Sick Hate – Sick World Read Online J.A. Huss

Categories Genre: Alpha Male, Dark, Sports, Suspense, Virgin Tags Authors: J.A. Huss Advertisement

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And I want to share it with her. All of it. Even the stupid thing like t-shirts.

She tugs the shirt on without a bra, and then pulls a pair of denim cut-offs up her legs. I pull on a pair of cargo shorts and we leave the bedroom. “Hungry?”

“Starving.”

When I glance at the clock, I realize it’s already noon. I never ended up cooking the food from last night. Kabobs. They’re already skewered, covered in marinade inside a pan in the fridge. So I start the grill and put them on.

Irina sits in a lounge chair, eyes closed, just a few feet away. And I start thinking about what she was telling me earlier.

How she was sad that it was over. Her fights. And that’s something I feel as well.

I don’t know what to do with this life. I don’t know how to fill it up. I think I need an anchor because I’m drifting. I was gonna use Irina, and maybe she was gonna use me, but I doubt it because she’s Irina. And she’s perfect, and singular, and has no expectations.

I was gonna use her to keep me from floating away.

But she’s drifting too. And I can’t help but think back to Dog and how he described meeting her out there in the ocean.

Drifting. Like she was dead.

And how can you anchor yourself to another drifting person?

Just… drift with them? Drift together? How does it work?

I don’t know.

But here is what I do know—I will go anywhere she goes.

Anywhere.

CHAPTER 27

I was supposed to die nine times already, at least.

The nine ghosts of my opponents follow me around like reminders. Their gaunt faces, their expressions of pain, the fear in their eyes when they realize death has come for them. They have stuck with me all this time.

I’m not supposed to be here, living a brand-new life with a man I could fall in love with in a blink. I was supposed to go out fighting.

I was supposed to die in that tenth fight. Everyone knew it.

Sure, I made it farther than most. But everyone’s luck runs out eventually.

And that was the plan. It really was. I wanted to kill people that day I ran out of the gym. I wanted to make the world better. I wanted to get rid of all the evil. I wanted to fix it.

But this desire, this fantasy—this, more than anything else, is what made me pathetically naïve.

The dreams of dreamers. That’s all it was.

After I came back inside from the terrace last night I heard a little bit of what Eason was telling Romero in the living room. How the machine that runs the evil is just too big and powerful. There are thousands of them. Tens of thousands of them. They run everything. Every fuckin’ country. Every fuckin’ army. Every fuckin’ corporation. They. Are. Everywhere.

And the thing is, I knew this. I knew this.

All growing up I knew this. I knew better than to fight back. Which is ironic, of course, because all we did was fight.

But we weren’t fighting them, we were fighting each other.

We were convinced that if we just played by their rules, and did what we were told, and held on to the idea that we could be bought and sold, and therefore we could buy our way out—that it was… what? Fair?

It’s not fair. There’s no fair here.

This is sick. That’s it. It’s just fuckin’ sick.

I can’t change anything. What happened that day in the village was a one-off chance. It didn’t change anything. The machine didn’t break. It didn’t burn. The power went out in one small part of the whole and there was a… flicker.

What we did that day—those men we killed—was but a flicker.

The lights are still very much on.

The monster is very much alive.

And I will spend the rest of my days fully understanding that there is nothing I can do about it.

This is why Eason can’t get out of bed some days. Sure, it’s the little brother. Everything that happened to him and his family is part of his depression. But mostly—I think, anyway—it’s because he knows. He knows there’s nothing we can do.

There is no way to tell anyone who can make it matter because like Eason said, they’re all on the take.

So there are two choices. One. Fall into that dark abyss of self-loathing. Unable to get out of bed. Unwilling to make a new future because I’m stuck in the past.

Or. Two. Pretend like it never happened.

I’m living a brand-new life with a man I could fall in love with in a blink.

I stop and really think about that for a moment.

Really understand it.

And then I blink.

The next morning I wake up before the sun with Eason’s arm wrapped around my waist, holding me tight against his chest. The AC is humming, but other than that, it’s eerily quiet.

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