Here's To Box Set (Complete Series)

by Teagan Hunter

  “N-no,” I say unsteadily.

  “No?” I don’t know whether his voice is uncertain or relieved.

  “No, Hudson. I won’t marry you. Something feels…off.” I phrase my statement as an opportunity for him to say something, to come clean.

  He doesn’t. And my heart breaks even more.

  “I…I have a ring. Just not here.”

  I stare at him, unsure of what to say, because a ring is the last fucking thing I care about right now.

  “I’m, uh, going to head back home,” I finally manage.

  He doesn’t reach out to stop me from leaving. I don’t like that he doesn’t reach out. I don’t like that he hasn’t asked again. I don’t like that he’s not begging me to marry him. That just proves to me even more that something isn’t right.

  “Rae.”

  I let my hand linger on the doorknob, turning around to face him. I raise a brow in question.

  “Will you be there tonight? When I get home?”

  “Will you be honest with me?”

  His eyebrows scrunch together. “I have been honest, Rae. I want to marry you.”

  My feet move, and before I know it, I’m standing right in front of Hudson, close. He’s staring down at me, his eyes clouded with confusion, pain, and anger.

  “And I want to marry you too, Hudson. So badly. But I can’t. Not until you’ve been honest with me…”

  “I have been…”

  “Really honest with me. You haven’t been that. Something’s off. We need to fix that before we can move forward.”

  He sighs and I feel his breath on my face. I want to inch closer to him. I want to press my lips to his, to kiss away this weirdness between us, to feel him. Hudson makes the first move, leaning forward, tilting his head just right. He lifts his hands and cradles my face. His lips hover over mine. He’s hesitating too.

  “Rae,” he breathes.

  This moment right here feels like the real deal. This feels normal, like what it’s supposed to be like with Hudson. This is us floating rather than sinking. I love it when we float.

  He dips his head lower, his lips brushing against mine in just the slightest. “Rae, I—”

  “Knock, knock, boss,” Liam, one of Hudson’s employees, calls as he opens the door. “Oh, shit.”

  The spell is broken. Hudson and I take a step back from one another, putting back the distance that’s been steadily growing between us.

  Liam clears his throat. “Um…uh…sorry, man.”

  “It’s fine, Liam. We were just finishing up our conversation,” I say coolly.

  I retreat to the door, rushing to make my escape, to get fresh air so I can clear my head. For a moment, just a split second, everything felt right again. And then reality crashed in and wrongness settled.

  A hand curls around the door just as I’m about to pull it shut.

  “Tonight?” Hudson asks.

  Do I want to go home to him? Of course. Do I want to go home to a house full of awkwardness? No, not at all. But I need to. I need to face this. We need to face this. Tonight may give us an opportunity to talk about things, to open up a little further.

  Hopefully.

  This time, I don’t look back at him. “I’ll see you at home, Hudson.”

  I swear I hear a sigh of relief before he clicks the door shut behind me.

  6

  Hudson

  I feel like an intruder in my own home. Every move I’ve made has been calculated, careful. I’m tiptoeing around our conversation from this afternoon, around the proposal. Correction—the shot-down proposal.

  She said no. I mean, an extremely small part of me thought she would with everything that happened last night. But I honestly thought this, asking Rae to marry me, would make things better, not worse. I was very wrong. It’s actually made things worse, if that was even possible. Then again, how stupid could I be for thinking a proposal was the way to fix what’s wrong? Not that that’s what I was doing. Well, not entirely. Actually, not mostly. Nope. Not at all. This was all because I fucking love Rae. Maybe the timing has something to do with why I picked today to do it, but that’s not the reason I want to marry her.

  But I’m also an asshole because she’s right. I have to fess up to what’s been going on with her dad. And now. Or else this is going to ruin us. Hell, it may even still be able to. But I have to get this off my chest.

  “Daddy? Did you hear me?”

