Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80699 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 403(@200wpm)___ 323(@250wpm)___ 269(@300wpm)
“What do you guys do for work?” He opened the door; I’m walking through it.
“Contract work mostly. Recon and recovery mostly.” He dips another fry into his shake, and I’m saddened when he pops it in his mouth rather than offering it to me.
“Sounds very 007.”
“Seems that way on some jobs. What do you want to do when you get older?”
I laugh. “I never considered anything short of getting married and leaving Farmington with Alec.” I can’t help the sad smile that creeps up on my face; it goes hand in hand with the pain in my heart that shows up each time I think about never talking to my best friend again.
“It’s easy to see how much you loved him,” he says gently.
I nod.
“Did you guys talk about children?” He groans at his own words. “Fuck, Khloe. I shouldn’t have asked that.”
I chuckled lightly at his reaction. “No, we never spoke of children.” I sigh knowing how difficult the truth is going to be to say. I almost feel like I’m betraying Alec. Not because I’m beginning to like Kid, but because I promised to keep his secret.
“My relationship with Alec wasn’t…. traditional.”
His brows knit together in confusion.
I take a long drink of my shake and only pull the straw away when the fine edge of a brain freeze begins to burn behind my eyes. I watch him take in my words and wonder what kind of wild scenarios are running through his head.
“Alec was gay,” I say finally putting him out of his misery.
“That makes sense then.” Now it’s my turn to look confused. “I heard your foster father belt out some derogatory comment at the hospital.”
“Yeah,” I say looking into my melting cup of chocolate and strawberry swirl. “Apparently we didn’t have as many people convinced as we thought.”
“You were his cover,” he says.
“And he was my ticket out of town. Don’t get me wrong, we were best friends first. The other plan just sort of bloomed from there.”
“How did that work out for your boyfriends, or his… partner for that matter?” He swirls a fry in his shake. The action is less about eating and more about distracting himself while he asks difficult questions.
I laugh. “There were no boyfriends. For either of us.”
“You abstained to keep your cover?”
I smile wide. “Abstained? I haven’t…” I clear my throat. “I didn’t abstain.”
“So just more like secret rendezvous. A no strings kind of thing?”
“What? No. You don’t have to abstain from something you’ve never done.” He gasps; I continue. “I mean Alec and I tried once, but it never got past kissing. It was just too weird for both of us.”
His face is white as a ghost, so I do what I’ve always done in uncomfortable situations, I continue to talk. “I mean I had a sort of boyfriend sophomore year. I tried the whole blow job thing once, but he said I sucked.” I chuckle lightly. “I mean like sucked in a bad way, not the good way that he was hoping for.”
“You’re a virgin?” he finally manages.
If I weren’t so embarrassed, I’d find the look on his face quite comical.
Chapter 16
Kid
I can’t believe my damn ears. A VIRGIN! I don’t know if I should be more excited that she’s untouched or disgusted that my dick is hard at her words, and she’s only seventeen.
“Yes,” she answers. “It’s not like something I’ve been holding onto or waiting for love and marriage. It’s just… I don’t know. I’ve not been presented with many options to… dispose of it.”
“You’re almost eighteen,” I mutter. Hell, when I was in school fifteen and sixteen seemed like the age to ‘dispose’ of virginity as she put it.
She laughs softly. “I know that makes me almost like a unicorn or something. Some mythical creature everyone knows about but never sees, but I assure you, I’m not the only one in existence.”
I smile at her candidness.
“For a long time after the awkward make-out session with Alec, I thought maybe it was me. He was questioning his sexuality, but at the end of the day, I figured he just wasn’t attracted to me.” She shrugs.
I huff, loudly. “Fat fucking chance, Khloe. If Alec turned you down, he sure as fuck was gay.”
She smiles brightly as if it’s something she’s longed to hear for a while.
“How exactly did the whole marriage idea come about?”
Her eyes fill with mischief. “You’ll think I’m stupid.”
“I promise I won’t. Tell me,” I prod.
“We watched The Proposal.”
“I’m not familiar. I presume it’s a chick-flick?”
“Yeah. It has Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. Alec and I both watched it for that fine hunk of man candy.” I laugh at her awe of the movie star. “Anyway. In the movie, the woman is going to get deported. She comes up with a plan to say she’s engaged to an American to keep that from happening. The idea kind of stemmed from there. We were already acting like a couple in public to keep the mean ass kids at school from bullying him. When he graduated a year ahead of me, we had to figure out what we were going to do to get out of this town.”