A/N: For all of those coming from fictionpress - welcome! Enjoy!
Chapter 29-30
Hunter stewed at his desk, staring at the pile of paperwork on the desk in front of him. Reclining in his chair, he ran a hand over his scruff, trying to massage out the kink in his jaw. He felt irritated, and he felt thiiis close to telling everyone in his vicinity to shut the fuck up so that he could focus on his god damn paperwork – which he’d started and stopped about a dozen times thus far. The annoying whirring of the space heater was driving him off the wall, along with the rattling of the photocopier machine which was supposed to have been fixed last week. It was snowing again, and a blizzard had been forecasted to arrive by nightfall so he wanted to get everything done and over with before the worst of it hit.
“Good afternoon, Sheriff – here’s the F1 report,” Robbie dropped another manila folder on his. Hunter only grimaced as the pile got higher, adding even more work to all the files he’d fallen behind on.
“What’s on your mind?” Jackson sat at the desk beside him, a steaming hot poutine in his hand. “You look grumpier than usual.”
“I’m fine.”
“Don’t look fine to me,” Jackson’s chair creaked as he turned his wheelie chair towards Hunter, “want some poutine?”
“You’re going to kill yourself if you keep eating that.”
“This is the heart and blood of Canadians, this is what keeps us alive.”
Hunter chuckled, “Alright, if you say so.”
“How’s Emma?”
“Fine.”
“Hm,” Jackson swallowed a bite of fries with gravy and curds, and turned back to his desk to face his own stack of files, “If my wife’s taught me one thing in life, is that fine does not mean fine.”
Even Jackson was annoying him now, “anything new in the case?”
“Nothing. We’ve told Kat to keep us updated if she gets any strange phone calls asking her to do anything, and have her lines tapped.”
“Great.”
A few minutes passed, and Hunter focused on typing up a case report on a misdemeanor involving two kids filling a snow blower with tomato sauce and painting their neighbor’s house red. Trying to tune out everyone around him so that he didn’t have to focus on that nagging feeling of irritation within him, he sighed heavily when Jackson started talking again.
“So you going to talk to me about it or not?”
Hunter clenched his jaw and didn’t turn to face the detective. A few moments passed before he sighed again, “She’s leaving.”
“Where to?”
“Toronto, with the friend that’s arrived.”
“Probably best for her.”
Hunter looked at Jackson out of the side of his eye, exasperated, “I know that.”
“She’ll be safer there.”
“For sure.”
“Have people her own age around her.”
“Yup.”
“More job prospects.”
“I know that too.”
“She’ll have more seasons than winter, and almost winter,” Jackson craned his head to look towards the window, “I still don’t know how you guys do it out here.”
Now he was fully annoyed, “what’s your point?”
“You should be happy she wants to leave. It’ll keep her safe while we keep looking for who wants to hurt her, and the town will go back to not caring about the lighthouse anymore.”
“I know all of this.”
Jackson put down his poutine then, and sat back in his chair, “but you’re not happy.”
Hunter pursed his lips as he thought. “No, it’s not that I’m not happy. I feel… inconvenienced.”
“Inconvenienced?”
“Yeah, inconvenienced.”
“By her?”
“Yeah.”
Jackson laughed then, and turned back to his desk, “Ah, to be young and oblivious.”
Hunter didn’t know what he meant by that and deciding he didn’t like the way Jackson was laughing, he decided to end the conversation right then and there. Going back to typing up his report, he tuned out the chatter around him and went back to his paperwork.
The day passed by as it normally did, with phone calls about minor inconveniences, chatter over the radio about the storm, and with police banter filling the station. Jackson left around three to run forensics on the body they had found at a different, more advanced lab, leaving Hunter with some leads that he wanted him to check up on.
It was around five when he finally wrapped up, and he told a few of the officers to go home early if it was a quiet night. No need to be at the station when they could be on call at home, near a fireplace as the storm raged on.
