself, ready for Jeremy or Garrett or one of those morons to come flying out of the trees.
But nothing had happened.
“You could take them, couldn’t you?” she said out of the blue.
He didn’t have to ask who she was talking about. After that display in the hallway, he wasn’t surprised those thugs were on her mind, too. He smiled. “Take them,” he mimicked. “I don’t really want to fight them.”
“Why not? Don’t you think they’d leave you alone?”
Hunter stopped at the edge of the tree line. There was a long stretch of grass here before the cornfield started, and his dad had set steel targets of varying heights into the ground. He set his backpack gently on the ground.
“That’s not how it works,” he said, dropping to sit in the grass. He unzipped the nylon. “If it were that easy, I’d have done it at the beginning of the year.”
She hesitated, then dropped to sit beside him, pulling her skirt over her knees. The grass was warm here, the sun beating down. “I don’t understand.”
“People don’t really leave me alone,” he said. “Kind of an occupational hazard.”
She frowned. “I still don’t understand.”
Hunter smiled and shook his head. “Sorry. I just mean, when I fight them, it seems to inspire them to fight more. You know how sometimes when you put up resistance, it just makes people push harder?”
