Page 83 of Snowed In with Benefits

The dishes are done and I’m left staring at a basin of soapy water with nothing to do with my hands. I could tell her right now. I could just open my mouth and let the whole thing fall out, the fight, the punch, the cuffs, the plea deal, the three years of industrial soap and fluorescent light. The words are right there, stacked up behind my teeth. But if I tell her, I have to tell her about Hunter, and if I tell her about Hunter, something changes between them. I can’t be the one who does that. I empty the sink and watch the water spin down the drain. Same way my life spun down the drain. Just as filthy. Just as opaque. I grip the edges of the sink hard.

Josie puts the last dish away and I move away from the sink, looking for something else to do. I don’t like being idle, and we’ve been doing a lot more nothing lately than I’m used to. But the woodpile is full. The house is clean. The fire is stoked. There’s nothing that desperately needs to be done apart from laundry, and Josie and Hunter already claimed that.

You’d think that having another person around would make for a dirtier house, but I haven’t seen much of a difference. She carries her own weight quietly. Not furtively, like she used to, not like she’s trying not to take up too much room, just quietly. Tidying up after herself. Chipping in with chores here and there. Helping with the cooking. Picking out the Christmas tree and making us all decorate it.

“We still have cookies,” Josie says after the silence has stretched on for a long time. “Anybody want some?”

“Sure,” I say.

“Sounds great,” says Hunter.

We head out to the living room, where the cookies are still on the tray by the fire. I grab one and look at it. I didn’t notice yesterday, but these cookies are cut into shapes. This one is just a deformed circle, but some of the others look like… I give up.

“What are these supposed to be?” I ask, gesturing at the tray.

“Cookies,” Hunter says like I’m slow.

I give him a flat look while Josie laughs.

“We only had a knife to work with,” she explains. She points to different cookies as she talks. “This one was supposed to be a tree. That one you’re holding was an ornament. This was supposed to be a star.”

“Creative.” It comes out sounding sarcastic, but it isn’t supposed to. I don’t feel sarcastic. If it were me in the kitchen, I would have just rolled them into balls and been done with it.

Hunter snorts. “You would know,” he says. Then, to Josie, “You should see what he can do with ramen and a bag of chips.”

I shrug uncomfortably as the back of my neck heats up. I can feel her looking at me. That open, curious look she gets, the one that makes me feel like she can see straight through the wall I’ve spent years building. I don’t know what Hunter thinks he’s doing, cracking the door like that, but the door’s cracked now and she’s standing right in front of it. “Prison food sucks,” I tell her. “You have to learn how to get creative with it.”

“I guess three years of the same stuff would get old,” she says. There’s no judgment in her tone, just acknowledgment.

“It does,” I admit. I look down at the cookie in my hand. A deformed ornament. I turn it over, studying it like it’s interesting, because it’s easier than looking at her while I say this. “But there’s something… I don’t know. There’s something nice about having everything decided for you. Your job. I was a dishwasher. Your bedtime. Exercise time. Even your social groups. You can just… turn your brain off and coast.”

Hunter gets a look on his face. It’s almost a frown. It’s the look he gets when he’s thinking hard about something he’d rather not be thinking about.

“I can see the appeal,” Josie says slowly. “That’s kind of how it was when I was with Preston. He made all the decisions. I was, I don’t know, more like an accessory to his life than anything else. Was it worth it?”

That lands harder than she probably meant it to. She just compared her relationship to my sentence and found common ground, and the fact that she can do that without flinching, without making it about pity or horror, just meeting me where I am… I don’t know what to do with that. I stare at the fire.

Hunter opens his mouth before I can answer that. “Beau. She should know the truth.”

I shake my head, pressing my lips together. “She knows the truth. Somebody got hurt and I went to prison for it. That’s the truth. That’s all the truth that matters.”

Her eyes are darting between us. I do my best to ignore her. She doesn’t need to know the full story. It would change the way she sees Hunter. They have the best relationship out of all of us, and if she knew what really happened that night, that might change. I can’t let that happen. The only other person in the world who knows what really happened is Emmett, and he’s not about to talk.

Hunter takes a breath and looks at Josie. He opens his mouth.

“You shouldn’t do that,” I interrupt.

“Let me do this,” Hunter says, his voice low and flat. He’s not brooking any arguments. I lift my hands and let them fall, surrendering to Hunter’s terrible idea. I hold my head in my hands while I listen to him talk.

“I threw the punch that night,” Hunter tells her. “The one that put the guy in the hospital. I jumped into the middle of the fight and just started swinging. That one connected and he went down hard.”

“Then how⁠—?”

“Beau stepped in and claimed it,” Hunter says softly.

My chest is doing something complicated. I remember that night clearly. How I hesitated for just a second. How Hunter didn’t hesitate at all. I’ve never seen him like that, all action, no talk, just violence. Haven’t seen him like that before or since. It took me by surprise and I didn’t act fast enough.

“What do you mean, he claimed it?” Josie’s face is soft and confused. I look at her through my fingers, then sigh and drop my hands.