The blizzard was already well on its way as he drove back to his house. In an hour, the roads would be impossible to drive on, and it always took a few hours before the snow plough trucks from the nearby city to drive down to Harbordale to clear the paths. He’d been sulking in his thoughts for the entire day, the irritation turning to annoyance, which turned to brooding.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t happy for her – he just couldn’t understand why she had to go ahead making decisions without consulting him first. After all, he’d gone well out of his way to keep her safe. You’d think that would warrant a conversation or at least, more than a two weeks’ notice like he was some employer. Granted, he had employed her, but … ugh. His thoughts trailed off. He was irritated that he was even thinking about this. He hadn’t spent this much time thinking about a woman since he had been a teenager, when he had proactively decided he would never spend this much time wasting his thoughts on women. It was counterproductive, a waste of time and worst of all, a sign of weakness. He hadn’t managed to get promoted to Sheriff by the age of 29 by chasing women. Emma had become a knot in his side, aggravatingly refusing to come undone.
As he drove up to his driveway, he had decided he would cook some dinner (because Lord knows that the woman still had no idea how to turn on an oven), invite her over, and talk some sense into her. She couldn’t go to Toronto without a game plan, and it would take more than two weeks to make a game plan. She needed to have a job ready, an apartment ready, and an idea of she wanted to be in a years’ time. Rushing head-first into the next big thing had landed her in this mess in Harbordale in the first place; why did she want to do the same thing in Toronto?
With that decided, he locked his jeep and walked back home.
The dishwasher was beeping when he walked in, a sign that Emma hadn’t finished unloading before she left. He wondered if he could use that to mess with her and use it to say that she hadn’t fulfilled her contract. It would drive her insane, and he hid a smile at the thought of her barging up to his house, pink cheeked and furious.
He had only just entered the kitchen to stop the incessant beeping of the dishwasher when he saw a neatly typed note pinned to the refrigerator under a fridge magnet.
He froze.
Hunter,
I’ve decided to leave Harbordale tonight.
I know this is short notice, but I wanted to leave without messy goodbyes with everyone I’ve grown close to here. I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but you know as well as I do that this place is not for me.
Please don’t come looking for me. I’ve suffered enough these past few months, and I want a chance at happiness.
I’ve left your spare set of keys on the kitchen counter. I’ve made arrangements to ship everything to my new place, so you don’t need to concern yourself with any of it.
Sincerely,
Emma
x.x.
The music of the pub was loud, drowned out by the crowd of people teeming around the bar today. Harbordale always did this. On an extra stormy night, the townsfolk buckled down together to whether out the worst of it with pints, liquor and debauchery. Kat was back at work, and Hunter glared at her over the rim of his pint glass.
He felt fucked.
“Women don’t get how hard it is to be a man, you know?” Robbie was talking to the group of cops, who were sitting together near the pool table. “You know what I mean? It’s hard when you gotta worry about two heads, not one.”
“Shut up, Robbie,” Hunter drawled as he downed the last of his third pint, his chest still hurting from something he couldn’t pin-point.
“I’m just saying, men need support systems just as much as women do. We don’t get taught how to differentiate between all the hormones.”
Hunter tried to massage the dull ache in between his eyebrows, wondering how he got grouped together with such an incompetent group of officers.
He didn’t want to be here. But he didn’t want to be at home either, alone with that note. Every time he thought of it, his chest felt tight, like he couldn’t breathe. A pain that he hadn’t felt before would seep into his lungs and into his throat, and the only thing he could think of to help stave it away was to drink.
Which is why he was here. At an impromptu after-works drinks gathering, while it blizzarded outside.
“I fell in love with this city girl once,” Derek was talking, his eyes inebriated and hooded, “She fucked me up bad. I always thought I knew how to act smart while dating, but my brain stopped working altogether. I spent so much money on visiting her. Turned out she had another man along.”
“Can we change the topic?” Hunter motioned for the bartender to get him another round. “Anything but this.”
“It hurt man,” Derek went on, oblivious. “I think it was because I’d never met a city girl, you know. They ‘aint like us slow townfolk. They live on a different speed wave.”
“Sound wave,” Hunter said gruffly, graciously accepting another beer and taking a heavy swig.
“What?”
“It’s sound wave. Speed waves isn’t a real word.”
“Sorry, Sheriff,” Derek gave him a curt nod, before sharing a knowing look with the other cops at the table, “something on your mind?”
“No.”
“Emma related?”
Hunter paused, lips at the frosty mug. “Say that name again and I’ll make sure you don’t have teeth to talk with tomorrow,” he chugged the entire pint then, tapping it on the table after he was done.
No-one mentioned Emma’s name for the remainder of the night.
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