Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 148704 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 744(@200wpm)___ 595(@250wpm)___ 496(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148704 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 744(@200wpm)___ 595(@250wpm)___ 496(@300wpm)
Wait, what?
Squared away at the bar…
It hits me then. The cot in the tiny, closet-sized office in the back of the bar, the pile of mail sitting on my bedroom dresser, the near-naked woman who opened the door that’s no longer his.
Crew’s living at the bar on the springy foldable cot crappier than a hotel rollaway. Now the bar is closed, hopefully for no longer than a couple days, but still. A few days is a few days he’ll be without a home.
Layla looks at me, and I realize I’ve yet to say anything, so I draw on a small smile and nod.
“Yeah, he’s sort of always been that way. My mom would ask him to stay for dinner every single day, but she would say ‘it’s like pulling teeth to get him to accept without a fight.’” I don’t tell her how the nights we couldn’t convince him, he would go to bed hungry because there was nobody to make him meals at home.
There was nothing for him to make himself either.
“After a while, she stopped asking and pulled her mom voice out. Basically, he wasn’t allowed to go home until he cleared his plate.” And then his parents signed their rights over to mine. Unwanted by his family at fourteen years old, Crew legally joined mine. His mom and dad disappeared with Drew, not long after that.
That was the only time I saw Crew cry.
Layla’s low laugh has me blinking back into reality, and I watch as she lovingly rubs her belly.
She may know that about Crew already, but if she doesn’t, it’s not my place to tell, though the sorrowful smile covering her lips in the next moment indicates she knows a little bit of something. Whether that something has to do with Crew’s upbringing or knowledge of my brother, I don’t know.
“Ready?” Crew pops his head in the room.
Masking the runaway thoughts in my mind, I nod, saying a quick thank you and goodbye to Layla on my way out.
The ride home is an odd mix of relaxed and uneasy.
I’ve never been anxious around Crew. And while I do enjoy the nonsense of it, I’ve never felt a need to fill in the silence with random conversation, but before I knew Crew, and as he flat out said, I don’t anymore. Not fully.
Not as well as his new friends do.
A heavy sense of grief washes over me and I look to my lap, rolling the stray strings where the rips in my jeans are.
He was Memphis’s Crew before.
My Crew.
He’s not anymore.
Now, he’s theirs.
It makes me wonder. If I hadn’t reached out to him, would he have eventually reached out to me?
I’m beginning to think not.
“Are you headed home from here?” The moment I ask, I wish I could take it back, especially when Crew’s lie rolls off his tongue without pause.
“Yep.”
I nod back, even though he’s focused on the road ahead, but the closer we get to my apartment, the more the situation nags at me.
So, once he’s pulled up in the space beside my car, I turn to him, blindly pulling on the handle.
“Come in a minute?” Before he has a chance to say no, I add, “I have something of yours I’ve been meaning to give you.”
Unable to taper down his curiosity, he turns off the car and follows me to the door.
Inside, I move straight to my bedroom, heading back into the living room in seconds. Stepping up to Crew, I place the box against his chest, forcing him to grab hold or let it fall. His questioning frown bounces from it to me, but I quickly swivel into the kitchen, grabbing what I’m after in the first drawer to the left.
Being the box is still closed in his palms when I turn to face him, I have no doubt he’s about to get far more confused, but it won’t take him long to figure out.
“Here.” I drop the key on top of the shoebox, and he glares from it to me. “My roommate moved out last summer, so the room next to mine is as empty as it was the day you helped move me in.”
“Davis…” His face falls.
“Stay, Crew. The room is as good as yours now.” Offering a small smile, I give an encouraging nod as I begin to back away.
“Where you going?” His question is a quick demand, yet his tone holds a heaviness he can’t—and no doubt tried—to hide.
“I have to be up early so…”
He shows no sign of breaking eye contact, and even once I do, something tells me he stays frozen in the spot I left him long after I close my bedroom door behind me.
Chapter Twelve
Davis
Last night I did something I never do, something my dad would ream me out over, but it felt necessary. I slept with my headphones on, “putting myself in a potentially dangerous situation,” as he always said, because I knew if I didn’t, I would obsess over everything I heard, trying to decipher whether Crew took my offer for what it was.