“What the fuck did you do?” I asked, my hands shaking with a combination of anger and sadness.
“I guess I saw this here and thought it was a letter I had meant to send but didn’t want to after all. Oops. My bad.”
I completely lost control then. Years and years of bullying all piled up in a rage I’d never experienced before, or since. I screamed and hurled myself at my brother, arms swinging, intending to do as much damage to him as was humanly possible. I wanted to kill him. No exaggeration, if I had been given a gun right then and there I knew I would have shot him. There was nothing more that I wanted on the planet.
Unfortunately, I was still a slightly overweight seventeen year old, and he was the captain of the lacrosse team. He held me off easily, like I weighed nothing, and eventually I ran out of energy and just collapsed on the ground, crying.
Kiegan left with a smile on his face, and I knew from that second on I would never, ever forgive him. And I hadn’t. Two months later I left the Hunt Estate forever, abandoning the family that had given me their name, and I did my best to forget about Kiegan Hunt, or as I’d been calling him for years in my head, Hunt the Cunt.
Chapter Seven
I tried watching Person of Interest, but my mind kept wandering back to my childhood, to my asshole bully of a stepbrother.
In the end, I never would have gone to Harvard anyway. I knew that now. But it still didn’t make it hurt any less that he had purposely sabotaged my dreams.
Eventually I gave up on TV. I closed the tab and opened up Google. Typed in “Kiegan Hunt”. I had to admit it, my curiosity had gotten the better of me.
I opened up the Wikipedia page about my brother. Obviously he’d been busy if he had an entire Wikipedia page about him. Over the last two years I’d made sure to completely avoid any celebrity news or gossip as much as possible, I didn’t want to know anything about my old family.
The more I read, the more surprised I was. I had always expected that after high school Kiegan would have gotten himself into a bunch of trouble. Instead, he graduated, and rather than go down the traditional Hunt family route of getting a good education, took the money from his trust fund that was released to him when he was eighteen and founded a tech company that he sold the year before for seven billion dollars.
Going back to the main page I clicked on a bunch of celebrity gossip magazine articles about my stepbrother.
Kiegan Hunt: Will America’s Most Eligible Bachelor Ever Settle Down?
Kiegan Hunt Refused Entry to Canada After Busted for Pot Posession
Hunt Heir Arrested in Buenos Aires After Bar Fight
Kiegan Hunt in Hospital After Skiing Stunt Goes Wrong in Austria
It turned out my brother was now an adrenaline junky, and still the same old bad boy with no respect for rules that he had been a few years ago. Adulthood, and business ownership, it seemed hadn’t changed him at all.
I scrolled through the first article. It had a list of Kiegan’s girlfriends, all from the last couple of years, and the list was already in the double digits. Plus that was just the ones the media knew about. In one corner was a picture of my brother, his arm around a Victoria’s Secret Angel, together in Rome. I couldn’t help it. I felt a pang of jealousy when I saw his hands wrapped around her waist, his fingers lingering ever so slightly on her waist. Her face was turned towards his in laughter, and he leaned in towards her, like he wanted to be as close to her as possible.
I sighed and closed that article. It wasn’t normal. I shouldn’t have these feelings for the man that made my teenage years hell. I couldn’t explain why I did. How was it possible for someone to feel both lust and rage whenever they thought about a person?
It doesn’t matter, I thought to myself, closing all the tabs I’d opened. You’re never going to see him again. You’re never going to speak to him again. And your life is all the better for it.
I did my best to think about other things. But I couldn’t help the anger building up inside of me. It wasn’t fair that the asshole who bullied me all through high school had the looks of a Greek God, more money than God and lived the life of an untouchable king while I sat here in my drafty apartment, thinking about where my next meal was coming from. No, it wasn’t fair at all. As I fell asleep that night, I swore I was never going to look up anything about Kiegan Hunt again. I was going to go on with my life, and he could go on with his, and they were never going to intersect again, ever.
Boy was I ever wrong about that one.
Chapter Eight