Chapter Text
Hunter Duvall woke up in a dingy motel room under musty-smelling sheets. The walls were so thin, he could hear his dad snoring through them, and there was a skittering noise near the microwave that was, best case scenario, a mouse.
He hadn’t slept well, and the slice of sunlight not blocked by blackout curtains carved straight through his vision and directly into his brain, stirring a headache behind his eyes. He was tired, under-caffeinated, and sore from long hours spent tossing and turning on the paper-thin mattress.
But none of that mattered. Today was going to be amazing, because today, Hunter was finally going to meet Cole Hill.
He’d been waiting for this for weeks. As winter warmed into spring, and his dad kicked down every obstacle Mayor Maybrook tried to throw up in their way, Hunter had devoted all his free time to preparing for the day he’d take the reins on this project. His project.
There hadn’t been much free time for a while there. Eli Duvall, ever the negotiator, made the whole endeavor contingent on Hunter graduating. The real deal: no credit recovery, pay-to-play summer school loopholes. If Hunter wanted his haunt, he had to walk across that stage in a robe and a stupid mortarboard hat.
So that’s what Hunter had done, because that’s what the Duvalls did. They didn’t sit back and wait for things to happen. When they wanted something, they rolled up their sleeves and did whatever it took to get it.
And now, here he was. They were in Kettle Springs to sign the last of the paperwork and kick off their temporary residence. Dad had contractors and construction folks ready to go. It would be a tight timeline, getting everything ready for an August opening, but they’d done more in less time. Hunter had faith in his parents and faith in himself, now that he could finally throw himself into the project full-time.
His phone was plugged in on the side table nearby. He unplugged it, slid into a pair of basketball shorts, and let himself out onto the sidewalk outside.
The sign for the motel wasn’t impressive, but it was unmistakable, and that’s all that mattered. He snapped a photo of it with the blue sky behind and posted it to his stories with the caption: “today’s the day!”
He briefly considered adding a clown emoji, then decided against it. Starting tonight, they’d be moving into a rented place and living here in town the next few months. Best not to bait the locals.
Hunter made a point of closing the app down and putting the phone away in his pocket as he went back inside. He left it in his shorts as he stripped everything off and got into the shower. He jacked off, washed up, shaved, and got dressed before he let himself check it again.
Cole Hill had liked the post. Hunter’s stomach flipped.
He opened up Cole’s profile. It was an automatic impulse, something he did often enough that he probably could have managed it blindfolded. Cole hadn’t posted anything new recently—Hunter would have known if he had—but that wasn’t what Hunter was looking for.
He clicked over to messages and opened up a DM chat. There was nothing there yet. They were mutual follows, liked each other’s posts, traded the (very) occasional comment. Hunter kept a careful count to ensure that his engagement stayed exactly even with Cole’s: like for like, comment for comment. The last thing he wanted was to come across as another pathetic, parasocial fanboy.
That said, he’d been planning this first message for days now, going over the wording in his head.
You going to be at the meeting today?
Casual, undemanding, like they were continuing an ongoing conversation, rather than striking up something new. It said we’re equals. It assumed a response.
Hunter sent it, then made himself put the phone away and go out in search of coffee. There was a Keurig in the room, but the pods were probably as old as he was, so he grabbed his keys and drove into town.
Kettle Springs was a shithole. He knew everybody blamed the factory closing for the town’s decline, but this place had clearly been sliding for a while, and Cole Hill’s guilty spending spree on the local color hadn’t done much to stop that. Even if Eli Duvall hadn’t been Eli Duvall, they would have gotten their way on the deal before long. This place needed the cash and the work.
He pulled up to the Eatery, which featured prominently in Cole’s socials as the town staple. There were a couple of other cars out front. Not many, and none of them much to look at. One of them was so Kettle Springs it hurt: a scabby-looking Ford that had obviously left its best days several decades behind it. Hunter felt a smug sort of satisfaction parking next to it. Even without its lifts, his truck would have dwarfed this piece-of-shit rustbucket.
