Scandalize Me

by Caitlin Crews

  “You’re the key to my revenge,” she agreed. But her voice was frozen. Too sharp and mocking. It was like a slap.

  He didn’t want to slap back, he wanted to soothe her, hold her, help her—but he knew she’d never let that happen. She’d never let him close to her again without a fight.

  Hunter could always fight. He was good at it.

  “Some revenge,” he said. “So enthusiastically sleeping with a man you think prefers the company of call girls. How does that hurt Jason, exactly?”

  “That was purely to manipulate you.” A quirk of her dark brows. “Especially the enthusiasm.”

  He laughed, though he couldn’t quite pull it off. “I appreciate you suffering through it. Very thoughtful. But you probably should have come up with a better morning-after act.”

  There was a flicker of something in her too-dark eyes then, and he thought he might have broken through, but then she only smiled that same empty smile.

  “I don’t think I have to manipulate this situation any further,” she said calmly. Too calmly, as if he hadn’t been there in that bed. As if he didn’t know there hadn’t been a shred of calculation in her all night long. “You’re either going to help me because Jason Treffen is responsible for your girlfriend’s death, or because you know I’m aware that you’re one of his very special clients and you wouldn’t want that getting out. It doesn’t matter which.”

  “Of course it matters.” That came out harsher than it should have, revealing him too starkly, and her head jerked back as if he’d hit her. Damn it. “I told you I was never his client. Not like that.” He studied her for a taut breath, then another. “Are you fighting all the ghosts in the room or are you fighting me? I can’t tell.”

  “I can’t really see the difference.”

  “Fight me, Zoe. You can actually hit me. Because I’m standing right here.”

  She moved then, and he thought it was a small sort of victory, even when all she did was head to the far end of the sectional and sit down, lounging back as if she’d never been more at her ease. Never more calm.

  Meanwhile, he thought his chest might crack wide open. He thought this might actually kill him. Especially when she leveled that unfriendly look at him, as though after all of this, he was the enemy.

  “I’m not fighting,” she said, in a tone that suggested he was a raving lunatic.

  Hunter rubbed his hands over his face, then sat down, too, not far from her but certainly not as close as he would have liked. There was too much boiling inside him, too big and too dangerous, and all of it so painful and unbalanced and extreme he didn’t know what to do with any of it.

  “Of course you’re not,” he muttered, and instead of indulging his usual fight-or-fuck response to adversity the way he’d have preferred, he just looked at her. “Why don’t you tell me this plan of yours? I think it’s time for the great unveiling, don’t you?”

  She was quiet for a moment, and Hunter was too aware of the way his heart pounded so damned hard, how his breath felt caught in his chest. Loud. Constrained. Zoe shifted slightly where she sat, and he wanted it to be nerves. He wanted her to feel some of what he did.

  “The plan is that you expose Jason Treffen. Show the world who he really is.” She gave him that small, sharp smile again, still lacking the bite and sparkle of the Zoe he knew. “Right before his big interview that will cement him in the public imagination as a saint forevermore.”

  “Why would anyone listen to me?” He was proud of his calm, reasonable tone. “I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but I’m not exactly considered the poster boy for truth and justice these days.”

  “That’s why you’re perfect.” She seemed to relax slightly as she ticked off his selling points on her fingers, one after the next. “Your reputation is already shot, so it’s not as if Jason can threaten you with the loss of it. You’re hated, in fact, so what will it matter if people hate you more? But you also have intimate knowledge of the man going back more than a decade, which means that if you speak out long enough and loud enough—and into the right ears, which is where I come in—you’ll eventually be heard.” She smiled again. “And meanwhile, the fact that you’ve spent all this time quietly doing good works in the wake of your expulsion from the NFL without attempting to benefit personally from any of it will, of course, play heavily in your favor.”

  “And here I was beginning to think you were making it up as you went along.”

  She shrugged. “I told you I knew what I was doing.”

  But he couldn’t help thinking about how she’d have said that last part if she wasn’t as switched off and distant as she was now, and it thudded inside him, the loss of her sharp, knowing smirk. Of that amused glint in her cool gray gaze.

  He wanted her back.

  “I was hoping you were going to these lengths because you had designs on my fine body. It happens. Sometimes, as you saw, it even happens at the gym. Or in libraries.”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me before,” she said, much too softly, her gaze dark and tormented on his. “I wasn’t being metaphoric. I was an escort. I sold myself. To men. For money.” Each sentence was a short, harsh bullet. “Why would you keep flirting with me now? This is usually where I get paid. That’s what whore means.”

  And Hunter recognized what he saw in her, then. What she was doing.

  That almost-warm, near-laughter in her voice, encouraging him to join in the horrible joke. That sharp, pointed boldness, throwing the worst thing she could think of out on the table like that. And all of that terrible anguish beneath.

  Oh, yes. He knew this routine. So well he could taste it like bile in his own throat.

  He knew terrible guilt when he saw it. He knew self-loathing and that deep, debilitating shame. He knew this game. He’d been playing it for years, and with far less reason.

