20. Hunter

TWENTY

HUNTER

M y emotions are at war within my body right now. The loudest part of my fucked-up brain feels peace because Winter is finally mine. My wife. My everything. Tied to me in ways that are as difficult to unwind as possible.

Winter Brigham is right here next to me.

It’s a dream come true.

But another recognizes that Winter is unhappy, and I feel her discontent in every one of my nerve endings. It’s like she’s deflated with every hour that has passed since my proposal, and now that we’re on the plane, she’s as distanced from me as we are from the earth below.

We’ve been in the air for an hour, and every five minutes I try to talk to her—try to come up with some semblance of a valuable conversation—but I know we won’t really be able to communicate until we’re both willing to spill all the shit out on the table and address it.

What happened in the shower.

What I confessed.

How we can move forward from here….

I don’t think I’m ready to address it at all. Because even though she’s my legal wife now, the safest choice for Winter would be to leave me and never look back.

I know that she’s the better person—the healthier person, the happier person, the better human.

And I also know that if I allow it, she’ll let me consume all of her.

I won’t let my darkness dim her light.

I’m deep in thought when blonde hair interrupts my vision. Blinking twice, I gather what’s happening. Jami leans over me, nearly pressing her lips to my ear.

The audacity of the woman stuns me for a moment, but then white-hot anger has me gripping her wrist in a crushing hold when she’s inches from putting her hands on me.

But instead of embarrassment or, hell, even a modicum of shame, she gasps and blushes. Her arousal radiates off her, and I feel dread at the entire situation. Holding the flight attendant’s wrist away from me, I’m prepared to berate her so soundly that she’ll never want to step on another plane ever again. That is, if she’ll even have anything left of her career once I’m done.

I should have had her removed from the fleet altogether after Asheville.

“Get your hoes in order, Hunter,” Winter spits out, and in a blink, she pushes past us and is in the back of the plane with the door slid shut behind her.

Panic blinds me.

I jump out of my seat and go after my wife.

“Wait, Mr. Brigham,” Jami says. I don’t know why I stop to listen to her, but it’s probably because I’m stunned that she dares to touch me again.

Her blood-red nails press into my forearm.

One.

Two.

Three.

“What do you want?” I ask, my tone unkind.

She gapes for a moment, and for a fleeting second she looks unsure. Then she licks her lips. “I was hoping we could…play some more. I can’t stop thinking about the last time. I know I freaked out on you a bit at the end, but….”

She blushes, and where her hand makes contact, my skin burns.

I lift an eyebrow, waiting in her silence as she tries to find her words.

“My wife is here,” I grind out. Her mouth pops open in surprise.

“Oh? I thought that was—the last time it wasn’t true, so I didn’t know. I just figured that since this was a much longer flight, maybe you could spare some time away.”

I know I wear a look of disgust, and she gains some sense and pops back a foot, dropping her hand.

I take a deep breath, trying to calm myself. Trying to battle my tendencies to solve issues with violence.

After three breaths, I access enough calm to speak.

“Come here, Jami,” I say, using the voice that feels foreign now in the eighteen months that Winter has been in my life.

Jami balks, and I widen my stance.

I know that I’m giving her what she wants: my attention. She wants the reward of my time and the punishment I’ll mete out.

But I won’t.

She doesn’t realize that for the rest of my life, the only woman who will have me is at the back of the plane.

Upset. Hurt.

No one gets to hurt Winter ever again. Not even me.

“You want to play?” I ask, dropping my voice even lower. Jami bites her lip and looks up at me from beneath her eyelashes.

“I want whatever you want, Mr. Brigham,” Jami whispers.

I hum. “Right,” I say, my voice low. I turn without further acknowledging her.

I put my hand on the latch, prepared to wrench the bedroom door open, but I pause as sense returns to me.

If I fuck this situation up, if I handle it in the wrong way, that could likely be it for me and Winter. No matter that she now is my legal wife. No matter that she carries our child.

Breathe, Hunter.

I’m surprised that the door isn’t locked when I slide it open on its silent track.

The room is dark, but a shaft of light comes from the oversized en suite bathroom. Water runs and I can tell it’s from the sink. I count the seconds as I wait for Winter to emerge, choosing to lean against the now-closed door.

When she exits the bathroom, she stops short. She’s changed out of the fancy linen outfit—picked in case we ran into paparazzi—in favor of a flowy beach skirt that skims the top of her feet and a camisole that shows a sliver of her stomach. Her face is shiny, and it’s clear she washed it.

But the thing that arrests me is the fact that her eyes are swollen and red-rimmed.

“Talk to me, Winter,” I say in a low voice.

She remains silent, swaying slightly as if she were drunk.