The truck looked vaguely familiar, something Hunter mulled over idly while he walked in, until he realized that rustbucket had been more accurate than he’d realized. At a table across the room, seated with his back to the wall and a clear view of the diner, was Ruston Vance.
Hunter felt a moment’s panic. Was Cole here? This wasn’t the outfit he’d picked to make his first impression in. If Cole was here, Hunter would have to find a way to leave without drawing any attention to himself. More attention, that is, because Vance hadn’t missed the door opening. But the other person at the table with him was a girl, and there were only place settings for two.
A girl. Hunter kicked himself mentally. That wasn’t “a girl.” That had to be Quinn Maybrook.
Hunter wasn’t a backwater nobody from Nowheresville. His family was rich and well-connected. Their businesses had celebrity partnerships and endorsements. He knew how to act around famous people, actual famous people who were in movies and shit. There’s no reason Ruston Vance and Quinn Maybrook should have made him nervous. But Hunter had been steeped in news about the Kettle Springs Massacre for months now, learning everything he could as part of his more comprehensive research for the haunt. The survivors loomed large in all of those accounts. Quinn Maybrook, in particular, had taken on a kind of mythic stature in his mind. A real-world Final Girl.
And for an old-school horror nut like Hunter, that was about as celebrity as it was possible to get.
Ruston Vance, on the other hand…Hunter felt a pulse of jealousy, and then a buzz in his pocket.
Cole had replied. Yeah. You?
Hunter should have waited a couple of minutes to write back. He didn’t want to seem too eager, like he was hanging on a response. But Vance had looked up when the door opened, watched him walk in, and then immediately dismissed him. He was talking to Quinn now, laughing at something she was saying with a wide, disarmingly goofy smile. Back to being relaxed because he’d judged the stranger at the door unimportant. Not a threat. And that rankled.
Okay, I’m not a threat, Hunter thought, a little snidely. I’m just texting your boyfriend right now.
Hunter opened up the chat and fired back a reply: You know it. Then, Want to show me around after? Give me the tour?
He went to the till and ordered three coffees to go, adding one of their giant blueberry muffins for his mom. Then he turned around and leaned against the counter. Hearing back from Cole had emboldened him, given him a giddy energy that needed somewhere to go, so he pushed off and sauntered over to Quinn’s table.
Up close, she was everything he knew she would be. More Sidney Prescott than Laurie Strode, but also entirely herself: approachably pretty with that edge of Final Girl steel. She put her fork down as he got closer, shifting in her chair to fix Hunter squarely in her sights.
Across from her, Vance had done the same. Annoyingly, he lived up to the photos Cole posted. Hunter had nursed a secret hope that lighting and filter magic had been doing more of the work there. But Ruston Vance was the sort of handsome that set Hunter’s teeth on edge. He looked like those shitkicker wannabe cowboys at Hunter’s high school, the ones with “back the blue” stickers on their trucks who Hunter had avoided since coming out at thirteen. Even though he knew better, everything about Vance screamed not safe! steer clear! to Hunter’s well-honed survival instincts.
And this was what Cole Hill wanted? Sure, Vance was townie trade, but he looked like he’d hate crime you afterwards. That’s what slim pickings in a small town’ll get you.
“Hey,” Hunter said, letting some of his dad’s twang settle into his voice. “Figured I should introduce myself. Hunter Duvall.” He knew better than to stick out his hand for a shake. Instead, he just hit them with his most charming smile and watched as ice settled over the two of them like the first October frost.
Hunter could see it in Quinn’s eyes. It was magnificent. She was the real fucking deal.
“It is a genuine pleasure to meet you both,” he continued.
Vance looked like he’d bitten into the soft spot of an apple. Hunter beamed at him. Inside his pocket, his phone buzzed.
Sure. You’ll probably need an escort if you want to avoid an angry mob
Texting Cole right in front of Vance’s sourpuss face. Hunter dashed back my hero :) and slid the phone back into his pocket, triumphant.
“Well, I won’t keep you. Looking forward to seeing you around.”
He turned just as the server slid his coffees towards him on a cardboard carrying tray, the muffin in a bag: the universe giving him his perfectly-timed exit. He pushed the door open with his hip, not looking back to see if they were still watching him.
