Page 29 of Hunter or Hunted

I softened my voice as I reached out to touch her arm. “I do trust you.”

She stepped back before my hand could make contact. “Until your back was against the wall, you didn’t.”

“That’s not true.” Frowning, I shook my head. “It’s more complicated than that. But back to Simone⁠—”

“You want to go back to Simone? Fine.” Face screwed up in confusion, she shook her head some more. “You don’t understand women. You don’t understand our friendships, our connections, the way we love, or the way we feel. You think that I should trust you more than her because we’re in love. You think that it’s somehow more significant than my relationship with her. That me and Simone, our love for one another, matters less because it’s platonic instead of romantic. But it’s not. It’s just as deep. In a different way, sure. But it isn’t less.”

“Who’s being condescending now?” I asked. “I know you think I’m this antisocial weirdo, but I do have friends. I have a deep love for many people in my life. But it’s not the same as the love I have for you. You’re right about that. It is different, Gwen. In what way is it different for you?”

“It’s…” She paused, thinking of a good rebuttal. “It’s friendship. That’s how we started. That’s the love that I had for you to begin with. With something else. Something⁠—”

“Something more.” Shifting my position so I could flip the chicken with my left hand while still looking at her on my right, I shrugged. “I’m not saying it’s a dramatic difference in quantity, Gwen, but it is more. Romantic love is platonic love with another layer.”

Teeth gritted, still glowering, she waved a dismissive hand at me and spun around. “I can’t argue with you about this right now.”

“Great. Then don’t.”

A twinge of satisfaction bubbled in my chest. She was done with that part of the conversation, not because she made her point clear, but because she saw mine, and she agreed. I’d been doing the therapy thing my whole life, and I knew I needed to get the smartass, God complex under control. But how the hell could I stop feeling so good when I knew I was right?

“But we need to,” Gwen said, fishing around in the fridge. She came out with a glass jar of apple juice. Good choice. Apple aided digestion. “We have to finish this, because I can’t. I can’t with your attitude. You act like you’re some progressive, knight in shining armor, and then you just—you—Ugh.” She set the glass jar on the counter with a clink then thrust her fists down at her sides. “And you’re not. You’re just not.”

I squinted at her, raising my shoulders. “I told you not to put me on a pedestal. I never claimed to be a knight in shining armor, Gwen.”

“That—Ugh.” Groaning, she ran a hand through her hair and grabbed a fistful at the back. “Yes. You did. The other night. Standing over his grave, that’s exactly who you painted yourself as. Maybe because you’d prefer I see you as a hero than a lunatic who could rip off the jaw of a man you once called a friend.”

I winced. She noticed.

“You hold yourself up on a pedestal,” she said, raising her voice. “You know you’re better than most men out there, and you own it. But that’s just it. When you took me to that grave, you made it out like we were on the same page. Like we saw the same things that are wrong with the world. Two broken, screwed up people who did a screwed up thing to make this screwed up world just a little bit better. It was about survival when I killed David. Then I saw what you did, how you rationalized it, and you validated what I’ve been fighting myself about for months. I’m not what’s broken. The world is.

“And killing Evan, killing men like him, is a small way I can make a difference. It won’t save the world, but it’ll save his next victim. It’ll save the next Delilah. And that’s what you said. That’s why you said you did it. To protect Lizzie, to protect the girl who came after Sarah, but if that were true, we wouldn’t be standing here arguing about it.

“Killing Jason was vengeance. Because you loved Sarah, and because he took her from you.” Her voice broke on those words, and my chest ached. When her eyes softened, the bands of muscles around my heart clenched tighter. “And I respect that. I understand it. I get why you don’t want to ruin your life—or risk it—with another murder. But I thought we felt the same way. After you took me to that grave, I thought we were on the same page.”

We were. And we weren’t.

The hot frying oil crackled. It shot from the pan. The burning heat smacked me on the forearm.

Fighting the urge to mutter a curse, I took the browned chicken from the pan with a fresh fork and tossed it onto another plate. As it cooled, I threw another piece into the hot oil.

“Are you going to say something?” Gwen asked.

“Are you going to eat something?” I held out the plate.

She snatched it from my hands. “I’ll eat if you respond.”

“We do feel the same way.” A deep breath passed from my nostrils. “In a lot of ways, at least.”

Air a bit thinner now, she stretched past me and reached into the silverware drawer. Confusion wrinkled her face as she settled in against the counter, ripping the chicken tender apart with a fork and butter knife. “What does that mean?”

“I’ve seen stories like yours, like Simone’s, like Delilah’s, my entire life.” An image of my mom flickered through my mind. At her worst, with a swollen lip and black and blue around her eye. “I see it. I feel for you, and for Simone, and Delilah.” And Sarah, and my mom. “But it’s always going to be like watching a movie to me, Gwen. I can’t live it the way that you all have. My eyes watered and my chest tightened earlier, when you gave your speech, but it didn’t hit me the way that it hit everybody else, because I’m not one of you.”

“Yeah, just like I can’t feel exactly what Axel’s struggle has been like as a gay man, but I can understand it.” She blinked hard at me. “I thought when Delilah died, and I came to you, you could understand my pain. My rage. I didn’t think you’d spit in my face.”

Shoulders drooping, I shook my head in disbelief. “How did I spit in your face?”

“When you said it had only been a few months.” She swallowed hard. “That I barely knew her.”

It was a fact. Delilah was not to Gwen what Sarah had been to me. Comparing the two wasn’t fair. Our relationships were not the same.