Page 26 of Hunt Me
‘You know what I mean,’ I push, but the scowl doesn’t leave her. ‘Before everyone died.’
There must be a thread connecting us, bringing us together. How else would you explain my nickname being eerily similar to her actual name. We fell into each other's paths and have been playing games ever since.
‘My mum loved animals,’ her voice is quiet and she doesn’t look at me as she speaks. ‘We used to live on a farm, and whenever she and my dad were out checking stock, they’d seelots of deer. Then, the day my parents found out they had been approved to adopt me, they saw a baby faun. They said it was a sign. So they named me Fauna.’
‘You were close to them?’ The pain in her voice as she speaks of her parents is palpable, but I ask anyway.
She audibly swallows, her fingers back to tracking the crack in her bat. Then, ever so briefly, as if it is all she can bring herself to manage, she nods her head, a tear dropping to her bat as she blinks it free.
Chapter Thirteen
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Fauna
‘It hurts, doesn’t it,’ my voice fills with emotion as I speak, and I don’t take my attention from my bat.
The crack is getting bigger now.
‘What does?’ Ruaridh asks.
‘Realising that sometimes your plans, no matter how well thought out you think they are, can be destroyed by another person. Sometimes your life can be ruined by one wrong move or someone else’s well calculated one.’
My admission surprises him, I see it in how his eyes widen.
I’ve been studying his expressions, how his right dimple will show ever so slightly when he is amused with himself or how a line will appear between his eyebrows when he is concentrating, thinking of how best to act next.
The whiskey I sip no longer has much of a taste to it, which is probably a sign that I should have stopped drinking once thesensation changed, but I haven’t. I need this; I have needed it for a long time.
It wasn’t my most light-hearted statement of the night, the amount of whiskey I’ve consumed bringing on my darker thoughts, the ones I usually keep hidden. I should stop, shut up and not let him know anything more but the pain in my chest, the thick feeling that has been lodged at the back of my throat for months, and the constant pressure behind my eyes has me so exhausted I don’t care anymore.
I don’t care if this ruthless monster hears about how fucked up I feel because what difference will it make.
I’m already on the brink of breaking.
Maybe me being here and choosing to stay with him is my subconscious’s secret wish for something to happen. That inside I’m begging him to give me an out, to take me away from all the pain this world has shown me. But no matter how much I could ever really want that, dream of it, I will never be able to let it happen. I may put myself in dangerous situations but I can’t abandon the girls. I can’t leave Isla to give birth on her own and I will certainly not be abandoning her in such a vulnerable time.
‘Aye,’ Ruaridh sighs, gulping whiskey himself. His Scottish accent becoming thicker the drunker he gets. ‘The world’s a fucked up place, but that, what you just said, has always been the case. The apocalypse, the virus didnae create that form of pain and disappointment. It existed long before the world changed. And we adapted and lived through it when it happened to us, just like we do now.’
I watch him carefully through my hazy vision. The way he speaks with such certainty is gripping. He really believes what he is telling me. To keep going we need to keep adapting and pushing through.
‘I don’t know how much strength I have left to do that,’ I reluctantly admit, looking into the glass in my hand and watching the amber liquid swirling below inside its crystal container.
Ruaridh’s gaze is hard, I can feel it penetrating my skin. It feels almost as if he is trying to peel back each layer there is of me. It is as if he is trying to understand every thought I have and inspect any secret I keep. It is as if he wants to hold everything I keep near.
The pressure behind my eyes grows, and I look down to where my nails scrape against the patterned crystal. There is dirt underneath them, and some lines where the crinkles in my skin are cracked with dryness.
Tattooed hands pull the tumbler out of my grip, and the impurities of my own hands are covered by the perfect lines that adorn the Skull’s hands. Intricate details of Ruaridh’s tattoos work together to create art that is so beautiful it’s hard to believe it must have been created during a time of such chaos.
He doesn’t look old enough for them to have been done before the outbreak, or if they were done, then I would seriously question how he’d managed to find someone so good that would tattoo a kid, not to mention where he found the money for such artwork. I don’t ever remember such big tattoos being cheap.
Ruaridh’s hold is kind. ‘Why don’t you let someone else be the strength for a little while?’
‘You don’t understand,’ I croak. There is no one, the girls are closer to breaking than I am.We have always been a strong group. We looked out for one another and made sure that we held each other up. But the journey up here was painful before it even began. ‘The further we walked, the harder it got. Then it just … kept getting harder. We’d laugh so much and at anythingreally. It has kept us going, we have kept us going but it’s different now.’
And none of us know what to do.
‘How is it different now?’ Ruaridh asks as his thumb lazily strokes circles across my palm.