This really was going to be a perfect day.
The meeting was kind of a shitshow.
Not for Hunter. Not for any of the Duvalls, really. They’d gotten everything they wanted, and then Eli Duvall spent some time grinding Mayor Maybrook’s face in it on principle. Hunter couldn’t feel too sorry for him. Hadn’t the man been an emergency doctor in Philadelphia? You’d think he’d be better at handling stressful situations. He was so easy to wind up, and Hunter’s dad did it with expert precision, turning the key and setting him loose in a defensive frenzy. It was hard to believe that Quinn Maybrook had come from this.
But that was the thing about Final Girls. They always came from unexpected places.
Not that Hunter could devote too much thought to Quinn Maybrook. Hunter wasn’t doing too much thinking at all. How could he? Cole Hill was here, in the living, breathing flesh.
He’d tried to prepare himself for disappointment. He knew as well as anybody else that someone’s social media presence was no indicator of reality. As recently as this morning, on the drive to the meeting, Hunter had told himself that Cole might not live up to expectations. He might be shorter, plainer, have a weird off-camera voice, bad vibes, an unpleasant personal habit that wasn’t apparent in the carefully-curated media image the rest of the world saw. A part of Hunter even hoped that it might be the case, because he recognized that he’d been getting a little obsessed over the past few months. He’d even started passing on his usual hookups, or phoning it in with a vague sense of dissatisfaction, a sense that he was settling.
All those reality checks, all those stern mirror talking-tos: none of them had done him any good. Because Cole Hill was fucking perfect.
It wasn’t just that he was hot. He was, absolutely and undeniably, but it was more than that. Cole exerted a sort of gravity on everything in his orbit. If people were moving, talking, going about their lives, they were doing so around him, pushed and pulled by his magnetism even if they didn’t seem to make any contact with him at all. When he walked in—late—the atmosphere in the room shifted, his very presence changing the balance of every other interaction taking place.
Now, he sat on the other side of the room, in a chair pushed just far enough away from the table to signify that he was an observer, not a participant: separate and apart from the tense proceedings unfolding in front of him. Mayor Maybrook was sputtering about something, but Hunter couldn’t follow it because Cole had just caught his eye and flashed him an amused smile, like they were sharing a joke.
They hadn’t actually talked yet. Hunter hadn’t officially introduced himself, which meant Cole just recognized him. Had he spent some time this morning scrolling through the photos on Hunter’s socials? Did Cole like what he saw?
This preoccupied Hunter for the rest of the meeting, which was—fortunately for Mayor Maybrook—mercifully short. The papers were signed, the Tillerson land officially leased, and Duvall Farms was finally, finally moving forward. If Hunter hadn’t been so determined to look cool, he’d have pumped his fist in victory.
Eli Duvall phoned the foreman he had on standby from the meeting table, right in front of Maybrook and the city council. They’d start clearing the land for construction today, and tomorrow Hunter would start making his dream a reality.
Tomorrow.
Today, on the other hand…Hunter slid out from his seat as soon as people began milling. Cole was by the window now, chatting with the Mayor, a sympathetic hand on his arm. Right, because they were supposedly on opposite sides here. Cole was fraternizing with the enemy by talking to Hunter—which was perfect, because every good love story needed a conflict, something for the star-crossed couple to prevail against.
Hunter found a place to stand that was close enough for Cole to spot him, far enough that he didn’t look like he was hovering. Then he took out his phone and waited. His patience was rewarded a scant seven-and-a-half minutes later when a shadow fell over his screen and Cole Hill said, “looks like this thing is wrapping up.”
Hunter looked up, straight into Cole’s dark eyes, and had a moment of vertigo. Get ahold of yourself, dude. You’re swooning. Be cool. “Cole.”
That. Was not. Cool. He knows his own name.
“Hunter.” Cole’s perfect mouth quirked up on one side. “You wanna get out of here?”
They took Hunter’s truck, since Cole had apparently gotten dropped off. That was too bad; Hunter had been looking forward to sitting in that Hellcat. But the way Cole had whistled in admiration at Hunter’s ride almost made up for it.