“I’m so sorry she was so disrespectful. She’ll be off the plane as soon as we land, and you’ll never have to see her again.”

Winter crosses her arms, the stance protective rather than combative. The hum of the airplane engines fill the silence.

“Winter, what can I?—”

“Hunter, what do you want from me?” Her words are low and her tone holds devastation. I’m transported back to the first time we made love and those hours after.

My memory forces me to sit in the worst moments of my life: when I lost her.

But even then, there was a spark of something that blazed between us. I could see it in her eyes. There was still hope because she cared. She cared too much.

Now as I stare at her, all I feel is coldness, and that makes me want to sink into the cargo hold.

“What do you mean, Sunbeam? I only want you as you are. Your presence next to me is all that I need.”

I pour the truth of my heart out to her, praying she’ll absorb the words and come back to me.

But when she’s silent again, still looking at my feet, I take a step forward.

She tightens her hands over her arms and takes a step back.

“I don’t know who you are, Hunter.”

My voice is hoarse when I speak. “What do you mean? Are you talking about the flight attendant? She was before you, and I promise you’ll never have to see her again.”

“Oh, so you did fuck her? I’m not making that up in my brain?” Her delivery is flat.

I press my lips together and shake my head. “It was before you. I don’t want her at all. She doesn’t begin to compare to you.”

She sniffs, raising her nose and unfurling her arms as she spins toward the nightstand. She lifts her iPad, tapping on it for a few seconds before squaring her shoulders and reading the screen out loud.

“‘Abuse and betrayal: Former lovers expose Hunter Brigham's cruelty,’” she says, reading as if she were reciting the morning announcements. “‘Hunter Brigham is a complex man,’ UK pop darling Missy Que says in an exclusive statement to The Eagle. ‘But if there’s one thing that’s simple about H, it’s that he needs to control everything around him—including his women. Especially his women.’”

When the plane banks to the side, I stumble more than I usually would, taken off guard by her words.

“Let me see that,” I say, and she hands the tablet over wordlessly.

Still, she recites from memory: “‘Hunter craves control. He needs it like he needs air. So with his submissives, he’s not a loving, careful Dom. He’s the definition of a sadist and a violent abuser.’”

I take a deep breath, ready for my entire world to spiral out of control as I read the article. I have to hand it to The Legion: it’s damning. I look like a monster in this, and it’s clear how they plan to setup my fall for Blair’s murder. When the story does drop that Blair is dead, the court of public opinion will already be poisoned against me.

Not all of my sexual experiences explored the edges of kink. I could clock it easily when a woman was down to allow me to be rough. The ones who weren’t into it left unharmed after receiving a few excellent orgasms and the right to say they fucked Hunter Brigham. But the ones who were inclined to let me do what I wanted to them…they helped get me back to center when the world stopped making sense and my control started to slip from my grasp.

Any sexual interaction I’ve ever had with a woman began with their enthusiastic consent.

But the article isn’t too far off the mark.

“I know how it looks, Sunbeam. Especially with what I did to you the last time we were together—but I can assure you, what these women are saying is totally spun the wrong way. It’s not even like that.”

She makes a delicate sound in her throat. “What’s it like then?”

I open my mouth, only to close it. She continues in my silence.

“What do you want? Does it make you happy to mark the women you sleep with up? To make them bleed?” Her eyes drill into me. “Do you need this, Hunter?”

The plane banks to the side again, and when she loses her footing, I can’t resist grabbing her arm to steady her. She jerks away from me and places her hand over her stomach. Over our child.

“Sunbeam, I don’t need that stuff. Not anymore. I’m disgusted with myself at what happened that night. I’ll never forgive myself for hurting you.”

“You don’t need that stuff anymore?” she says with her eyebrow raised.

“No,” I say emphatically. “Before you, I…I didn’t have tools to cope with what I’ve done. I didn’t know how to cope with what has been done to me,” I say, trying to swallow, but my mouth feels coated with sand.

She tilts her head to the side.

“I don’t believe you, Hunter Brigham.”

We stare at each other and her face is unreadable.

I stand taller, make my shoulders broader, and I stalk toward her.

“All I need is you, Winter,” I spit out. The words don’t sound as loving in their delivery as they do in my head.

“I know that you love me, Hunter. I don’t question that at all. But I want to know: In order to be happy, do you need to be with someone like your girlfriend Jami out there? Someone who doesn’t push your buttons? Someone who straddles the line between vixen and submissive?”

“Don’t, Winter,” I bite out.

“Do you want someone you can throw around? Someone who will take everything you can give them? And do you think that woman isn’t me?”

I’m on her in an instant, my hand firm around the back of her neck. I control her movements, and she places her hands on my chest.

