We Found Love (5 page)

S
ILENCE
HAD
a way of maddening strong minds, and in a place like Hartfield—where crazy came in abundance—silence had a way of wreaking havoc. It led to thinking, and thinking led to remembering. Remembering led to fearing, and….

Swallowing hard, Riley burrowed his head deeper into his pillow. He lay flat on his back, corpse flat, with his arms crossed over his chest. That’s how he would’ve been tucked away in his coffin had that shower nineteen months ago worked the way he’d planned. Why couldn’t people just leave him the fuck alone?

Speaking of….

“Why did you try to help me?” he mumbled, not really sure if Hunter had fallen asleep. After all, they’d been lying in complete silence for over an hour already. And Riley didn’t dare look over and assess the situation. That’d make him look interested, and he most def wasn’t interested.

“That’s a hell of a way of thanking someone, man,” Hunter eventually answered. Almost like he’d been lying on his side of the room calculating his response just to keep the peace. Riley sympathized.

“Who said anything about being thankful?”

The springs of Hunter’s bed creaked and squealed. A soft
thud, thud
followed. The sound nagged at Riley, begging him to glance over and do a little ocular investigation. Oh, but he didn’t want to. He knew good and damn well looking over would lead to conversation—conversation he didn’t want to have. Talking to people wasn’t his forte, not by a damn sight. And yet his head turned toward the distant bed before he had enough sense to make himself stop.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Hunter asked, demanding and angry, body steely and rigid, shoulders squared, and honestly, kinda hot. “Someone does something nice for you, and you gotta shit all over it. Why?”

The tone and volume of his voice took Riley right back to that house from his childhood: John standing over him while he hunkered down in a dark corner, Mimi pretending to cry in the background, Riley only wanting to be a good little boy. Riley wanted to shrink back in the corner of his bed, close his eyes, and pray the night away like he used to. He couldn’t, though. He couldn’t let this guy think he could walk all over him. This was Riley’s territory.

Clenching his jaw, he raised his eyes to Hunter’s towering level. Their stares locked, and a million things passed through Riley’s head—from telling Hunter to fuck off, to pushing him back to his side of the room, to kissing him breathless. The last came as a huge shock. There was only one other guy he’d ever wanted to kiss. That wasn’t to say he hadn’t been turned on by men in the past. Oh, he had. He’d had more sex than he was proud to admit. But kissing, well, that took things to a whole new level, didn’t it?

“Maybe I’m not thankful,” Riley settled on saying. It sounded a hell of a lot better than what he wanted to say.
How about you get the fuck out of my face.

“What, you wanted that guy to pulverize you?”

Riley shrugged. “He wouldn’t have.”

“Looked like he was close to me.”

“Nah. He’s all talk and no show.”

Something resembling frustration passed over Hunter’s face. It came in the form of rolled eyes and pursed lips and turned into softened shoulders and a sharp exhale. He stepped back, then plopped his ass down on the edge of the bed, as if all his mojo had suddenly drained out of him and he couldn’t do the
getting all up in someone’s face
business anymore.

For whatever reason, that made Riley sit up. He swung his legs over the edge of the bed and turned his body toward Hunter. The guy looked tired, like genuinely worn the fuck down. Dark rings circled his eyes. His color wasn’t quite right, and still he was probably the most attractive person Riley had seen in a long time. The right amount of messy in the blond hair, clothes that hugged all the right places, and the right amount of sun, and damn, Hunter probably would’ve been more godlike and less corpselike.

“I didn’t hit that guard or anything,” Riley admitted, though after he said the words, he wasn’t sure why he’d shared that juicy tidbit.

Hunter raised his head, frowning in confusion as if he’d already forgotten the orderly’s nice little introduction.

“The scar on the orderly’s chin.” Riley pointed to his own, drawing a line with the tip of his finger. “He said I put him through a window. It wasn’t because I hit him.”

“What happened?”

Those two words spurred a great internal debate in Riley. He didn’t talk to people, especially strangers, for obvious reasons. Last time he’d spoken to a stranger it didn’t end so well, and he’d ended up living in hell for four long, miserable years. Then again, this stranger had just stood up for him, tried to protect him from getting his face punched in.

“You don’t have to—”

“He tried waking me up from a night terror,” Riley admitted. That truth made him lower his eyes. Actually, he didn’t want to see Hunter’s reaction to the news of his new roommate being a violent sleeper. “It doesn’t happen all the time. But when it does, it’s bad. They told me I’d been screaming so loud it was causing other residents to act out.”

“So how did you put him through the window?”

“It was the window in the door, and he didn’t go through it. His chin hit the edge and busted open, but he had to make a bigass deal of it. They sedated me after.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

Biting the inside of his cheek, Riley raised his head. He found Hunter eyeing him hard, startlingly hard, which would’ve made Riley uncomfortable enough to act out. Violently act out. But not this time. This time, the need to stand his ground didn’t hit him like it had before. Obviously, Hunter was curious. Not sizing him up but trying to figure him out.

Good luck with that, guy.

“Sooo…,” Hunter drawled.

This was the point in conversation between strangers where things got awkward. They always got awkward when they wanted to ask questions but didn’t want to be rude about it. Riley wondered which question Hunter wanted to ask: the wrists, the night terrors, or why he was here to begin with.

“How horrible is this place?” Hunter asked.

Wow. Okay. Didn’t expect that one.

“Um….” Riley swallowed, rubbing his hand all the way up his colorful forearm. Trying to hide the scars didn’t seem as important now. “Depends. You got anything to compare it to?” And that was how you asked someone about their past without being nosy or rude.

“Nah. Jail once. No big.”

“Well, this ain’t Disney World, but it ain’t Guantanamo Bay, either.”

“So… comfortable middle?”

