Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84607 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 423(@200wpm)___ 338(@250wpm)___ 282(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84607 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 423(@200wpm)___ 338(@250wpm)___ 282(@300wpm)
Kat exhaled a laugh. “Hello to you too! I wasn’t calling to fuss over anyone but you.”
Oh, joy.
“What have I done now?” I slowed down at the second gate and reached for the lockbox, where I inserted a key and punched in a second code.
“Kristen called me today.”
I grimaced and scrubbed a hand over my mouth. That was a closed fucking chapter. Why the hell would she go and call my sister?
“Is it true that you haven’t talked to her since you broke up?” she asked.
“Why would I talk to her again?” I drove through the gate and continued down a narrow, bumpier dirt road with nothing but trees and darkness all around. “She said if I wanted to work things out, I could call her, but I don’t. I was a shit boyfriend, and she wasn’t great either. She thought she could change me, and I stubbornly made her my target for my last-ever attempt at committing to someone.”
I wasn’t doing it again. This past year, I’d seen her once a week at most, and I’d been late to almost every dinner. I hadn’t been able to stay past the meal—hell, I wasn’t sure we’d slept together a single time in six or seven months, and whenever we had, I’d woken up with an insane urge to escape before her alarm went off.
Attraction was tricky with me. Like a flip of a switch, I could go from “Yeah, okay, let’s give this a go” to “Honey, you make my skin crawl.”
“It’s always the same story with you, isn’t it?” Kat sighed. “It happened with Tara, with Emily, with…”
“I vaguely remember their names. Go on.”
“Well… Do you still talk to Adam?”
I furrowed my brow. “We have our once-a-year beer around his birthday in February. Why?”
Kat cleared her throat. “He once made you question your sexuality.”
Uh.
“What the fuck are you smoking?” I asked. The trees parted up ahead, and a beat later, the facility got caught in the headlights. It looked pristine as always, yet abandoned and ghostly at the same time. Just a white-painted box-like structure nestled in the thicket. “There’s absolutely no reason for you to rehash a confused fourteen-year-old’s—”
“Don’t downplay it,” she responded abruptly. “You can’t blame me for wanting you happy, Bo. And if you’re living in denial of some sort—”
“I’m not in denial about anything,” I chuckled. It was my turn to cut her off. “I’m also not blaming you for shit. I just think you’re overdoing it because you’re afraid I’m gonna be alone now that you’re moving.”
Frankly, the day couldn’t come soon enough.
To think I was, what…gay or bi, all of a sudden? For chrissakes. No. Our folks had been weirdly accepting and inclusive all our lives—even our old man—so that whole thing had never been a stigma in our family. Hell, I’d spoken openly about my so-called confusion as a teenager. It hadn’t been a big deal. But after messing around with Adam and a couple other guys, I’d just found it way easier with girls.
I was by no means good with them, as my exes could attest, but at least I knew what I was supposed to do. Be present, listen to her, compliment her clothes, send her flowers for Valentine’s. Shit like that.
With guys, I’d felt…uncomfortable. Not all the time, not at work or wherever, but in those few moments I’d contemplated wanting…more.
“You might be ten percent right,” Kat said eventually. “Eric told me something similar, and I’m not surprised. You’re men.”
I sucked my teeth and parked in front of the building. “That’s sexist. I thought you were more progressive than that.”
I could definitely envision her rolling her eyes.
“Ten percent seems low,” I added and killed the engine.
“That’s what I’m giving you,” she answered stubbornly. “I still believe you’ve compartmentalized things for so long that you don’t have the faintest idea of what you actually want, so you go with these outdated cookie-cutter ideas of what relationships are supposed to look like. And you’re not cookie-cutter, Bo.”
Man, she exhausted me.
“I have zero energy for this.” I jumped out of the van and slammed the door shut, then trailed over to the entrance. “Why don’t you tell me what you think I should do, and then I can pretend to agree.” Third code to punch in, thankfully with keys that glowed in the pitch-black nothingness.
Once the door was open, the hallway was lit up, and I could see properly. Kat was undoubtedly about to give a grand speech, but one of my nephews saved my ass by crying in the background, diverting Kat’s attention.
“Give me a sec, Bo.”
Finally, a break. “I can give you way more than that.”
I returned to the van and opened the back, where I had Nassim on the floor in his semi-open body bag.
I hauled him out with a grunt, and he landed on the ground with a thud. Oh shit, he groaned. He was waking up—he wasn’t supposed to wake up. Had someone fucked up the dosage of the sedative?