Page 50 of Bloom

“I—” I open my mouth and promptly close it, sucking in a breath as I do. After a second, I let it out on another laugh—so much freakinglaughter, I can barely comprehend it—before shaking my head and moving on. “Favorite subject in school.”

“Biology.”

“Really?” As hard as I try, I just cannot imagine the man beside me wrapped in a lab coat and tucked away in a science lab.

He nods, shrugging. “Wanted to be a vet.”

Nowthatmakes sense.. “Wanted?”

“Dropped out before I finished.”

“Why?”

“Lots of reasons.” None of which he’s going to expand on, if the sudden stiff set of his shoulders and the twitching muscle in his jaw are anything to go by. He proves me right when he shifts the spotlight back onto me. “You?”

A wry smile curls my lips. “Lunch.”

“You didn't like school?”

“I just wasn't very good at it."

“You?” He feigns surprise. “Not good at something?”

Something warm, fuzzy, and ridiculous unfurls at his comment, even as the topic of school dampens my good mood. “It just wasn’t my thing.”

I’ve never been booksmart. Even if I was, I didn’t exactly have the best home conditions for consistent studying. I used to look forward to school, though, if only because it got me out of the house, but during those final years, it was miserable to be surrounded by people who seemed like they knew exactly what they were doing, exactly where they were going, exactly what their lives were going to be, while I had no clue.

“So you didn’t go to college?”

I shake my head, averting my gaze to the gravelly path stretched out before us. I don't know why I find that fact embarrassing because it’s not. The logical part of me knows that lots of people don’t go to college, that I’m not the only one from Haven Ridge High who got a job instead. But the illogical part likes to convince me otherwise. It likes to sneer that I’m the onlyone not doing anything new, anything spectacular, with my life. That I’m the only one stuck in a rut.

“You said you have a sister,” I blurt out, eager to change the subject even though I’m the one who brought it up.

To his credit, Hunter doesn’t acknowledge the abrupt change. Instead, the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen twists his mouth. “Yeah. Kelsey.”

“She’s eighteen, right?”

He nods, maintaining that freaking smile as he quietly gushes about his little sister—turns out, when he’s not the topic of conversation, Hunter likes to talk. He tells me everything about her, keeps telling me until I know her better than I do him. He swears up and down that her first word was a garbled version of his name. He taught her to drive. He didn’t like her first boyfriend, or her second boyfriend, or her prom date. They’ve always been close, he tells me, because with their age gap, they didn’t have a whole lot to fight about.

As he talks, I find myself feeling… not jealous, exactly. Wistful, I guess. Pining for a love like that, for someone to love me so much, they look likethatwhen my name comes up.

Fingers graze mine ever-so-slightly, there one second, gone the next. “She hated school too. Couldn’t graduate fast enough.”

I felt the same; until I actually graduated and realized I felt just as lost and out of my depth in the real world.

“She's not going to college. She has absolutely no idea what she's doing with her life and it stresses me the fuck out, but she's happy.” Hunter pauses, sliding me a look I swear is pointed. “She’ll figure it out.”

I shiver under the weight of his gaze. “You think?”

This time, when his hand brushes mine, it lingers—it holds and squeezes and holds a little more. “I know.”

We're less than a mile from the parking lot when the first clap of thunder sounds.

Glancing up at the sky that’s considerably darker than it was a few minutes ago, I flinch when a fat raindrop lands on my cheek.

“Shit,” Hunter grumbles, tugging me off the trail and under the cover of the trees. Simultaneously, he shrugs off his backpack. Before I can comprehend what’s happening, something is shoved over my head, shrouding my world in darkness.

Cozy warmth, soft fabric, and the familiar smell of hay and grass and something unmistakably male envelop me like a hug. Pushing back the hood covering my eyes, I glance down at the dark material protecting me from the rain before casting a questioning glance upwards. “You don’t want it?”

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