  I turn to Joey. “Of course I did.”

  Lie. Lie lie lie. That seems to be all I do these days.

  “Then can I?”

  “Can you what?”

  Joey scowls. I look to Rae for help, hoping like hell she was paying attention. She rolls her eyes and answers Joey’s questions with a “yes.”

  “Thanks!” Joey shouts. Then she’s pushing away from the table, dumping her plate in the sink, and running up the stairs all within five seconds.

  “Don’t run!” I yell after her. I glance over at Rae. “What is she doing?”

  Rae stares at me blankly. “She just asked if she can be excused to go play on the Wii.”

  “Oh.”

  “Glad one of us was paying attention.” She grabs her plate and mine, walking them to the sink and throwing off cold air in her retreat.

  I stand and follow her, placing both of my hands on the counter on either side of her waist, caging her in so she can’t run this time. She stiffens instantly. I hate that she stiffens.

  Lowering my lips to her ear, I say, “We need to talk.”

  This time she shivers. I love that she shivers. It means something is still there between us. I need so badly for something to still be there. I don’t want distance between us anymore.

  She spins around, but I refuse to back up in the slightest. We’re standing so close that I can feel her chest brush against mine every time she breathes. And right now, that’s a lot because her chest is rising and falling in rapid succession. From what, I’m not sure. But judging from the fire dancing behind her eyes right now, I think it’s safe to say she’s not very happy with me.

  “Now you want to talk. Not this afternoon when I came to you asking for the truth? You want to do this now?”

  “Hell yes I want to do this now. I shouldn’t have to walk around my own damn house like I’m gonna run into a tripwire at any moment. That’s not fair.”

  “Your lies aren’t fair, Hudson.”

  Her words hit me like a fucking brick. I guess I deserved that though.

  Sighing, I lean into her, needing to feel her. I rest my forehead against hers, our lips barely grazing. “Will you kiss me? Please?”

  She sighs this time and I catch a tear rolling down the side of her cheek. “I hate that you even have to ask that.”

  “I hate asking it.”

  I notice she doesn’t answer my question, but I don’t care. I press my lips to hers. We don’t move. We don’t try for more. We just stand there, holding our lips together, taking this moment in. Then suddenly, we’re really kissing. I don’t know who reaches for whom first, but we’re instantly wrapped up in one another. Within seconds, I have her up on the counter, her legs wrapped around me, writhing her tight, small body against mine. My cock is standing at attention, pressing into the heat between her legs. I hear a moan and I don’t know who it came from.

  Then I’m stumbling backwards, being pushed away, and Rae is crying. Hard.

  “What the…?” I scrub a hand over my face and move back in to her, gathering her in my arms, squeezing her tightly, trying to take away all the hurt. “I’m sorry, Rae. I’m so fucking sorry.”

  “You…” She sniffles, wiping her cheeks on my shirt. The tears soaking through feel like fucking fire. “You can’t fucking do that, Hudson. You can’t just use kisses and sex to get out of this. It’s too big. I don’t know what you’re hiding, but I can feel in my gut that it’s a big one.”

  I hate this. I hate that I’ve been hurting her for God knows how long now. I wonder…

  “How
long have you felt this way?”

  “Not long, really. Just a couple weeks. I’ve just noticed you’ve been working on the weekends a lot, but it doesn’t ever feel like you’ve actually been working when you come home, ya know?” She gives a humorless laugh, pushing me off her again. “Of course you know. Because you haven’t been working.”

  She looks at me, her eyes lit up with anger. She’s fucking pissed and I don’t blame her one bit.

  It’s time. I take a step back from her, letting us both have room to breathe.

  “You’re right. I have been hiding something from you.”

  “How long?” She repeats the same question from earlier today and I wonder why she keeps asking that.

  “Why does it matter?”

  “Because I want to know how long you’ve been dishonest with me. I need to know. Given my past, you should understand that.”