Her pale pink nails press into my flesh, scoring my pectorals through my shirt.

“You want to fight, Sunbeam?”

“Yes, I do, Hunter!” She shoves me away. “It’s always ‘fight me about it later,’ but later never comes. So we’re doing this shit now.”

One of her curls falls in front of her eye and she bats it away with an agitated flick of her hand.

“In the absence of your full honesty in this relationship, all that’s left are empty dreams and manipulations. And now that I’ve taken off those rose-colored glasses, I realize that goddamn it , I love you, but you’ve been manipulating me all along.”

I stop breathing. She picks up the iPad, lifting it to give it a quick shake in the air.

“This? I can see what this is. I can see right through how The Legion is using this to harm your reputation. Do you think I can’t connect the dots and see how they’re trying to spin things?”

“You can figure out anything,” I say, my voice hoarse.

“The issue right now, Hunter, is that despite me begging and pleading with you to open up to me, and despite me giving you every single part of me over and over—even when it dishonors myself—you still have me on the outside looking in.”

“Sunbeam—”

“No, it’s my turn to talk,” she says, her voice a shout. “I understand how painful it can be to talk about your past. I empathize with the level of trauma you’ve been through, and I’ve always, always wanted to help you be the best, healthiest version of yourself possible. I want you to have the best life, Hunter.”

Her bottom lip quivers, and I have to clench my fists to prevent myself from rushing toward her.

“But this relationship isn’t healthy. Not right now at least. There’s so much that’s fucked and if we’re going to go anywhere, even if it’s just as co-parents, we have to start getting very honest with each other.”

I choke. “Co-parents?”

“Please be honest with me, Hunter. Did you knock me up to trap me? Was getting me pregnant one of your games to control me?”

My voice is hoarse. “Don’t talk about our baby like that, Winter. Our baby is a miracle.”

“Our baby is a miracle. I love our baby. I am happy to be pregnant, but what kind of family are we bringing them into? What lies and secrets will they have to carry alongside ours?”

“Enough!” I bellow. The pressure of the cabin closes in on me. I want to make her stop. I want her to stop.

I sink onto the bed. “What do you want, Sunbeam?” I murmur with my head in my hands.

“I want to know who the hell I married,” she whispers. “I want to know what is real and what is a lie.”

“I’ve never lied to you about us, Sunbeam,” I say. I can’t look at her, so I stare at the expensive carpet beneath my feet.

“You hid this crucial part of yourself from me. What do you call that, then?”

“I don’t want to be like that with you,” I grind out.

“Well, maybe I do!”

We’re silent, staring at each other.

“What do you mean, Winter?” I rasp.

“What if I…” she pulls in a shuddering breath. “What if I like it when you’re assertive and dominant? What if it makes me feel safe and protected? What if…what if I wanted that from you because I know your truth? Which is that you do need that, at least on some level, and there’s nothing wrong with needing what you need?”

I shake my head. “No.”

“Hunter—”

“No!” I yell, lunging to stand and getting close to her face. Winter stares back at me wide-eyed. Then, her face morphs, hardens. She closes the distance between us, pressing her breasts to my chest.

“You need to tell me right now. If I can’t be what you need, what do you want? Who do you want? Choose now, because I can’t take spinning in your circles anymore.”

I gape at her, feeling like I’ve stepped outside the plane and am barreling toward the ground.

“I won’t be like that with you, Winter,” I say, my voice low. Even to my ears, it sounds broken.

She stares at me for a moment, and then she nods.

“Okay,” she says and takes a step back. “I’ve been thinking about it. Really thinking about it—this concept around pain and hurt. And I realized…I’ve missed a critical distinction.”

She takes in a deep breath with a tremble.

“There’s a difference between harm and hurt. Your silence harms me, Hunter. Your darkness hurts. And call me crazy, but if the cost of having all of you is pain alongside our love, I can handle that. I want that. I’m sure it probably sounds fucked up but what we did in the shower? I loved it. But you never even asked what I wanted. You just decided for me, Hunter. So yes, the things we do together may hurt, and that’s okay with me. I welcome the pain in many aspects. But I won’t tolerate you causing me any more harm.”

She picks up the iPad again.

“You think I’m not capable of making my own decisions. You think I won’t stay if I know all of you. But the fucked-up thing is, I love every single part of you, Hunter James Brigham. Even the parts you hate.”

It feels like my chest is breaking open—cracking with each soft-spoken word.

“I’m tired, H. I know I didn’t honor your need for space when you asked, and for that, I’m sorry. But right now, I need…I need some space.”

Since I can’t speak, all I do is nod and leave the room, sliding the door closed behind me.