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“She’s so fucking perfect,” Blaise whispered while sitting in the glider and staring at me.
“She kept me up all night,” Ryker said with a sigh. I bit my tongue. I knew for a fact that he spent most of the night just watching her breathe. I guess you could say we all had the new-parent jitters. I never thought it was possible to love someone as much as I loved my daughter.
“I’ll take the next shift,” Callum offered enthusiastically while handing me a nutrient-dense breakfast shake. We sat in our master bedroom, watching our daughter feed. My breasts were heavy and sore. Breastfeeding wasn’t so bad after all. I didn’t think it was possible to feel this tired but still be so damn happy.
“She is definitely a Bullet. Resilient little princess,” Gavriel said before kissing my neck. He was lying beside me on the mattress.
I was so scared to become a mother. I was so terrified to take the next step with my family. But things were perfect. We fought for this. We died for this. Like my best friend's namesake, something beautiful was born from the ashes of our evolution.
Bullets Forever.
A Lovely Obsession
Hunter’s Story
Preview
ROE
My heels wobbledon the slippery tile in Nicole Knight’s kitchen. Bodies were herded together, crashing into one another with flirty looks and lingering stares. I had a buzz in my bones, a tingling forgetfulness that tempted my good sense.
To some, it was a house party. To me, it was a rare escape.
“Have another drink, Roe,” Nicole said while jabbing a dirty shot glass in my face. I’d seen at least a dozen of my classmates wrap their chapsticked tobacco lips around that very rim. I wasn’t in the spirit to catch mono, but the clear liquid inside of it tantalized me.
I wasn’t much of a partier. Wasn’t much of an extrovert, either. But tonight—justfor tonight—I needed to pretend to be someone else for a bit. Someone that didn’t strategically know every danger in the room.
“I should stop,” I replied. I had already devoured enough tequila to make my body chatter, and my cotton mouth pout was begging me to drink some water.
Nicole frowned. She was my friend of the month. Tragically beautiful, she had bright blond hair and sparkling jade eyes that seemed to spill with sad mischief. She moved here two months ago, which meant she hadn’t been around long enough to know what I was about.
“Come on, you wanted to forget that asshole, drink up!” she encouraged, pressing the cool glass to my lips. I took it from her and swallowed, letting the scorching hot liquid land on my tongue before shooting it down my throat.
Some onlookers cheered. Bad decisions were more palatable when you had good company.
“How are you doing, girl?” Nicole asked while draping her slender arm around my shoulder. She smelled unmistakably of cheap beer and cotton candy body spray, but she was noticeably sober. I realized a couple of weeks ago that she liked to host the parties, not become them.
“I’m fine,” I lied, the words like ash on my tongue. That expression was getting on my nerves. It was one of those lies everyone could see through, like a sheer blanket you wrapped around yourself before bracing for a blizzard. But it wasn’t my recent breakup that had me out of sorts.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “You seem so sad tonight. It’s a fucking party! Liven up!” Nicole fist-pumped the air just as a guy bumped into her, rocking us both as he staggered to the living room. She rolled her eyes at him when he didn’t apologize, before turning her attention to me. “I didn’t even think you liked Joel that much. I mean, you broke up with him, right?”
Joel was my ex. He was nice but vacant, and he worked perfectly for what I needed. He smoked pot on the weekends and liked to play video games. We lasted longer than most of my relationships, mostly because he seemed more concerned with getting high than asking questions. But of course, it didn’t last.
Joel started to gettooclose. He started to want to know about my likes, dislikes, past, present, and if I could imagine a future with him.
So naturally, I ran.
“I know. I just wasn’t expecting him to move on so quickly,” I replied, the lie easily rolling off my lips. If I were being honest, I wasn’t drinking myself into oblivion because of Joel, but Nicole didn’t need to know that. I’d rather she think I was heartbroken than know what was really bothering me. The truth wasn’t as easy to swallow.
Joel spent all week fucking through anything with a pussy, and any normal girl who could actually fall in love would feel devastated about that, but not me.
I wasn’t healthy. I devoured affections and spun them into sophisticated insecurities, ending them without a care. I was a serial dater. A clingy friend that kept things surface level, then fled. There was a certain high I felt when getting to know someone. I was obsessed with hoarding personalities and hyper-focusing on the intricate tics of others to avoid my own. I liked making friends. I liked kissing random boys. It was sticking around that I struggled with. I was running out of people to fall for.
“You know what they say,” Nicole began. “The best way to get over an ex is to get under someone else.” She knocked my hip with hers and giggled. I doubted she had evergotten underanyone. Nicole might’ve liked to host parties to piss off her parents, but she wasn’t actually as rebellious as she claimed to be. It was another one of those quirks I’d picked up on.
“I’m tired of the dating pool at Mountain Prep,” I argued. “It’s a bunch of fumbling boys that use your vagina like a fleshlight before asking, ‘Did you come?’” My chuckles filled the room as Nicole gaped at me. Our school was nestled in suburban utopia just outside of Denver, where the middle class thrived and every day at school felt like a reality TV show. People liked to create drama so their small town boredom was more palatable.
Nicole laughed as she peered around the room, assessing the growing crowd in her house. “I don’t know, I heard Chris is good in bed,” she offered, nodding at the preppy quarterback currently hitting a Juul and blowing smoke in some poor girl’s face. Oh yes, I knew Chris very well.