  I wince because this ties so much into her past, and I know that’s what will be the real kicker here. That’s what’s going to get her.

  “Since two months after the beach.”

  I can see it—she wants so badly to explode, to rage. But somehow, she manages to wrangle it all in and whisper, “Almost a year.”

  I inhale sharply at her words. Because fuck. It doesn’t feel like that long. This feels so much worse than it did just moments ago.

  “Rae, I…”

  She holds her hand up to me, and I shut up instantly. “No. Stop. I don’t want more lies, Hudson. I don’t want excuses. I want the truth.”

  I gingerly take a step toward her, a little scared of how she’s going to react to what I’m about to say. “I’m…I’m scared to tell you.”

  “You’re scared? That’s about the most bullshit thing you’ve ever said to me. You need to tell me. And now. Or you’re going to run this relationship straight into the ground.”

  I don’t budge, but instead direct my stare to the ground. I can feel her staring at me, willing me to speak. I don’t. I just...stare.

  “Please.”

  A shaky breath. A slight gasp. A quiver to my legs.

  What I’m about to say is going to change our relationship in a big way, and I’m so much more terrified than I ever admitted before. I don’t want to lose her. But that’s the risk I took when I started this whole thing. That’s the gamble I made when I decided to start seeing Ted on the weekends without her knowing. This is the moment it’s all been leading up to, and I have to tell her. Now. Or she’s right, I will run this relationship into the ground. I can’t let that happen.

  “I’ve been seeing someone because you won’t.”

  Her brows furrow in confusion for a split second before pain seeps into her gaze. I know she’s connected the dots the moment a strangled breath falls from her lips.

  “Your father.”

  She explodes. “You what! You have got to be kidding me! After everything? After what he did? All this time you’ve been slinking around visiting him? Becoming his friend? What for?”

  At this point, she’s shaking and shouting and begging for air. She’s panicking. I cross the room and lift her, placing her on the counter and grabbing her face in between my hands, trying to soothe her with my words.

  “Breathe, sweetheart. Breathe. In, out. In, out. Stop shouting. Joey’s upstairs.”

  She stiffens. Maybe terms of endearment aren’t a good idea right now.

  I hear the crack of her hand across my face before I feel it. She gasps and I clench my jaw, grinding my teeth hard, reeling in the anger that I know is coming off me in waves right now.

  I look at her and see how much she regrets slapping me. But I don’t want her to regret it. I deserved it. I fucking deserved it!

  “I deserved that for lying. But that’s the only reason I deserved that.” I squint at her when she opens her lips. She closes them, losing whatever argument she was just trying to cook up because she knows I deserved it too. “Now, do you want me to tell you why I’ve been seeing him?”

  “Yes,” she says automatically. “Just try to actually tell the truth this time.”

  Her words burn. It’s like I stuck my hand into an open fire and the flames are slowly licking their way up my arm, going straight for my chest. The pain sinks in and I can feel the corners of my mouth tip down just the slightest.

  “At first I understood your anger toward him. I got it on so many levels. He hid things from you practically your entire life, led you to believe the drowning was all a nightmare. Your being upset was one hundred percent justified.” I pause, waiting for her to say something. She doesn’t. “Rae, you wouldn’t see him. You wouldn’t answer his phone calls. Anytime he tried to reach out to you, you turned away from him. I’ve been on that end with my own father. I’ve been the one pushed away and I’ve done my fair share of pushing back. I hated it. Every single damn second, I hated it.”

  I close my eyes, thinking of my dad, Rocky. Of the fun we used to have together, of the summer trips to the beach, of the football games, and many games of hide and seek. And then I’m thinking of the summer everything went to shit, the summer I got Jess, my high school girlfriend, pregnant. At sixteen. I remember the fights and the screaming, the punches thrown, and the pain of being kicked out of my home right after I turned seventeen. I’m conjuring images of powering my way through school on no sleep from a crying baby, working endless nights and weekends to make ends meet for my little family, and how my father refused to help or see me for years. Then, I think of the day we first spoke again, the day everything changed for the better, the first sign of love from my dad in years and how whole I felt again. Until I wasn’t. Because he was taken away from me again, and my entire world shifted when he died just three years ago.