Riley snorted out a laugh. “Yeah, comfortable middle works.”

Hunter’s mouth stretched wide around a yawn as he settled back on his bed. He tucked one arm under his pillow. One arm over. His eyelids looked heavy, like he was barely clinging to consciousness and any minute Riley would lose him. Only Riley wasn’t exactly ready to be alone again. All this time without company, and he’d always sworn he didn’t want it or need it; to have a taste left him craving more.

“There’s stuff to do here,” he said, returning to the conversation. “I mean, we can make it our own Disney World.”
God, that sounds so juvenile.
“I mean, there’s stuff the staff doesn’t know about.”

That made Hunter perk up. He opened his eyes to full width and angled his head on his pillow so that he was now looking more at Riley than the air and opportunity between them. “Yeah,” he finally said, “like what?”

And now Riley had to decide if Hunter was someone he could trust enough with the secrets of what went down here after dark. The only other person Riley had gotten close to in this place had told him the tales of Hartfield, and Riley had sworn not to tell anyone—unless that anyone was special like Riley.

Thinking about Andy brought back a lot of old laughs and tears. Whirlwind Andy had come through Riley’s life and taken it by storm. Roommate number one. Best friend. Would-be love had Andy been gay. Like… really gay. He’d been one of those semistraight guys who would kiss a boy every once in a while. He’d claimed he liked kissing Riley the best. And Andy had been the one to show Riley the magical place the patients weren’t allowed to go.

“You gonna spill or what?” Hunter asked, ripping Riley out of his memories.

“Yeah. Um… s-sorry,” Riley stuttered.

Hunter tilted his head, stare narrowing. “Where did you go just now?”

Everywhere and nowhere.
Off to find Andy again.
“I was thinking.”

“About what?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying.” Sighing, Hunter rolled onto his back and set his gaze on the ceiling. From the side, he looked much thinner, not as intimidating. Hell, he even appeared smaller than Riley, though Riley knew that wasn’t the case at all. “I’m too tired to play the quiet game right now.” Hunter yawned again. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Riley immediately opened his mouth to spill his guts, now that he’d managed the balls to say something. His lips moved, and his brain did a damn good job of arranging words into sentences. But his vocal cords checked right the fuck out. Before he could silently coax them into getting with the program, a soft snore from the other side of the room blew his brightly formed sentences into jumbled letters. Like an eraser to a whiteboard.

Bummed about losing his new companion to neverland, Riley swung his legs back up on the bed and rolled to his side. He kept his eyes on Hunter, though, watching the subtle movement of his lips and the rise and fall of his chest, watching the curiosity in male form sleep as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. Riley envied him that.

Chapter 5

H
UNTER
WAS
known best for being the life of the party, but in his own laid-back way. He’d developed an impervious wall of I-don’t-give-a-fuck. He’d done so well, drinking and staying busy, that he’d almost fooled himself into believing his own bullshit.

He was angry, but it was always an internal roiling of self-hatred, never spilling over into the real world. So the fact he’d just tried to toss a chair at someone was so uncharacteristic he didn’t know what to do with it. The doctors had watched his tantrum with bland yet interested expressions. He’d felt like a rat being researched in a lab, and that pissed him off more.

Intake panel. That’s what they’d called the hell he’d just suffered. A panel of doctors, dieticians, orderlies, and nurses sat before him as he squirmed in an uncomfortable, cold plastic chair. They’d asked questions that had pissed him off and
told
him what he was feeling—based on his sister’s words, no less. Who the fuck was she? He had barely spoken with her over the last couple of years, so how did
she
know what Hunter was feeling or what he was going through?

Making the situation even shittier, Hunter’s ribs ached from the punch he’d taken the night before, and his hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
And don’t forget the nausea.
He’d run from his bed to retch his guts out at least twice in the early hours of dawn. He hadn’t even tried to look at himself in the mirror. He didn’t want to see the bags he knew would be under his eyes. He’d seen it enough times before to know what he looked like when he hadn’t had a drink in a few days.

By the time his shoulders started heaving during the intake panel, the doctors had pulled in one of their drug-and-alcohol specialists as well. Rehab, they said. As if he hadn’t tried that before. But when they’d tried to pry into his past, when they brought up his sister’s account of Cory’s death… that’s when he’d lost his mind. They didn’t get to bring up
Cory
. His sister had no idea about Cory. They could all fuck themselves.

So he found himself, yet again, shut up in his room with some pill they’d used to help with the shakes. He was floating just a little but not enough to help with how miserably angry he was. He shouldn’t be here. They’d kept saying words like
suicide attempt
and
mental exhaustion
. They were wrong. He wasn’t fucking crazy. He was a drunk; he’d give ’em that. Hell, he didn’t even really care that he was a drunk. He still paid his bills on time. He could do without the shakes, but… why was it any of their fucking business anyway? So he’d had a bad night. His mom had just died. Everyone grieves in their own way, right?

Yeah, blackout drunk with a handful of Xanax. That’s typical.

Shut up, you.

Oh, yeah. His sober brain pissed him off too. Too bad it’d suck too hard to punch himself in the face, because it’d feel good teaching that inner voice a lesson right now.

“What’s with the scowl?”

Hunter rolled over in his bed, away from his roommate, who’d popped in the door to catch him battling with himself.
’Cause that’s how you prove you’re not crazy.
He took a couple of deep breaths and rolled back to Riley, who now sat on his own bed, back leaning against the wall, arms wrapped around knees he’d pulled to his chest. He was studying Hunter in that quiet way he did, again. Hunter found it disarmed him less than it had at first. He couldn’t deny enjoying the interest in that searching gaze. It wasn’t sexual, but it was more passing interest than anyone had given him in any way for the last several years. He had an overwhelming need to melt into it, revel in the attention.