*This was already published, as a preview at the end of "Secret Love". I don't think I'm going to start updating regularly until the first of the year. There's just too much going on right now.
As always, God Bless and Happy Reading.
"Bethany?" Hunter rubbed his eyes, throwing his keys into the bowl on the stand by their apartment door. It had been a long day. He and his band had gone into the studio to lay down some tracks at five that morning. It was now nine, and he had eaten nothing but a bowl of fruit since breakfast. He wandered into the kitchen, pulling open the fridge and dragging out a carton of milk. His voice was weak from singing all day, and his fingers were aching from pressing the strings of his guitar for hours.
He pulled a bowl from the cupboard and poured some cereal and milk into it, grabbed a spoon from the silverware drawer and bumped it closed with his hip. He shoveled the crunchy kernels into his mouth, finishing the bowl with record speed and placing the utensils in the dishwasher. When he had finished, he maneuvered down the narrow hall to the bedroom he shared with his girlfriend, Bethany.
She was sitting on their bed, her back resting against the backboard and her bare legs curled under her chin. One arm was wrapped around her calves, and the other held a book out in front of her face. Despite his exhaustion, a small smile touched Hunter's face. No doubt she had been curled up like that for hours, devouring page after page of the novel he had bought her last week when she had dragged him into a book store. He had rolled his eyes at the time, having never understood how she could enjoy such a tedious activity. He had never read an entire book cover to cover in his life. It seemed to make her happy, though, so he had been more than willing to stand there and recite corny pick-up lines as she gazed in wonder at the bookshelves.
She had not yet pried her eyes away from the pages, and Hunter could see the golden flecks in her brown irises flicking from one word to the next with a strange kind of ravenous hunger. He decided to leave her be for the moment, heading into the bathroom to wash his hands and quickly deciding on a shower instead. He ran the hot water, peeling out of his clothes and stepping under the spray.
The song they had been recording in the studio today was still stuck in his head, so he hummed it, momentarily distracted from his exhaustion by the wonderful feeling of the scalding downpour. The song reminded him of the time when it was written: during the four months in which Bethany had not been with him. He did not allow himself to remember that time very often, so it had been very emotional to have to put all of that back into his head today.
It was not like things had not had a happy ending. His previous girlfriend, Amanda Felton, whose conniving, abusive ex-boyfriend, Matt Rutland, had forced her to play a massive role in a plot to strip Hunter of his modest fortune, was now nothing but kind; Bethany had actually cultivated a close friendship with her since Matt had been thrown in jail for his machinations. Matt had involved Amanda heavily in his plot. He had tried to coerce her to sleep with Hunter, so that he could sue him for a sum of six million dollars in child support, claiming that the Amanda's pregnancy was Hunter's doing.
Of course, it had eventually been revealed that the child had not belonged to Hunter at all, had instead belonged to Matt. In fact, at the party after the awards show, the night Hunter had supposedly slept with Amanda, Amanda had ordered the bartender to spike Hunter's drink, and he had been so inebriated that he had fallen asleep before the two had even reached the hotel room.
He could not be angry with Amanda anymore. The poor girl had been under a dangerous influence, and if she had not done as instructed, she would have been harshly punished. Matt had even pulled a gun and shot her straight in the stomach when the truth of the situation had come out in the court room, a tragedy she had survived, though her baby had not. Hunter was actually grateful to her, in a way. The confession that she had not actually slept with him had been given to Bethany in private, and Hunter could not be more glad. He was not sure he and Beth would have ever gotten back together if Amanda had kept that information to herself.
He got out of the shower and toweled off, wrapping the wet cloth around his waist and leaning over the sink to brush his teeth. He opened the bathroom door to let the sticky fog out, and saw that Beth's eyes were still glued to the folded paperback. He smiled, spitting the last of his toothpaste into the sink and rinsing off his brush. Before he left the room, he pulled on his pajama bottoms, rubbing his eyes as his exhaustion took over again.
He clicked off the light in the bathroom and strode over to the bed, where he grabbed one of Beth's ankles and pulled her out of her sitting position. He dragged her gently down so she was laying on her back, her tank top bunching up and her tiny shorts revealing her smooth skin.
"Hunter, what are you doing?" she protested, laughing as he grabbed her around the waist and snuggled into her chest. "Hunter," she complained, laughter tainting her resistance, "Come on! I'm almost done!"