  When I open my eyes again, they sting from the tears I’m fighting so hard to hold back. I want to let them out, because I can do that with Rae. Or I used to be able to do that with her. Now, she feels closed off. I can tell from the way her jaw is screwed tight and eyes narrowed, waiting for me to continue.

  “You don’t get it until you lose it, Rae. You don’t understand how much these things don’t matter until you lose them. Your father is your best friend. He’s the only parent you’ve ever had. You need him. You want him in your life and I can see that so much more than you can because my judgment isn’t clouded by anger. For the past year I’ve watched you reach for your phone to call Ted on so many occasions. When you got your job, when we moved in together. Hell, even when you made your first pot of boxed mac ‘n’ cheese without turning the noodles to paste. I’ve watched you struggle. I’m tired of watching you struggle. You need him.”

  I can see her jaw ticking, practically feel the tension rolling through her body.

  “I need him? I don’t need anyone. Especially not someone who lied to me for twenty-two years of my life. Not someone who refuses to admit he was wrong in hiding the fact that my mother tried to drown me and then killed herself. I. Don’t. Need. Him. And right now, Hudson, I don’t need you stepping in and trying to play the knight in shining armor for me.”

  I don’t say anything, because what’s left to say?

  “Let me get this straight.” She huffs and crosses her arms over her chest. “You think that because you screwed up in your past with your father that you can suddenly butt into my—my—relationship with my father. And what, Hudson? What do you expect to come of this? What do you think is going to happen? That I’ll just wake up one day and say all is forgiven because he’s been talking to you? That’s not how this works.”

  She pushes me away from her, hops off the counter, and begins pacing. I stay silent, watching the wheels spin in her head. I want to stop them, want to throw a wrench directly into them. But I don’t. Because whatever she’s thinking in there is probably the truth. Rae knows me well enough to be able to guess just exactly what’s been going on.

  She comes to a halt, spinning to face me, burning me with the fire in her eyes. “What have you told him?”

  “What?”

 
“What have you fucking told him, Hudson? Everything? All that’s been happening? All of our conversations? Our private fucking conversations!” She’s yelling at this point, and I don’t want Joey to hear any of this.

  I laugh at myself because I’m such a fucking asshole. I had no problem just minutes ago with having her pinned against this counter, her legs wrapped around me, ready to carry her to our bedroom and fuck away this horrible day.

  You’re a dick, Hudson. A grade A dick.

  “Keep your voice down. Please.”

  “What have you told him?” she repeats.

  Sighing, I say, “Everything.”

  I feel like we’re in one of those old western films where they square off in the middle of the street. A shootout. Only we’re fighting with our words, with our feelings. Right now, I know I’m winning because the look on her face tells me I’ve shot her right in the heart with that one simple word. I don’t want to win.

  “Well, not everything. But enough.”

  “Why?” It comes out a broken whisper.

  “Because he needs to know how you feel and someone had to tell him. You’re an adult, Rae. Running from this isn’t going to solve anything at all. You can’t just keep ignoring him. You have to talk, you have to get it out. It’s eating at you and you don’t even realize it.”

  “It’s not your place, Hudson. Not even a little bit.”

  “As the man who’s madly in love with you, it’s my place to see that you’re happy. And you’re not. I mean, you are, but you’re not. Not really. Not when you’re not talking with your best friend.”

  I have a point and she knows it. For the past year, she’s had this…void. A hole, if you will. It’s been lingering and growing by the day. I’ve continued to ignore it, ignore everything. It’s been wearing on her. I can tell she’s close to her breaking point, and I have to fucking fix it.