“That’s… that’s ludicrous!” she wailed.
“What the hell is going on, Lora?” an older man asked, coming up behind his wife with his computer in his hand. “Oh, you’re here. Can you fix my computer? I got onto a, uh, website last night and it was, uh, bad I guess? I can’t get it to turn on anymore. It’s a good thing you finally can stop by. It’s been a while.”
It’s been a while.
Umm, it’s been like years.
From what I understood, they’d never visited him while he was in prison.
Not once.
“This, this woman is claiming to be his wife, Fred!” Lora pointed at me as if I was the one to make the declaration.
“Well, maybe she is?” Fred shrugged. “I mean, that wouldn’t surprise me. A marriage of convenience, obviously.”
I stiffened.
Was he implying that I wasn’t worth anything more but convenience?
What the absolute fuck?
“We married each other because we loved each other,” Hunt lied as he pushed past both of them. On the way, though, he’d grabbed my hand with one of his, and the computer out of his father’s other hand. “Were you on a porn website, Dad?”
There was a moment of silence at our backs and then, “Yes.”
Hunt sighed. “I showed you the safe ones you could go to. They won’t cause you to have any pop-ups or viruses. Do we need to talk about those websites again?”
“No, I remember them,” Fred answered sheepishly.
His mother came by in a huff and walked past us, not stopping to make any more small talk.
She walked right up to a group of three woman and started gesturing wildly with her hands.
They all turned at once to look at me, and I realized rather quickly that I was the topic of conversation.
Yay.
“There,” Hunt said three seconds after opening it. “You just had to end task, Dad.”
Fred took the computer with a grin and walked away without even a thank you. And I entered the next realm of hell.
After meeting all three sisters, Della, Willa and Rella, as well as the one brother, Will—why there was a Will and a Willa, I didn’t know—I was then introduced to the copious amounts of children running around. All of which I only had a chance to look at in their screaming banshee forms as they catapulted themselves into the pool.
For the next thirty minutes I sat beside Hunt on a pool lounger while his family threw barbs either my way or Hunt’s.
At least for Hunt, he mostly ignored them.
He flinched more when they were thrown at me than when they were thrown at him.
Which made me feel a little bit better about what he was doing and why we were there.
At one point, Hunt had gotten up to get a drink and I thought I might actually have to talk to someone by myself, but then Fred had come out with burger patties.
Hunt came back with my drink and set it on the table.
Then one of the little demon spawns came right over and hit the damn drink over with a pool noodle. Then laughed.
Did any of the adults do anything?
Nope.
Not even a one.
They looked over, saw what had happened, and went back to their conversing without including either me or Hunt.
It was truly awful.
“You know,” I said when he sat down, handing me his drink for me to take a sip. “I’m surprised you don’t have a name like them.”
Thank God that he didn’t.
How did they ever get the right name when they were calling them out?
Hunt opened his mouth to explain, but apparently one of the sisters hadn’t been totally detached from us after all.
“Hunt’s actually adopted,” who I thought was Rella said. “That’s why his name is different than ours.”
That actually explained a lot.
Except, when Rella walked away to get a drink, Hunt sighed long and loud.
Really softly, Hunt lowered his voice and leaned into me, almost whispering against my ear. “I’m not actually adopted. My parents just say I am. I’m the result of my dad’s affair with his secretary. When I was born, Mom took me in, and the secretary had to sign away her rights to stay on at the company and continue drawing a paycheck. It’s easier to claim that I’m not theirs, though, because that’s easier than having to explain that I’m only a half-brother.”
My eyes were wide when I turned my face to stare at the man beside me. “Holy shit.”
And I wasn’t saying ‘holy shit’ just because of what he’d just told me. When I’d turned, he hadn’t pulled back, and my lips brushed against the corner of Hunt’s mouth.
He didn’t move his face away as he continued talking. “I found out by cleaning off my father’s computer when I was eleven. The bad thing is, they all know.” He jerked his head in their direction. “They’ve been selling this lie that I’m adopted since.”
“They sound like awful people,” I admitted. “Why do you even hang around them?”
Over the course of an hour that we’d been there, they’d all been terrible to him. Seriously, he’d sat down and they’d all handed him computers, as if the only reason he was there was to fix their shit and not have to take it to the computer place. Convenience. That was all he was to them.
Getting kind of angry now, I said, “You should just slow all their computers down to the point where they go buy new ones. Or do annoying things like make their computer browsers close and not re-open with all the tabs they had up.”
His lips twitched. “If I fix it well, they won’t come calling. And I won’t feel obligated to stop by any time soon.”
“You shouldn’t feel obligated anyway,” I told him bluntly. “These people are like cancer. I haven’t seen a single redeeming quality in any of them. Not even the kids. They’re all assholes just like their parents.”
Hunt grinned and I had the craziest urge to lean forward and press my lips to his.
I was about to, too,
