Sinner(189)

Logan nods towards the pickup parked next to a burning sheep hut that looks relatively untouched. I’ll drive if you can navigate, Hud.”

Fuck, we’re really doing this. “Any fucking idea where China is?”

“East?” He chuckles, winking at me. “Out of the frying pan, Hud, and out of the fire.”



Months later though, it still feels like we’re very much in the fire.

When we’re scraping by, making a living selling ourselves and our services and parts of our souls to whatever awful piece of shit will pay us the most, I know we all still feel the burn. When Logan goes a little crazy, and Bryce goes to the needle, and I decide to be just like my father and find peace in the bottom of a bottle, it sure as shit still feels like we’re in the fire.

Maybe we can never go back, but we’ve also got no place left to go.

We feel those flames for more than a year like that, the hurt and the pain searing itself into us every single day. That is, until the day we meet William Archer, and everything changes.



REAGAN

P R E S E N T



I wake up to the sound of my apartment door slamming shut, and sit bolt upright.

I live alone.

I’m out of bed before my head is even fully awake, and I grab the first deadly weapon I can find, which happens to be one of the heels I wore last night. With the fiercest face I can muster with my heart hammering in my chest, I fling open my bedroom door and scream bloody murder as I brandish the stiletto at the figure standing in my hallway shrugging off a winter jacket.

He turns and grins that cocky, arrogant smirk of his at me. “And a good morning to you too, Princess.”

Hudson?!

I freeze with the stiletto still brandished above my head, blinking as I stare at him trying to figure out just what the hell he’s doing standing in my apartment and leering at me like that at 6:30 in the morning.

“What- I mean, how-” I start to sputter, my mind still trying to piece together the reality of him being here right now when I see his eyes dip for a moment, and his grin only gets bigger as his eyebrow arches along with his smirk.

I am suddenly keenly aware of the fact that I’m standing in the hallway with him in nothing but a thin t-shirt and panties, and with a gasp, I’m dashing back into my room and slamming the door to the sound of his laughter. “What the fuck are you doing here?!” I shriek through the door as I press my forehead against the wood and groan to myself as my face burns bright with embarrassment. “How did you even get in?”

Hudson is still laughing, and I can hear him jangling something against the other side of the door that sounds like keys. “Donald gave me a set,” he chuckles, pointedly ignoring the first part of my questions. I yank on some pajama pants and fling the door open again just as he marches past my door into the kitchen. My eyes narrow at his back, trying to will my cheeks to stop being so damned red.

“Aw, no battle-cry this time?” He turns and grins at me, his eyes twinkling. “I’m hurt.”

“Yeah well, break into my place again and you will be hurt.” I mutter, feeling my ears burn as he only chuckles at my empty threat and breezes past me into the kitchen.

I’m momentarily thrown off by suddenly realizing what he’s wearing. He’s not in a tux this time, and is instead curiously in running shorts and a black undershirt, despite the fact that it’s freezing outside. I stare at him as he pokes his nose into my refrigerator, totally forgetting my train of thought as my eyes rove over the sleeves of tattoos running up his muscled and defined arms and across his chest and collarbone. I’ve seen them partially before I guess, but it’s only now seeing them in the daylight that I realize how beautiful they are. I recognize one image as the same Marine corp emblem that my father had inked onto his arm as well, but on Hudson the design is set into a twisting and complex background of other images and inked names.

I’m once again drawn to his shorts and I wrinkle my brow. “Wait, what are you wearing?”

He frowns. “What do you wear to the gym?”

“We’re not at the gym, though.”

He grins. “Yeah, but we will be after we eat.”

“Excuse me?”

He sighs heavily and rolls his eyes as he pulls away from the fridge with a carton of Almond milk in his hands. My jaw drops as I watch him open it before he brings it to his lips and takes a swig.

“What are you doing?”

“Oh relax, cupcake, I don’t have cooties,” He makes a face and stares at the carton in his hand before turning to me and shaking his head. “Almond milk? What the hell kind of-”

“What, I’m lactose intolerant,” I grumble, brusquely pushing past him and trying to shove the fact that his arm just brushed against my side out of my head. I push the button on the espresso machine and turn back to him.