Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 82112 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 411(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 82112 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 411(@200wpm)___ 328(@250wpm)___ 274(@300wpm)
If I had only known the future, would I have let myself be charmed by Saxon Houston? Would I have gotten in that truck? Probably not. The day he’d pulled up behind me as I was walking home from my volunteer work at the hospital to offer me a ride had sent my world spinning off its axis. My life would never be the same.
Now, I was here. Basically homeless. Working this awful job. And pregnant.
Two Months and Two Weeks Ago
My older brother, AJ, had forgotten to pick me up. Jerk. Why was he even home? He never stayed this long. He also didn’t help with the bills, and he ate our food. He was the one who had offered to come get me. If I had known he wasn’t coming, I could have gotten a ride from someone. Maybe even Aspen and her ride … no. That dude made me nervous. He was too intense, and he looked ready to murder anyone who got too close to her. Must be nice. I’d never had any kind of protection in my life.
With guys, I was always having to protect myself. They seemed to want one thing from me, and I wasn’t willing to give them that. When you were the second out of nine children, you didn’t need birth control. Your daily life was birth control.
My mother worked twelve-hour shifts at Walmart six days a week, and on the seventh day, she cleaned houses. Five, to be exact.
When I wasn’t working, I was cleaning the trailer we were all crammed into, making dinner, washing clothes, yelling at my younger brothers who did nothing to help, and putting out a fight—because when there were that many kids, someone was always fighting. During the school year, I helped with their homework, packed their lunches, did the grocery shopping. It was safe to say, I was never having kids.
Only Vulcan and Vinn—the twelve-year-old twins—along with Thorn, the baby who was turning ten next week, had regular contact with their father. The rest of us either didn’t know the man whose sperm had brought us into this world or he was in prison. My fifteen-year-old sister, Silver, only visited her dad in prison on his birthday every year. He was in for arson, theft, and attempted murder. He still had another ten years left to go.
AJ and I had been told we had the same dad, but we’d never met him. We were the results of an affair our mother had begun when she was eighteen. He was a married man, and she worked as a receptionist at his office. After AJ was born, he put her up for a while as his mistress, but when she told him about me, he accused her of getting pregnant on purpose and ended things.
Mom moved two states away to live with my aunt until she got pregnant with Jamaica—my eighteen-year-old sister—by my aunt’s boyfriend.
Obviously, we were kicked out of my aunt’s house when the paternity was revealed, and Mom then took up with a man she’d met in a bar where she was waitressing. That was Silver’s dad. Cliff helped out some, but he went to prison when Silver was two.
After Cliff, Mom got pregnant with Salem, who would have been fourteen this past April. Salem never made it to the age of nine. Leukemia had taken her from us. We didn’t know who her father was, and it still caused my chest to ache when I thought about how badly Salem had wanted to at least know his name before she died. It was something I didn’t think I could ever forgive my mother for.
DJ, my thirteen-year-old brother, didn’t know his dad either, but every year, he looked more and more like AJ. The resemblances weren’t those that they had gotten from our mother either. Then, of course, there was the fact that he was the only sibling I had with my eye color. Violet eyes weren’t common. Especially our shade. I had started to think that my sperm donor had hooked up with Mom again and left her pregnant. She’d never admit it, but she wasn’t ever going to give us the truth. The lies she fed us were all we would get.
Vulcan, Vinn, and Thorn were all from my mom’s only marriage. It had lasted five years before Bobby Mills packed his bags and walked out of the door. I’d never been happier to see someone leave in my life. He still paid child support most of the time and came and got the three boys every other weekend. I made sure not to be there when he arrived. My stomach still turned when I thought of the past and the trauma he had caused both me and Jamaica. But especially Jamaica. She’d been younger and timid. His abuse was something that had changed her forever.