Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 98992 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 495(@200wpm)___ 396(@250wpm)___ 330(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 98992 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 495(@200wpm)___ 396(@250wpm)___ 330(@300wpm)
She gives me a sweet look laced with playfulness. “Ten years? You’d wait ten years to sleep with me, Ry?”
“Correction,” I tease on an arrogant smirk, “Make love to you.”
“Okay, Cosmo.”
“That’s exactly where I learned that there’s a difference between fucking and ‘making love’. My brother’s girlfriend’s Cosmo she left in the bathroom.”
“You mean to tell me you missed that moment in Cruel Intentions?”
“Pretty much missed everything that wasn’t that chick-on-chick kiss, Pres.”
“Ohmygod,” she girlishly squeaks before breaking into new giggles.
“The point I was trying to make-”
“It better not be about watching me kiss another girl!”
“No, the actual point I was trying to make before shit got me growing wood again, is that I have no problem waiting.”
Her smile slips into one that’s easily my favorite.
“I’ll wait forever for you, Presley Morrison. Forever and a day, baby.”
--
“But you didn’t.” Doc’s uncompassionate expression mixes with my guilt causing me to close my eyes. “Because you’re sitting here.”
Here, which I don’t doubt is very far away from wherever she is.
Wherever life rightfully took her.
Fuck, I hope it’s some place amazing.
She deserves that.
She always deserved that.
“You’re moping on the floor of an overpriced, poorly fucking staffed rehab facility, refusing to finish your time. Refusing to complete these sessions.” There’s a very brief pause. “Why?”
The question is more mumbled than anything else, “Why what?”
“Why didn’t you wait for her?”
“I…,” finding the right word becomes impossible, “tried…?”
“Convincing.”
“But…I…did.”
“Obviously not fucking hard enough.”
Unsure I heard him correctly, I lift my glare to him. “The fuck did you just say?”
“You heard me.”
And the asshole isn’t a fan of repeating himself.
“Had you done everything the way you’re implying you were going to, you wouldn’t fucking be here, pining after that shit like a spoiled little brat who lost his first puppy because he didn’t lock the gate like he was told.”
I merely blink, baffled by his bluntness.
“You chose to start at that moment in time-”
“You said ‘impress you.’.”
“And I’m telling you now don’t fucking lie to me.”
There’s a twitch of my eyebrows but no time for an interjection.
“You knew some little blowjob bullshit wasn’t going to phase me. You started there for a point of reference. You wanted me to see what it is others don’t make time to see before trying to get to ‘the bottom’ of bullshit. You started there for a reason. And it wasn’t for shock or show. It was so I understand what heaven to you looked like prior to hell.”
Air struggles to reach my lungs.
“What happened after you took her home, Collins? After the blow job.”
All of a sudden, a familiar aching begins in my bones. The pain of realization I’ve dealt with year after year in between highs has long moved past settling in just my chest. No. It’s made a fucking home in my entire body. It’s damn near hollowed me out. The weight of what happened after that fractured even the simplest structures in my spirit. Doc’s fucking right. I picked that moment because it was the last happy and fucking honest one, we had together. It was the last time I believed in fucking miracles. The last time I believed in anything greater than the power of my next fucking fix.
“Collins.”
“About twenty minutes after that bj, my life began to fall apart.”
--
“Come here, son,” my obviously intoxicated father calls me to the end of the neighbor's driveway.
All I wanna do is go upstairs, text my girl one more time that I love her, and crash. Fuck, I hate when I can’t pass out with Pres after we mess around. Sleeping next to her is almost as fucking amazing as getting off with her. I love the way she smashes her face against my ribs and her breath kind of tickles until I drift off. What I love even more is the way she curls herself into a ball like a defenseless creature that needs my arm around her for protection.
Needs me for protection.
I love that she needs me.
Makes me feel less crazy for needing for her all the goddamn time.
Dad sternly and more aggressively repeats, “Come. Here.”
Yeah, the problem is I don’t wanna “come here”. I don’t wanna hear the terrible shit he has to say. It’s always about fucking money. How just the right amount of money can make “miracles” happen. How if it doesn’t make money, it isn’t worth your time doing. How money is the “foundation of life”. All conversations where I’m the main audience member or reluctant participant are centered around that shit. Why? Simple. Because I’m the accidental child. I’m not the one who was meant to hold his big-shot legacy or the one he knows will marry someone he can take under his wing to teach his magical money-making ways to. I’m also not the young version of him like my older brother – who is practically a spitting fucking imagine in the looks department – or the thin, perfect, carbon copy of my mother in her college years that is better known as my sister. No. I’m the surprise shit storm that literally stopped a divorce in progress. The surprise that legally pushed them back together. The problem child that they both blame the other one for being so fucked up rather than accepting equal amounts of responsibility. Disgust for me is the glue that literally keeps their joke of marriage in one piece. That is…at least until I walk off the stage with my diploma.