Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 90972 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 455(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90972 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 455(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
I don’t know why he hates me so much, but Kellen Arches has stopped at nothing to make my life at Wicked Falls a living hell. He torments me relentlessly until I finally give into his demands. I give up everything for him, but everything is still not enough. He wants more.
He wants the only thing I have left.
Me.
***Quiet Rage can be read as a standalone and comes with a HEA*
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
Chapter 1
Kellen
It must be nice to be a college student. Not just somebody who takes classes, but the old cliché of a carefree teenager who gets to live out every day the way they want to. On the surface, that’s what I get to do. I hang out with my friends in my free time, I study—and at least, I do as much as I need to so I can pass. Right now, walking across campus, I fit in. Nobody would know there’s anything different about me just by looking.
They don’t see what’s inside. They don’t see the walls separating me from the rest of them. I feel like a scientist or something like that, the kind who observes animals in the wild. When I notice a group of guys throwing a football around while girls hang out on the grass, I don’t see people my own age passing time between classes. There’s something foreign, because they have something I never will. They’re free to think about themselves and their lives and that’s it. There’s nothing hanging on them the way it does on me.
“Kellen! Hey!” A couple of the guys lift their hands to me, like they’re trying to wave me over to play. I point to my wrist and shrug—the international sign for I’m in a hurry. I’m not really in a hurry, but I’m also not in the mood to pretend I feel carefree today. The mood I’m in, I would end up hurting somebody, which isn’t hard to do even on a good day since I’ve pretty much been the biggest guy in the room ever since I hit puberty.
There’s a couple of girls sitting on a bench under a tree. They’re cute, but that’s not what caught my attention. I can hear one of them bitching and moaning about something as I approach with my backpack slung over my shoulder. “I’m supposed to work fifteen hours a week and take four classes? Where the hell am I supposed to find the time?” the girl whines.
It’s amazing I can settle for rolling my eyes when I really want to laugh in her face. She thinks that’s a problem? That’s something worth complaining about? For fuck’s sake, she’s close to tears while her friend tries to comfort her. It’s pathetic. So many people don’t have the first clue how easy their life is. Taking four classes and working fifteen hours a week would be a luxury for me.
Because not everybody has a father like mine. Not everybody has a life like mine. They can act young and careless the way we’re supposed to at this age. They can fuck up, make mistakes and learn from them, they can fall back on their parents when they need help the way people our age are supposed to be able to do. And I know life could be worse. I’m not poor, I don’t struggle that way. But there are many ways to struggle.
Like the struggle I’m going through as I enter the cafeteria and force myself to leave the rest of my life outside for now. I don’t want to think about Dad or anything I left behind this morning. I can think about it later, when class is over and I have no choice but to slide into my other life the way I slide into a pair of jeans.
“Hey!” Tucker notices me first and waves a hand overhead, even though they’re all sitting at our usual table. Not that we have our names written on it or anything. People know to stay away just because we’ve been seen there so many times. That’s sort of the effect we have around here.
I jerk my chin at my friends and look around the table. “Just us today?” I ask as I sit down.
“The girls had some stuff to do at the library,” Briggs explains. He looks disappointed, which doesn’t make any sense to me—he and Wren live together. He sees her every day. They can’t spend a few minutes apart?
It’s funny, how different it is to hang out with them when their girls aren’t here. I would never tell them this, but I’m not totally comfortable with the way things have changed since everybody started dating seriously. The girls are cool and all that, low drama, I can sit down and have a beer with them at a party. But there are differences in how we talk and act around each other now that it isn’t just the guys, and since I’m the last one still single, I’m the one who feels it.
“Did you sleep last night?” Preston asks, elbowing his twin brother Easton and jerking his chin at me. “You look like you just rolled out of a grave and brushed off the dirt before you came in.”
“It was a late night.” That’s all that needs to be said. They know I work at my father’s bar, even if they don’t know the specifics. To them, a late night means staying up with their girlfriend. Or partying too hard, maybe. They have that luxury.