  But he also knew Zoe.

  “How do you want to be paid?” he asked lazily, and she jerked against the sofa, her breath leaving her in an audible rush. “Cash? Credit card? An exchange of gifts and services?”

  She looked as if he’d hit her again, and harder this time. “Very funny.”

  “Let’s be clear, Zoe. I don’t think anything that’s happened since you came downstairs this morning is funny. Not in the least. I asked you a question.”

  “About payment.” She’d gone still. Pale.

  He thought that was probably progress, though it felt like broken glass inside him, shattering over and over again.

  “Sure.” He held her gaze, hard. Until she let out a long, shaky breath, temper and agony, and he felt it like nails across his chest. “Name your price.”

  “Stop.” Small, but certain.

  “You seem to want to throw what happened to you in my face, so let’s do this. Let’s make it as awful as possible. Name a price. You know I can pay it. I’m richer than God.”

  “Of course you’re making this about you. That’s what men like you—”

  “There are no men like me,” he bit off, all the violence he was holding in check in his voice then. “Not for you. Not now. Name your price.”

  “Go to hell!” she threw at him.

  She surged to her feet in a blind explosion, but he’d expected that. Wanted it. He met her, feeling a kind of deep satisfaction when she swung at him. He felt her fists land on him, harder than he’d anticipated, and he let her do it. He didn’t even raise his own arms in defense.

  “Hit me harder,” he told her gruffly, watching that dark light in her eyes, that grim cast over her face. “Make it hurt, Zoe, or what’s the point?”

  She swayed on her feet, her breath coming in harsh pants, but the gray eyes that met his were a wild winter storm. The dead thing behind them was gone, and though he knew that was good, he also knew it must hurt. And still she held her fists in front of her like wea
pons, as if she had no idea how small they were. Or as if it didn’t matter, because she’d fight anyway.

  His Zoe. Completely incapable of surrender.

  “Hurt me,” he said again, more intently. “Don’t you know how this works? Shit always rolls downhill. So consider this an incline.”

  She was still breathing too hard. She looked forlorn and terrified and fierce all at once, and he knew that if he tried to touch her she’d come straight out of her skin. He concentrated on the faint sting from the blows she’d landed on his chest, each one proof she wasn’t as lost as she looked. She hadn’t disappeared beneath that ice. She was still right here, no matter how much it hurt her. Or him.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” she gritted out after a long moment, as if the words were torn from her throat.

  He waited until her gaze moved to meet his again. Held it. “Then don’t.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Yes,” he said. Implacable. Sure. When he was neither of those things in anything but this. “It is.”

  Zoe jerked her head away, turning it to the side as if that would hide the way her face crumpled in on itself, and he had to stand there and watch that. Stand and do nothing but wait while she pressed one of those tight fists to her lips, as though she could beat back her own tears if she had to. If it came to that.

  “Let’s hurt the person who deserves it,” Hunter said quietly, and though she didn’t look back at him then, though he saw the hint of moisture at the corners of her eyes and the fist at her mouth tightened until her knuckles went white, Zoe nodded. It was jerky and stiff, and it seared straight through him as if it was his own pain, but it was a nod. “As it happens, I have a few ideas of my own.”

  * * *

  He called Austin from the car as he drove toward Edgarton that afternoon, the way he’d done every afternoon since Zoe had taken him there. First because she’d ordered him to do it and he’d decided to take that ride. And then only partly because of that, though that was one more thing he wasn’t ready to think about.

  “Who is this?” Austin asked in lieu of a greeting. “I don’t recognize this number. I’m pretty sure the previous owner accused me of being a stalker.”

  “We need to meet,” Hunter said, ignoring the dig.

  “I definitely don’t recognize this voice. You know you can’t keep playing the head-in-sand routine if you call meetings, right? People might get the wrong impression and think you care about something.”

  “Tomorrow night. I don’t care where. Bring Alex.”

  “Alex is actually a grown man, Hunter, with his own very busy schedule, which you would know if you ever took his calls. I don’t keep him in my back pocket.”

  “There’s someone I want you both to meet,” Hunter said impatiently, and he didn’t know if it was his tone of voice that did it or the fact that there could really be only one reason he’d want to make introductions to the two of them, but Austin was quiet for a moment.

  “Who?”

  Zoe had said she was fine with this, that she wanted to do it because it dovetailed so nicely with her own plans, but Hunter still wanted to protect her if she changed her mind. Because this might be the only way she’d ever let him protect her, he thought darkly, and the truth was she was far more likely to simply punch him again.

  He let it sit there a moment, the realization that he’d take either one.

  “You’ll find out tomorrow,” he said gruffly to Austin. “Unless you want to lecture me more about my telephone habits? Compare me to an ostrich again? I’m sure you can insult me much better than this, Austin. It’s like you’re not even trying.”

  “Hunter.”

  He waited, and it was as if history and memory compressed, somehow. As if it snapped tight in both of them at that same moment, reminding him of a thousand other phone conversations, as many long, late nights, all those hours upon hours they’d spent in each other’s company learning their own private language, making themselves their own form of family.

