Page 28 of Hunter or Hunted

The microwave dinged. I walked that way, grabbed out the plate, and returned to the counter. Once I grabbed a knife from inside the drawer, I looked around for something to slice on. “Where’s your cutting board?”

“I don’t have one. Just use the plate.” She stood and took a blanket off the arm of the sofa. As she sat back down at the kitchen table, she placed it around her shoulders and frowned at me. “Why can’t you understand that I feel the same way about Simone? You just said it yourself. You can’t say how you know I won’t turn on you. That’s how I feel about Simone.”

She wouldn’t like my answer, so I didn’t look up from the chicken breasts on the plate. “It happened in front of her, and you didn’t feel safe enough to tell her everything. You love her. I know you do. She’s your best friend, and she loves you, but you don’t feel safe with her.” Finally, I looked up. She still gave me that frown, but at least she’d stopped glowering. “How am I supposed to feel safe with her if you don’t?”

“It’s not what you think.” Gwen shook her head. “I do trust her.”

“Then what is it?”

“Okay, yeah, I kept the whole story from her to protect us both,” she said. “Plausible deniability and all that. But just because… I don’t know. She kept wanting to talk about it, how I felt after doing it, and I didn’t think she would understand.”

Pressing her lips together, she swallowed hard. “I’ve never felt any guilt or shame for it. I did what I had to, and it saved her life. Maybe saved mine. I rationalized it from the start, and that’s not how Simone’s mind works. Most of the time, she’s a feel-first kind of person. If the roles were reversed, the guilt would’ve eaten her away by now. She wouldn’t have been able to live with the shame. And I get that. It’s who she is. It’s what I love about her.

“But that’s not me. I feel things for a heartbeat, and then I logic my way out of it. I did what I had to, and I can live with that, but I couldn’t live with her judgment. And if it wasn’t judgment, if it wasn’t me looking like a psychopath, I couldn’t live with the sympathy. The pity.”

I replayed that in my mind as I washed my hands in the sink. When I was done drying them on the dishrag, I tossed some seasoning onto the chunks of chicken. “I think I get the first half of what you said. I’m a bit lost on the last part.”

A slow, shaking breath trembled Gwen’s frame. Holding the blanket tighter around her shoulders, she propped her elbow on the table and rested her head in her hand. “Simone was the first person I met from the ranch. She came to my hometown. She saw me at my worst. No, she didn’t just see me. She saved me. The day I came here, I’d—” She pinched her eyes shut and shook her head again. “Simone gave me a number to call if I needed her. I got in this little trailer, I was gonna try to make do on my own, and I couldn’t. Some shit happened, and I was…” Unable to meet my gaze, she licked her dry lips. “I was terrified I would never get out.

“She and Axel came,” Gwen said, voice softer. “They calmed me down. They gave me somewhere to go. Simone was this pillar to me at that moment. She’d been where I was, but she was better now. I learned from her example. I became who I am because of her. She showed me that I’m more than my trauma. And then, that night, when I saw her like that… I didn’t even recognize her, Sebastian. Her face was so swollen, she couldn’t even open her eye, and—And she had been my hero. Then she was the one who needed saving. So I saved her. But I was okay.

“Simone wasn’t. She hasn’t been, not really. Not since it happened.” Her eyes stayed on the tabletop. A few moments of silence passed, long enough for me to bread the chicken and toss it into the hot oil. “I didn’t want it to be about me. I didn’t want her to focus on making me feel better. I didn’t want her to feel bad for me. I just wanted to help her like she helped me. No questions, no pressure. Just assurance that everything was okay. That it would be okay.”

Ah. Now I saw her point. She trusted Simone. More than I trusted most people. Gwen hadn’t told her the whole truth, not because she feared what Simone would do with it, but to protect her from it.

I respected that. “I get it.”

Finally looking up, she squinted at me again. “Do you? Because you’re still giving me that look. Like you think I’m full of shit.”

“I don’t know how you keep getting all this dialogue from my face, but it’s not saying any of that.”

“Okay.” She stood, still bundling the blanket around her body, and joined me at the counter. She stood only a couple feet away, to the left of the stove while I stood on the right. “Use your words then. What are you thinking?”

She wouldn’t like my answer. But she asked for it. “I think it’s a good thing you didn’t tell her everything.”

Hip propped against the counter to stabilize her still unsteady gait, she went back to glowering. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what I said.” With the fork I’d stirred the flour with, I flipped one of the chicken strips. “Even if you trust her, I’m just not sure that I do.”

“Right. Because you don’t trust anyone.” She rolled her eyes and brushed past me. At the sink, she filled a glass with water. “You don’t trust me either. That’s why you taunted me for months with those texts.”

“I was never taunting⁠—”

“Regardless of what you intended, that’s how it landed.” She turned the faucet off with more force than necessary. “Imagine the roles were reversed. Imagine I found Jason’s body, buried it for you, and sent you all these weird creepy texts for months instead of just telling you that it was me, Sebastian. Imagine how that would make you feel.”

Like I wanted to crawl out of my skin. Like I had to constantly look over my shoulder. Like someone was stalking me. Like they were waiting for the moment to ruin my life.

“You’re right.” I raised my hands in surrender, hot specks of oil smacking against my back through my shirt. “Hindsight’s 20/20. I should’ve phrased the messages differently, or never sent them at all⁠—”

“You should’ve told me it was you.” Setting her cup down, she leaned against the sink. “You shouldn’t have hidden that from me.”

“You weren’t exactly forthcoming with it either⁠—”

“Straw man argument, Sebastian.” She pointed at me, eyes wide. “You didn’t tell me about Jason because nobody just goes around telling everybody about the murders they committed. But when you see your friend—or girlfriend—getting rid of a body, you just tell her. You don’t lie. You don’t keep it a secret and taunt her with anonymous texts for months. If Simone had seen me getting rid of the body, she would’ve asked what the hell I was doing. Yeah, she would’ve helped me, but she wouldn’t have played this game that you did. Because she trusts me. And you don’t.

“You don’t trust anyone, Sebastian. And that’s why you don’t understand my relationship with Simone. The only close relationships you have in your life are with Lizzie and Rhiannon. And I know, you were busy raising her, then with your career, and I get it. I really get why you don’t have close friendships. I don’t hold it against you. But you’re going to have to learn to trust somebody eventually. At least me.”

Fine. Even drunk, she mopped the floor with me.