Unbelievable.
That answered my question about him caring. I knew Mom was just a prop to him. That was why he let her drink herself stupid every day. He let her buy whatever she wanted. They ignored it when one or both of them cheated.
Because in my family all that matters is what people see.
They didn’t see Dad’s business partner touch me when I was twelve. There was no mark on my hand from when he made me touch him. The only mark from something like that rests under the skin.
So, of course, it didn’t count.
When Jackson called my name and stepped into the computer room, I closed the window without replying. Not that the “Fuck off” I’d been planning was much of a reply anyway.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Grab your things. We’re heading out.”
“Heading out where?”
“Out of the country.”
I slid off my stool, but when I tried to move closer, he kept a careful distance between us. Frustration fizzled on my tongue.
“We just got to Prague yesterday.”
“And now we’re leaving Prague today. You only gave me a week, and there’s a lot I want to do.”
There was a lot I wanted to do too, but he’d barely looked in my direction for more than two seconds since our kiss.
Not even bothering to muffle my grumbling, I shoved my things into my backpack and left behind the Madhouse hostel. If only I could have left behind my shitty mood, too.
At the train station, I asked, “Will you tell me where we’re going now?”
Hunt just smiled. I loved and hated that smile.
“Why are you doing this?”
He said, “Wow, you really don’t do well with surprises, do you?”
I rolled my eyes, and crossed my arms over my chest.
“I mean all of this. Why do you care?”
Normally, I never would have asked a question like that, not from guy that I was trying to hook up with. Especially not when the answer could be that he didn’t care, not really. He certainly didn’t have any qualms about rejecting me.
But I’d spent days with him, and almost everything I knew about him was from observation alone. I mean, it was like pulling teeth just to get him to tell me his first name.
“Because I wanted you to come with me. Do I need another reason?”
“Do you have one?”
He shrugged. “No one likes traveling alone.”
And that was the Hunt one-two punch. Pull you in and then plow right over you. Give you the most intense kiss of your life, and then pretend like it never happened and let you fester in your sexual frustration.
I stayed quiet on our way to the station and as we boarded a train to somewhere in Germany. As soon as we were moving, I folded my arms over the top of my backpack, and used them as a pillow.
Just for once, I wanted to know where I stood with him. I wanted to shake him until some actual answers popped out, rather than his charming, sweet noncommittal words.
We changed trains that afternoon in Munich, and even though the train was fairly empty, Hunt sat beside me.
I tried not to react, because any reaction I had was going to be bitchy. Instead, I fished my phone out of my bag and stood to place my backpack in the luggage rack above our heads. I sat back down beside him and slipped one earbud in. I was searching for a song when he said, “You’re mad at me.”
I glanced at him briefly, then pressed play.
“No, I’m not.”
I’d just put in my second earbud when he tugged them both out.
“Yes, you are. I might have spent the last few years in various deserts with mostly men, but I’m not so far removed that I don’t know that ‘No, I’m not,’ means ‘I most definitely am.’ ”
I sighed. “Jackson, I’m not mad. I promise. I’m just tired.”
“But you slept on the last train.”
“I didn’t mean that kind of tired.”
“You’re tired of me?”
I groaned and ran my hands across my face.
“I’m frustrated. I don’t know what you want from me.”
The look in his eyes reminded me of an ache, the kind you ignore for as long as you can, until you wake up in the middle of the night, short of breath, sweating, and unable to deny it any longer.
He didn’t know what he wanted from me either.
“I want several things from you, Kelsey. But at the moment, I just want a friend and to travel.”
I didn’t even hear the second part of his sentence. I was still hung up on the “several things” he wanted from me, and imagining what they all might be. Maybe I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted from him either.
He wasn’t a hookup. He wasn’t the kind of guy I could walk away from the morning after. But I also wasn’t sure I wanted the kind of thing I couldn’t walk away from. Because I was good at walking away.
I nodded. “Friends. Got it.”
A few hours later, he tugged out my earbuds once more and said, “We’re here.”
“And where is here?”
“Heidelberg.”
I looked at him. “Again, I say, where is here?”
“Still in Germany.”
“Okay, then. And what are we doing here?”
He pulled my pack down from the luggage rack for me and said, “There’s something I want to show you. Now, enough questions.”
I followed him off the train. I waited while he asked someone for directions, and then left the train station with him.
Heidelberg was small and quaint, though not that different from several other cities I’d already seen in Europe. There were cathedrals and narrow roads and a river. It was almost sundown, and the city was quiet and almost deserted. Hunt paused and turned in a circle, searching for something. When he found it, he smiled. I followed his gaze to a castle that sat perched on a hill overlooking the city.
It was both decadent and decaying, emerging out of the dense forest, seemingly untouched by modern society.
“You’re taking me to a castle?” I asked.