Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 87392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 437(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 437(@200wpm)___ 350(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
And then of course, that’s when the fucker decided to come back. He was going ruin all my years of work trying to forget him, trying to date other guys, trying to pretend he didn’t still appear in my dreams. I wasn’t ready for him to be back.
But I also had never been so excited in my life.
It was taking every ounce of control in me to wait until tomorrow to see him.
2
Mitch
Step one, when you move back to Amberfield: find your fuckin’ best friend.
Okay, steps one, two, and three: find a house, a job, and a brand-new life. But finding those sure would be a lot better with Evan by my side.
Green, rolling hills. Big, beautiful oak trees. And cows.
Cows everywhere.
Cows mooing at me as I jogged down the street. More cows than people, it seemed. I was definitely back in Amberfield, Kansas, after so long trying to stay out of it.
I wasn’t going to feel like I was really back in Amberfield until I saw Evan, though. All day I’d been thinking of him. Everything in this town reminded me of him—of us, back when we were inseparable every single day.
“That one had a baby calf,” Zach said breathlessly from next to me. He was drenched in sweat even though we were jogging at a casual pace. My kid wasn’t big on running like I was, but I’d convinced him to come see the new neighborhood with me this evening.
Zach was basically the polar opposite of me at fourteen. He hated sports, liked school, and he would rather read comic books than ever go inside a gym. He was whip smart, and I was proud as hell every time he brought home straight As.
The world already had enough dumb jocks like me. Zachie could be a programmer or engineer or CEO someday, and that was more than I could say for myself.
“Did you know that female baby cows are actually called heifers?” I said as we passed by the ranch. “Only the males are called calves.”
“Weird,” Zach said.
“Weird. You called the grocery store weird. You called our new house weird. Don’t you have any other words?”
“Everything in this town is weird,” Zach said. We rounded a curve in the road and came back up on the house. “And our house is dilapidated.”
“It’s not dilapidated, it’s a fixer-upper,” I said. As I jogged up to the front porch, Zach slowed to a walk in the yard, heaving a sigh.
“There’s more chipped paint on the ground than there is on the house,” he said. As if to prove a point, as he walked up the wooden front steps, he jumped on a creaky board, sending paint chips flying around.
“Don’t do that,” I said. “I don’t want you to step on a rusty nail and get tetanus.”
“See? This house is full of tetanus and you know it,” Zach said.
I reached over and gripped Zach in a playful arm lock, rustling his hair with my hand. “You’ll see. We’ll get this place looking polished and perfect within a few months.”
“Can I go play video games now? You promised if I ran with you—”
“Shower first. Then eat something. Then yes,” I said.
“Sweet,” Zach said, bolting into the house. He ran faster when he wanted to go play video games than he did when we were on an actual run.
I pulled in a big breath of cool evening air, looking around the porch. Zach wasn’t wrong. Of course the place was old and beat up. It was a two-bedroom on a modest plot of land, surrounded by similar small houses and the nearby cattle ranch. But it meant something more to me.
I remembered this house from growing up, and I couldn’t believe it was up for sale when I’d started looking at home listings in Amberfield. The place was cheap as hell. It used to belong to a crotchety, angry old man that Evan and I had dubbed Old Man Jones.
We used to climb the big, knotted oak in the front yard all the time. Old Man Jones had always yelled at us when he caught us, saying that the tree was “infested with spiders that were fiending to bite.”
There were never any spiders. Just lots of me and Evan shooting the shit about robots or airplanes or superheroes while our legs dangled off the branches. We had been two kids in a small town with nothing better to do than become each other’s favorite people.
I slipped my phone out of my pocket and shot a text to him.
>>Mitch: I was out jogging and I think I just got catcalled by a cow. Cowcalled?
>>Evan: LOL. You really are back in Amberfield.
>>Mitch: And it still has more cows than people.
>>Evan: Some things never change. Holy fuck, you’re really, really, really back.
>>Mitch: Really, times three.
He didn’t answer for a while, and I hoped I wasn’t intruding on anything. I’d seen Evan a few times over the years when he visited Chicago, but I realized suddenly that I had no idea what he did on a daily basis, now. I knew he taught math at Amberfield High. I knew he was single, but still searching for The One. But as far as I knew, he could have been dick deep in another guy right now, and I was just an impediment.