Page 18 of Hunt Me

Rolling all the windows down in the truck, I lean my head back against the seat and let my fingers work out some of the fidgets I’d been holding in the entire time. My first and middle fingers walk through the air, and I watch them cross through beams of sunlight.

Then my wrists bend, hands flapping, and as they do, tension starts to leave my body. I don’t open my eyes. I don’t want to know if people are watching. I just want to calm myself down so I can hit the road and head back to where I left my prey.

It doesn’t take me long to get back to the cemetery once I’m in the headspace to drive. There’s never any real traffic in this little town, and the cemetery is right at the edge, before the road that leads to all the farmland.

As I pull into the parking lot, my heart sinks when I realize that Denver’s car is gone, but it’s not exactly a surprise. He’s obedient. He was from the very moment I had him in that alley and wiped his attacker’s blood off his face.

But he’s also not a foolish man. He has pride, and he’s not going to wait, bent over a grave with his panty-clad ass out all day. Maybe someday, he will. Maybe someday, I can test his patience for me. But I’ll be doing that after I have him thoroughly trapped in my web.

And I’ll do it with a vibrating butt plug in his ass and a remote in my hand.

My cock thickens at the thought of that as I get out of the truck and do a quick sweep of the graves to see if he left me anything behind. Maybe there’s a note. A gift, some sign that he wants to see me again.

I’m entirely unsurprised to find nothing. There’s not even the smallest trace of him, and that probably means he’s angry with me for abandoning him the way I did.

Fuck, I want to put my fist through the wall for not thinking ahead and dragging him with me. But I’m really not good at thinking on my feet. It’s one of the few things I actively hate about being autistic. I wish I could be more like my brothers when it comes to being able to pivot, but once I have a task in my head, it’s hard for me to divert.

Even if diverting means getting to play with Denver and his pretty hole after.

But it’s fine. Like I told myself before, I will make it up to him. I will make him forget all the ways he’s upset with me and instead overwhelm him with all the ways I will spend the rest of my time making him feel good.

With a deep breath, I begin to pace amongst the graves. In the grand scheme of human burial grounds, this land is newborn. The church has been here less than a century. The oldest markers date back to the 1930s.

It doesn’t spark interest or joy, but it’s still a quiet place where I feel like myself. I know more about human burial customs than any man should know, but I can’t help it. Before I knew the wordsautismorspecial interest, I knew the types of stone used to make grave markers. I knew how the first homes were built over the bodies of their ancestors to keep their spirits close.

I knew about the pits where early homo sapiens used to leave their dead.

I knew about the first rituals humans used to pray to those who had long since passed.

And where death scares so many people, for me, I find it a comfort. It’s an inevitability we can’t escape. Life is constantly unpredictable, and my inability to control the world around me has always made everything feel so…so difficult. But knowing that it will all end—that we will all cease—brings me peace.

Feeling calmer, I walk toward the oldest marker and find several young daisies sprouting from the earth and pluck them. Then I move to the next. There’s a set of weather-worn faux flowers, and I take a tattered rose.

From the next, a sprig of leaves I don’t know the names of.

The grave beyond that, I take a carnation.

At the end of the yard, I take bits of stone from a crumbling granite cross that hasn’t been maintained and stick them in my pocket. The weight of them is as comforting as coffin silk against the pads of my fingers when I stim myself to sleep.

And then I can breathe a little easier.

The bouquet in my hands is probably a little macabre, but I think it’s beautiful. It’s raw and wild and stolen, which is the only way I would ever give flowers.

I wonder if Denver will understand what it means to me or what I’m trying to tell him with this gift.

There are a couple of hardy palms planted by the church doors, so I peel away a couple of leaves, then use them to tie the bouquet together before throwing it onto the passenger seat of my truck and making my way back into town.

I don’t know where Denver lives. Stalking is second nature to me—it’s how I’ve found every important person in my life who isn’t blood related to me—but I’ve been trying to understand boundaries, especially now that we’re getting out of our old life. So I haven’t looked him up, and I regret that now.

There are only three places where I know he’ll go consistently, and I don’t feel like going to the gym, and I don’t want to risk anyone noticing me on the college campus. So I go north instead of south, toward the bar where I know he has a show coming up.

When I pull into the parking lot, I feel a small pulse of relief to see that it’s closed and every space is empty. I haven’t actually done anything like this in a while. Lately, my job has been surveillance from the comfort of my truck, where I can snack on the foods I like and not talk to people.

I’m good at getting in and out of places unseen, but when there are tons of people around, it makes my job harder.

I don’t need to worry about that today. It takes me ten seconds to pick the lock on the back and another ten secondsto clip the wires on the alarm so it doesn’t go off and the video stops recording. It was honestly a little too easy.

“Amateurs,” I mutter to myself.