He pushed her arm back down when she tried to raise it so she could see the page, planting a kiss on her neck and snuggling back down into her chest.
"You aren't even going to say hello to your boyfriend?" he retorted, pulling the book from her hand and laying it down on the nightstand, open to her reading spot. "I haven't been home all day! Haven't you missed me? Aren't you going to say hello?" He tickled her for effect, and she squealed. His lips found her collarbone and he blew a raspberry on her skin.
"Hunter, gross!" she laughed, reaching up to wipe the spit off her skin.
He moved down to blow another raspberry, this time on her exposed stomach. This made her shriek, a piercing sound that meant he had succeeded in tickling her again.
"Hunter," she whined, as his hands pulled her closer to his bare chest, "Why did you take my book away? I only have a few more words left."
He snuggled back down into her chest, resting his head over her heart with his arm slung over her waist. He shook his head in mock disappointment and replied, "It's a good thing I love you, Beth. What kind of girlfriend pays more attention to a novel than her boyfriend?"
She laughed. "Oh, I'm so sorry," she said sarcastically, rubbing his neck with her free hand, causing him to make a noise of contentment in the back of his throat. "Would you like to tell me about your day? Or do you want a massage?"
He smiled. "No, that's okay. I just want to sleep. It's been a long day." He sighed happily, rolling over so he was on his side of the bed, and ducked quickly beneath the covers. Bethany also got under the covers, and he pulled her closer again, so he could wrap an arm around her waist and drag her against his chest.
He inhaled heavily, his eyelids begging to drift closed. "How was your day, sweetheart?" he asked.
She smiled, watching him fight his exhaustion. "It was all right," she replied, whispering and running her hands through his hair soothingly, propped up on one elbow so her body shielded him from the harsh light of the bedside lamp. "I'll be happy when you go back on tour, though. I'm beginning to get a little bored, just hanging around all the time."
He smiled. "Yeah. Me, too. It's just one more week, though. No worries."
She chuckled softly. "All right, mister. Go to sleep. You're exhausted."
He pouted, but his eyes did not open. "Aren't you going to kiss me goodnight?" he asked impatiently, and she smiled, leaning down to plant one on his mouth.
"I love you, Hunter," she said, a smile in her voice.
"Love you, Beth," he replied, before promptly sliding into the deep, slow breaths of sleep. She watched him until his eyelashes started pacing back and forth - an indication that he was dreaming - and then grabbed her book off the table.
She scanned the page, looking for the last sentence she had read, then continued from there.
"No, Jared. You don't know," Jessie said, running a hand through her hair and letting the tears fall to the ground.
"Well, good!" he retorted, his anger rising again. "I'm glad I don't know! You know what they say: what you don't know can't hurt you, right?"
Jared stormed out of the house, and his car left a spray of gravel behind as it peeled onto the curb. Jessie sank into her chair and pressed a frustrated hand to her eyes.
"Oh, Jared," she said, though she knew he was gone. "You don't understand. What you don't know...it only hurts me."
Bethany closed the book. It was the first of a trilogy, and she knew that she was going to have to go out and buy the other two before she went insane with curiosity. It was not even that the book had even been all that entertaining, and it certainly had not been spectacularly written. It was just the main character: Jessie Malcolm. Beth had identified with her from the start. Throughout the entire novel, Jessie had been hiding her past from her boyfriend, Jared McClendon. Jessie had practically been raped when she had worked as a circus performer in Nevada, and the man who had attempted to steal her virtue had been stalking her ever since his efforts had been thwarted and she had fled to Oklahoma.
The emotional struggle that Jessie went through in the book was exactly what Beth felt when she thought about the part of her past she had kept hidden from Hunter. Her situation was almost entirely different from Jessie's, but the fact remained that there were events in Bethany's past that Hunter should probably know. Like Jessie, Bethany had no idea how to put what she had experienced into words. How was she supposed to broach the subject? How was she to make Hunter understand that nothing was going to happen, and that it was all in the past?
She clicked off the light on the nightstand and curled into Hunter's warm chest. Was it so wrong to have one secret? Did she really expect that Hunter had told her every single shady bit of his past? There was no danger of it coming back to haunt her, so why involve him in it at all?
She let the issue go, closing her eyes and letting herself drift into sleep. Images floated behind her eyelids, scenes from the novel interposed with memories, sprinkled with bits of red fantasy.
What you don't know...it only hurts me. It only hurts me.