“Bet you turned a couple of heads in town driving this,” Cole said, swinging himself up into the cab.
“She’s my baby.” Hunter patted her door affectionately. “Custom lifts, custom lights, custom stereo system: all designed by yours truly.”
“You do the work yourself?”
“Not entirely, but I got my hands dirty.”
Cole was lining up a shot of the dash on his phone. Cole Hill was in his truck, snapping photos for his stories. Would maybe tag Hunter in them, the first of many joint posts, and Hunter could picture it so clearly, the way they’d tell it later: We just felt this instant connection. Everybody expected us to be enemies, but sometimes you meet somebody and you just know that you’re meant to collaborate with them, that together you can build something really meaningful and lasting. Only it turns out we weren’t just building a brand. We were falling in love.
“—over there.”
“What?” Hunter blinked out of his livestream interview fantasy in time to see Cole pointing at something.
“The Eureka. Crown jewel of Main Street. Feel free to take photos and gawk at your leisure.”
“You did the renovation on that, right?”
“I paid for the renovation on that. We got a local outfit to actually do the work, and Rust put a lot of hours in too. He helped rebuild a bunch of these places.” Cole started pointing out storefronts and restaurants on Main Street, unspooling praise to Saint Vance of the Perpetual Hammer or whatever. Hunter could not think of anything he wanted to listen to less.
Of course, Rust will always be important to me, the livestream-interview-Cole in his head said. But meeting Hunter helped me realize that I'd been trapped in my past. I needed to focus on my future.
“Which direction is Hill Manor?”
“That way.” Cole pointed, and Hunter made the turn off of Main Street. On the way, they passed the high school and the elementary school. The middle school was apparently in the other direction. Cole flagged landmarks as they passed them, and Hunter resisted the urge to ask about Quinn’s house. He was dying to see it, but there was no way to make that request without sounding like a weirdo.
When they reached the bottom of Cole’s private drive, Hunter brought the truck to a rolling stop and let his hand hover over the turn signal. “Gonna give me a tour of your mansion?”
“Nah,” Cole said, arm hanging lazily out the window. “I never take a guy home on the first date.”
Hunter’s stomach swooped, and he fought to match Cole’s breezy tone. “Where do you take him, then?”
Don’t actually answer that, Hunter thought. He didn’t want to hear some diabetic story about little first grade “Cole and Rusty” holding hands on the playground or whatever.
Fortunately, Cole didn’t. Instead, he gave Hunter directions that took them away from the Kettle Springs town center, through streets of faded houses with shabby lawns and cheesy decor. Then farther still, through a wooded area that dumped them onto a county road surrounded by flat, green farmland. The corn, recently planted, had sprung up in shin-high stalks.
“Okay,” Cole said. “There you go.”
“There I go what?”
“That was the tour. You’ve officially seen Kettle Springs.” Cole mimed a little bow. “Try not to make your friends back home too jealous when you tell them.”
“Dude.”
“I know, right?”
“Dude.” Hunter made a despairing face at him. “You live in Bumblefuck.”
Cole let out a crack of laughter. “I really do.”
“No wonder you stayed in the closet. I can’t imagine trying to come out in a place like this.”
“I guess so.” He frowned a little, but it wasn’t an unhappy expression. More thoughtful. “How old were you?”
“Thirteen.”
Cole’s head snapped to look at him. “Thirteen? Seriously?”
“Yup.” Hunter tried not to preen too obviously, but the impressed look on Cole’s face was hard to resist.
“And how did that…I mean, you seem like you’re on good terms with your folks. They were cool about it?”
“They were. My mom’s a real hashtag-boymom type, so as far as she’s concerned, it just means no competition.”
“Yikes. But helpful, I guess,” Cole said, and Hunter chuckled. “And your dad?”
“My dad.” Hunter shot him a look. “Do you know what my dad said when I told him?”
“Please tell me.”
Hunter put on his best Eli Duvall impression. “Thank god. I can take the line item for ‘abortion and/or shotgun wedding’ out of our emergency budget. Keep usin’ those condoms, though.”
“He did not.”
