Total pages in book: 59
Estimated words: 56630 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 283(@200wpm)___ 227(@250wpm)___ 189(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 56630 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 283(@200wpm)___ 227(@250wpm)___ 189(@300wpm)
People say he’s part devil, part angel. Nobody knows his name. He’s my last hope when loan sharks threaten my mom. When he offers us a place to stay. How can I say no?
My mom needs stability. She’s suffering from her addiction, but there’s a catch. All the rooms have cameras. He’s watching me.Our texts take us to steamy places, sending each other photos and sharing details.
Sam is over twice my age, with a body to die for and eyes somewhere between scary and so hot I could scream. He starts to take control and guides us to sweltering places as he watches me on camera.
After years of trying to support Mom, it’s a relief to let go.
However, I’m not sure what happens when we go beyond texting. I keep thinking about the future, wedding bells, stuff a so-called streetwise woman should know better than to hope for.
The more we text, the closer I feel to my guardian angel. But can this become something real? What happens when he no longer has to protect us?*
*Texting My Guardian Angel is an insta-everything standalone romance with a HEA, no cheating, and no cliffhanger.
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
CHAPTER 1
Katy
Mom hasn’t come out of her room for two days. Sadly, I’m used to this, but something feels different this time. Throughout my early and mid-teenage years, when she fell into the black hole of her addiction, she’d at least leave her room to eat a quick meal, maybe mumble a couple of words. Perhaps we’d even argue.
This is something else. When I knock on the door, she moans, “Go away.”
I sigh, gripping the doorframe and looking at the chipped paint. The apartment smells faintly of fish, though we haven’t eaten fish for several weeks. It drifts from the apartment below, along with many other smells. It’s as though the walls are made of gauze and can rip apart any second.
“Mom,” I say firmly, wondering how other nineteen-year-old women spend their Saturday nights. “What’s going on in there? This is getting ridiculous.”
“I’m… I’m sorry.” She breaks down, crying, as I experience that strange mixture of pity, love, resentment, and rage. “Oh, Katy.”
“You don’t have to be sorry,” I say. “You just have to tell me what’s going on.”
In the street below, four stories down, music pumps, and a bottle smashes. Somebody laughs violently, almost like they want somebody to call them out for it, and then they do—a joke, then a roar. Fists start flying. Men are shouting. This isn’t unusual.
“I’ll break the door down, Mom,” I snap, knowing it wouldn’t be difficult.
I’m not the toughest person alive, but before that mugger got Dad, he taught me a few lessons, like never letting the world see any weakness. Not this world where we live. I was thirteen when it happened. The mugger jumped from the shadows, and a knife ended it all. I can’t think about that night and what I saw—what I keep buried because Mom needs me.
The door rattles in the frame when I shake it, the metal lock sounding like it might break. “Mom…”
“P-please.”
“Is it… your stuff?”
Her stuff is the drugs she’s been taking even before Dad died, which have turned her eyes into hollow pits, causing her cheeks to sink inward. Gaunt, skeletal, hungering only for her fix, for the release of oblivion.
She laughs humorlessly. “Maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s everything.”
“Are you pissing and shitting in there?” I yell, losing my temper and slamming my hand on the door. “You haven’t left for two days. How am I supposed to take care of you if you won’t let me?”
“Take care of me,” she murmurs. “It should be the other way around.”
Yeah, she’s telling me.
“Wait a second,” she says, and I hear her shuffling around. “Let me get dressed, and for your information, no, I’ve been using the toilet. Just when you’re in your room or at work.”
One of us has to work, I almost say, but it would be needlessly cruel. It’s not like my cash-in-hand cleaning gig is anything to write home about.
Sometimes, I hate my mom for the choices she’s made. Other times, I see her as different from the rest of us, infected almost, with this need to disappear, to escape. I also feel the urge to run and make something better for myself. Then I’ll look into her eyes and feel like the worst daughter imaginable.
She opens the door. She’s almost a foot shorter than me, and I’m not exactly tall. Her hair is blond, turning gray, straw-like, tied back in a harsh ponytail. Her room is messy and depressing, with flecks of damp staining the wallpaper, but the entire apartment has those.
“We need to talk,” she says, staring at the floor. She’s trembling all over, sweat sliding down her forehead.