Total pages in book: 188
Estimated words: 179812 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 899(@200wpm)___ 719(@250wpm)___ 599(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 179812 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 899(@200wpm)___ 719(@250wpm)___ 599(@300wpm)
I reach up to his ear and whisper, “You’re a giant asshole, but no one has ever bothered to handle anything for me before and I have enough manners to say thank you. For saving my ass not once but twice. And you’re right, I don’t have a right to butt into your life, and I shouldn’t have spilled my drink on you. But, Shepard,” he tenses when I say his name, and I pause for a second because I always wanted to say it to him, to test it out on my tongue when he’s around before continuing, “I’m still not going to give you a lap dance.”
I don’t give him the time to react to what I just said, I simply do it. I knee him in the junk, hard. As hard as I can, and then I’m fleeing from the room. The last thing I hear before the door closes is his vicious curse and a groan.
Chapter Three
THE WRECKING THORN
My name is Shepard Thorne, and I have three brothers and a sister.
Our father was a drunk and abusive asshole, who struggled to hold a job. And our mother was loving but perpetually tired from always having to provide for us. He abandoned us when I was around ten and she died a few years later from a brutal illness.
It affected all my siblings in a different way. Conrad, the oldest, had to give up his rising career in the pros to take care of us. It wasn’t really a stretch, given he’d always been an authority figure for us. He’d always been emotionally controlled and iron-willed and all the tragedies in our life only made him worse.
Stellan, my twin, was the most similar to Conrad and so it was only natural for him to become Con’s right-hand man. Although he struggled with his own private issues that forced him to keep all of us at a distance, including me. Especially me. Ledger, our youngest brother, struggled with anger issues, and for the longest time was the family’s hothead who’d get into fights and get suspended. Callie, our baby sister, became the good girl, who listened to her brothers and tried to keep the peace in a broken home.
Despite all the issues, we always had one thing in common: the drive to be there for each other. To take care of each other. Especially the younger siblings, Ledger and Callie.
Which is why I gave myself a self-appointed role: to not be like my siblings. As in, someone with issues. Someone who got so affected by what life threw at me that I became crippled by it, developed anger issues like Ledger or hid secrets like Stellan. I didn’t want to be a control freak like Conrad, who lost it when something wouldn’t go his way. Or be so good, like Callie, that I finished my homework a week in advance.
No, I wanted to be someone no one had to worry about. Someone my siblings thought didn’t need any extra attention or energy. Someone they thought was cruising through life despite all the ups and downs and tragedies. Because no one had any extra attention or energy to give after everything we’d been through. No one had any space for another Thorne sibling with an issue. So I decided to be that, the easy one. The one no one had to take seriously.
Although ironically, it wasn’t easy to do. It wasn’t easy to become the easy-going brother. I had to do a lot of burying. Of emotions, of events and incidents that could’ve affected me but I made sure didn’t. I had to practice a lot of not-thinking, not-analyzing. Most importantly, I had to become really good at using distractions. School, homework, girls, parties. Soccer. Anything and everything that would help me stay the course and stay unbothered. Anything that would help me bury things and move on.
And so far, I’ve been good at that. Good at moving on. Getting over things and living my life.
Except now. Except her.
I can’t remember the first thing I noticed about her except to think she was hot. Pretty shallow, I know. But I’m a guy; we’re not deep enough to wax poetic about a girl’s eyes or her personality. Not at first sight at least. That came later. Not the poetic part—I’m not a fucking poet—but the part where I thought her eyes were pretty and that her personality didn’t suck.
In fact, her personality was interesting, and to be honest, I was a little surprised by that. To find that I could talk to her. That she didn’t bore me to death like all the other girls that came before. But that’s my own fault, being bored to death by other girls. I didn’t hook up with them for their conversation skills, just the distraction they could provide in the bedroom.