“He absolutely did. Then he launched a Pride-themed ad campaign, and we had our best summer yet.” Hunter smirked. “Whoever said ‘go woke, go broke’ hasn’t seen our portfolio.”
“I know that’s right,” Cole said, and fist-bumped him.
It was so easy, was the thing. So relaxed. So effortless. Did Cole feel it too?
Maybe he makes everybody feel this way. Hunter knew that might be true. All that natural magnetism, that supercharged charisma: Hunter would be stupid not to keep that in mind. He needed to stay vigilant, try not to get swept up in the fantasy. But at the same time, this felt so different from Cole’s public persona. Hunter had spent a lot of time (too much time, you know that) watching Cole Hill content. This, here and now, felt more intimate, more…authentic. It felt like Cole was showing him something real.
Real and irresistible.
Like the wistful look on his face right now as he watched the cornfields. It made Hunter’s heart pound. “Thirteen,” Cole murmured. “Jesus.”
“Yeah, but it was different for me. Branson’s a different kind of place than Kettle Springs.”
“Maybe.” Cole leaned his head back against the seat. “But you’re also brave as hell. Don’t sell yourself short. That shit’s hard no matter what.”
“Aw, shucks.”
Cole lapsed into silence, and Hunter let it sit for a while, taking them through more farmland and wondering what Cole was thinking about. He considered asking for all of about thirty seconds, before deciding better of it. Too intrusive, the sensible voice in his head cautioned. That voice always sounded like his dad, and it rarely steered him wrong—when he chose to listen to it. And you probably wouldn’t like the answer.
That was true, if the answer was ‘Ruston Vance.’
The possibility that it might be spurred Hunter into talking again. “So level with me: how bored am I about to get around here on my nights off?”
“So bored,” Cole said with a grin. “I hope you’ve got a hobby.”
“Gettin’ laid and making money,” Hunter replied, which earned him another fist bump. “And hooking you up with some actual fun, it sounds like.”
“Oh yeah? You think I need a social director?”
“In the bustling metropolis of Kettle Springs? Absolutely.” Hunter held up his phone. “I can have something on in no time. Big party. Small party. Crazy party. Just say the word.”
Cole laughed again, but there was an unmistakable gleam in his eye. “Rain check.”
“Come on. You know you’re dying to say yes.”
“He’s very confident.”
“Because I’m right. You can bring your friends. I bet Quinn can party.”
“Quinn can party.” He was thinking about it. Hunter could hear it in his voice, and tried to contain the excitement he felt at the thought of partying with Quinn Maybrook.
“And I bet Rust makes one hell of a designated driver.”
Hunter clocked the mistake the minute he made it. The shift in Cole was hard to pin down—his smile didn’t falter, there were no obvious outward changes—but it was undeniable. Like a window closing: you could still see out, but you no longer felt the breeze.
“Like I said.” Cole tapped his fingers against his leg. “Rain check.”
Okay, good to know. Bringing up Vance is off-limits. That was fine. Hunter had been with guys who were in relationships before, and many of them—though not all—included that kind of caveat.
He tried not to let the misstep get him down. As his dad always said, the point wasn’t to never make mistakes. The point was to never make a mistake twice. Don’t let your ego get in the way of the lesson. Learn from it, move on, do better.
Fortunately, Hunter had a plan to course correct. It was risky, but the payoff would be worth it. “You left something off of your tour,” he said.
“Oh yeah?” Cole smiled over at him archly, wind from the window ruffling his hair.
“Feel free to say no, but…” Hunter pulled up the GPS on his dash. “Want to show me the new home of Duvall Farms?”
It took Cole a second to catch on, likely because he hadn’t expected Hunter to ask. Hunter tried not to stare at him too obviously, but he saw the expressions that flitted across Cole’s face: surprise, suspicion, thoughtfulness, then determination.
When he replied, his voice was light, but there was a kind of electricity to him, a challenge accepted, a double-dog dare you kind of tension that sang along Hunter’s nerves.
“Yeah, okay,” he said. “Why not?”
