Finding You

Chapter 39 - Vulnerable

Hunter shakes his head again. "You shouldn't have come anywhere near me yesterday. I was drunk, I could've hurt you," he says, roughly running a hand through his hair.

"You wouldn't have."

"You didn't know that," Hunter replies, finally looking up at me for the first time, but the fact that his eyes are on me makes me immaturely look away.

"I did. I mean, it's you Hunter, of course I knew," I say, hugging my arms to my chest tightly.

Hunter sighs. "Still, if anything had happened to you because of me, I never would've forgiven myself - "

"It's okay. Nothing happened," I interject, before he can beat himself up about it anymore. There's silence between us for a moment, but I can't take it. "So, you were pretty drunk last night. Like, inhaled a liquor store drunk," I say, glancing up at him cautiously. "How come?"

He lets out a short laugh, almost a sigh, and I see the smile on his face that I used to live for. I don't think I'll ever get over his smile.

To be honest, I don't think I want to.

He's still got his eyes trained on me, and the intensity in them makes my breath catch in my throat. Why must he always look at me like that? It physically hurts not to be near him when he looks at me like that.

"Yesterday," he begins, bringing a hand up to rub the back of his neck. "Things got pretty dark. Sean was all over you every single day, and you wouldn't even look at me. Then I started to think about how I didn't deserve you anyway. How I wasn't good enough for you, and how I'm probably never going to be." He says it bluntly, easily, like it's just a simple fact of life. "And yesterday, after seeing you with him one too many times, I just felt like, no matter how hard I try to change, it's just always going to be that way. So I drank."

"Seeing me with him?" I repeat, doing my best to hold his gaze, but Hunter drops his eyes again. Eye contact seems to be a bit much for both of us at the moment.

"I saw you with him," he says. "Almost every day for the past three weeks, and I just knew. I mean, what else was I supposed to do? You seemed like you didn't want anything to do with me. I wasn't thinking straight," he says, and I can't help but feel confused.

After all the time we spent together, after everything I've told him, how could he think that the feelings I had for Sean are even close to what I feel for him? While we were together, did I not show him enough what he means to me? How much I need him? How nothing else matters?

"I get it, really, I do," Hunter continues, draping a hand over the back of his neck. "I'm just the asshole who lied to you and broke your heart, and he's your first love. I can't compete with that, I know that now. But damn, does it hurt."

First love.

Everyone says that you'll always remember it. The mountains may crumble, the oceans may dry, and your memories may fade, but you'll never forget your first love, or so it goes. But your first love doesn't always have to be the first person that you dated.

Your first love is the person that comes into your life and marks a clear before and after. It's the person that you will compare everyone else to after them, if there is an after them. It's the person that shakes up your world in the most wonderful and amazing ways that you never even thought possible. It's the one who mends your broken heart by giving you theirs. It's the person who makes you wonder how you even breathed before them. Or how you'll breathe after..

And it's because of all those things, I know that Sean is not my first love. He never was.

Hunter is.