  Reminding him again how much they’d lost.

  “Listen,” he began, inadequately, because he was pretty sure this was all his fault. He was the one who’d left. The one who’d never looked back. The one who’d been so determined to pretend nothing was happening, then or now.

  But Austin was talking again. Heading him off as if he already knew where this was going.

  “It better not be a fucking florist,” he said, and Hunter couldn’t help but grin. “I’m not kidding.”

  * * *

  The Edgarton High football field lay under two feet of fresh snow and likely would for weeks, which meant these practices took place indoors in the old, drafty gym.

  Hunter hated the gym.

  The scratched-up floors bent and squeaked beneath the pummeling of so many adolescent shoes, the smell of damp surrounded them like a humid choke hold, and the small, high windows were much too far from the ground to let in what little winter light was available.

  The whole depressing place was a fire hazard.

  Didn’t they fire your ass? Aaron, the punk wannabe quarterback, had demanded that first day. The kid had been puffed up and scowling as if he thought he was a much bigger man. But that hadn’t concealed the dazed longing in his dark eyes, letting Hunter know how badly he’d wanted to be convinced Hunter was the real deal. That something—anything—was. Why should I listen to anything you say?

  Because I’m a goddamned legend, Hunter had retorted. And you suck.

  And yet, defying all reason and his own uncertain temper, his small, sad group of kids not only kept coming to his increasingly difficult weight sessions and his killer drills—all better suited to teams that were already at the championship level than one with their decided lack of skills, because Hunter thought they might as well start hard—but they seemed to bring more new players with them each time they came. Until it looked less like an afterthought in that weight room, that sad old gym, and more like an actual team.

  Today the sight of them made him harsher. More demanding. Because he refused to fail anyone else.

  He refused.

  “You, uh, doing okay?” Jack, the actual football coach, not that anyone had been observing that title in weeks, dared to ask him. Hunter had the team running speed drills. Again and again and again, up and down the length of the old gym floor, pretending he couldn’t hear the mutinous grumbling as they went.

  “They have to be able to do this perfectly when they’re exhausted,” Hunter said shortly. “It’s about mental toughness.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said, in one of those too-agreeable voices that meant he didn’t want to argue, not that he actually agreed. “Sure. But, um. Are you...?”

  “I’m fine,” Hunter bit out, short and rough.

  Jack flinched, but Hunter couldn’t seem to modify his tone. Not when he was angrier than he’d ever been, and he couldn’t do a single thing about it. He couldn’t fix Zoe. He couldn’t save her. He couldn’t change a single thing that had happened to her, just as he hadn’t been able to save anyone else. Sarah. Even himself.

  He couldn’t even touch her the way he wanted, because that wasn’t what she needed. She’d said he’d made it about him and he, by God, refused to let that happen. He’d take Jason Treffen apart with his own hands if that was what it took—

  He realized he was scowling, and that Jack was staring at him.

  “Why?” he asked. It came out in a growl. “Do I not seem fine?”

  Jack raised his hands in surrender and didn’t ask again.

  “You can decide what kind of losers you want to be,” he told the pack of kids later that same bitterly cold evening. They were panting on the floor at his feet, stretched out across the scratched gym floors with the drafty walls letting too much winter in. Looking as if they thought they might die—or had
already died. Which meant that he must have been doing something right. “The kind who gives the better team a fight or the kind who wastes everyone’s time. Entirely up to you, gentlemen.”

  There was a long, angry, tired sort of silence. He almost smiled.

  “You get to decide who you are,” he continued, arms over his chest, scowl firm on his face. “You either get up and keep playing when it hurts, or you hobble off the field and you don’t come back. Very few choices in life are this simple. Relish this one.”

  “Says the guy who got booted a month before the Super Bowl,” someone muttered.

  “And is fighting, like, twenty lawsuits,” someone else replied, to a smattering of laughter.

  “I wish I saw some of that smart-assed spirit in these drills,” Hunter snapped, and the laughter died off. “Understand this right now—you’re the only people in the entire world who give a shit what happens to you. You might not like my choices, but for better or worse, they were all mine. Now make yours. Get up. We’re running another drill.”

  It was hard not to smile at the moaning then, and he wasn’t sure he succeeded.

  “If you can’t handle it, leave now,” he barked. “Your choice.”

  “What do you know about choices?” Aaron, who was apparently not smart enough to act appropriately cowed by all of Hunter’s bluster, demanded as he got to his feet. “Not like this is anything more than a vacation for you. We’ll still be here long after you get bored and go back to your real life.”

  “Are you here to make friends?” Hunter growled, staring the kid straight in the eyes. “Sing happy songs and braid each other’s hair? Is that why you keep coming here, Aaron? Or do you want to suck slightly less at football?”

  And he saw it then: that hint of steel on the kid’s face. The way he stood straighter, though he must have wanted to eat and sleep more than he wanted his next breath. As if he’d decided, then and there, that he wanted this more. Even if it was only to show Hunter that he could.