They arrived at the farmhouse almost fifteen minutes later. It sat back from the road a ways, orange cones set up across the drive and several No Trespassing signs hammered into the ground to dissuade curious investigators. To hell with that. This land was officially Duvall land for the next six months and—if Hunter got his way—the foreseeable future after that. So Hunter drove his truck up onto the grass towards the property.
This was where Quinn had killed Ronnie Queen and Matt Trent. And past the house, over acres of farmland left fallow, Hunter could just make out the hulking, ruined skeleton of the burned-out barn, where actual killer clowns had terrorized a party full of teens.
He felt the same frisson now that he’d felt when they arrived in Kettle Springs, when he’d first laid eyes on the faint outlines of Frendo on whitewashed buildings.
Beside him in the cab, Cole was talking. Nervous chatter about the Tillerson family, the neighboring farmland, the way government subsidies on corn worked. Hunter let the words wash over him without trying to hold onto any of them, enjoying the sound of Cole’s voice but already casting his mind forward into tomorrow, when he’d be able to get to work. God, he could see the haunt so clearly, could picture it rising up out of these dismal ashes: his own little slice of terror.
And here. Actually here, in Kettle Springs. Fuck. It was going to be perfect. He had the best parents in the whole world.
A noise interrupted Hunter’s reverie and Cole’s directionless monologue: buzzing from Cole’s phone. He picked up.
“Hey Quinn,” he said. (Quinn! Maybrook! What would it take for Cole to throw his charming weight behind a proper introduction?) “What’s—”
Hunter couldn’t quite make out what Quinn was saying on the other end, but he caught location and Tillerson’s. He also caught Cole’s face collapsing into mulish annoyance as he mouthed “stop the car” at Hunter and unfastened his seat belt. Almost before Hunter had finished applying the brakes, Cole had swung the door open and disembarked. As he walked away, phone to his ear, Hunter heard him say: “I know Rust is there. Put him on.”
Unfortunately, Cole moved out of earshot after that. He didn’t look happy. He also didn’t look at the Tillerson’s house or the fields beyond. He kept his back turned, his eyes on the street, one arm wrapped around himself. At one point he closed his eyes entirely and made a screaming face up at the sky, which filled Hunter with a smug joy.
Finally, Cole raked his hand through his hair and hung up. Then he returned to the truck.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “I should get back.”
“No, I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to get you into trouble.”
“You didn’t.” He said it with a note of finality, so Hunter let it rest. Hunter could be easygoing. He could give Cole his space and not badger him about where he was or what he was doing.
Things were mostly quiet as Hunter drove them back into town, strained in a way that Hunter didn’t love but wouldn’t risk making worse by questioning. Cole fiddled with the dial on the radio, and Hunter let him—an act of solemn trust and magnanimity that he hoped Cole could appreciate.
“Where should I drop you?” Hunter finally asked. Cole had abandoned the radio and gone back to his phone.
Cole paused his texting and said, “Main Street’s fine. By the Eureka.”
So that’s where Hunter took him. Hunter wasn’t surprised to see Vance’s truck parked on the street, the guy himself leaning against the side with his arms folded and a look on his face like curdled milk. Hunter was surprised at how quickly Cole jumped out of the car. He’d expected (hoped) Cole would drag his feet a little, make a point of showing his annoyance by taking his time. But once again, the truck had barely slowed when Cole was launching himself out the door and into Vance.
Vance caught him, expression softening, and the two were exchanging words too quiet to overhear. Hunter idled awkwardly in the street, unsure if he should just drive away, eyes stuck on the easy possessiveness of Vance’s hand resting on the small of Cole’s back.
He’d just about made up his mind to leave when Cole turned, pulling himself up on the step by the door and leaning in the window. “Hope you enjoyed the tour.”
“It was fascinating, but it needs a gift shop.”
“You’re the expert,” Cole said with a grin and a wink that blew Hunter’s poor heart to smithereens. Oh, he was fucked.
“I’m gonna hold you to that rain check,” Hunter called back as Cole dismounted again.
“Can’t wait.”
Cole stepped backwards into Vance’s waiting arms, but his eyes—sun-dappled and alight with promise—were on Hunter as he drove away.