Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 122097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122097 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 610(@200wpm)___ 488(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
But I don’t have plans to move out of Trinity County. I don’t have plans to go back to school. I’m here. And I’m gonna stay here.
Much to the chagrin of my best friend, Clover. She’s always bugging me to go on adventures with her. Her life didn’t get derailed in college. She was at WVU too and she went on to graduate with a degree in business. Now she works for a super-fancy-fancy hotel in Virginia as an event planner. She’s two hours away, so we don’t get together all the time, but we have a regular once-a-month date where I check in to her super-fancy-fancy hotel and we spa together. Sometimes she comes down this way and we will drink a little bit of wine, play old vinyl records, and dance in my living room.
Clover was born rich. Well, rich for these parts, which is to say her family looks rich, but cash flow around here is almost always a problem. Her parents own a huge Civil War-era mansion on the very western edge of town just as you go down the hill towards Revenant and Clover has been paying the reno bills for a few years now since her parents retired to Florida.
It’s a lovely estate. And every time she comes, we go over there and walk the grounds, and reminisce about how we spent our childhoods riding her horses through the surrounding woods. She’s been working hard on that place for nearly five years now and the reno’s still going. I really hope—
A noise from the bedroom pulls me out of my thoughts and back to reality.
I cringe a little. I don’t like the awkwardness of the morning after. I don’t want to see this guy, let alone serve him a cup of coffee. My one night of reckless behavior is over and he needs to go.
I’m just about to go in there and give him a hint when the bedroom door opens with a creak.
I hold my breath, preparing for the inevitable. But he doesn’t appear from around the hallway. Instead, he goes to the bathroom.
The breath comes out. It’s a short reprieve, but I’ll take it.
I’m just about to start rehearsing my you-need-to-go speech when a noise from outside distracts me. A tune. No. A ringtone. Specifically, my ringtone. The chorus to Son of a Preacher Man.
What the hell? Did I drop my phone outside last night when I came home?
I go to the front door, pull it open and swivel to my right. The sound is coming from the hedge. I have a big porch. It’s wide and long and there is a railing between me and this hedge, which is formidable. I’ve been carefully shaping the shrubs surrounding it for the better part of three years now, so the only way to really get to the phone—which is somewhere inside the one on my right, hidden from view—is to lean over and shove my hand into the soft green leaves.
I smile when my fingers find the phone and then straighten back up so I can look at the screen.
Bryn. Calling to check up on me. I accept on speaker. “Hey, sis. I’m fine—”
“Oh, my Gawwwdd!” She says this loud, her voice scaring some birds away in the nearby elm tree. “I’ve been calling you for six hours, Lowyn! What the actual fuck!”
My sister is as loud and obnoxious as I am quiet and contemplative.
“Sorry. I was sleeping and just found my phone in the hedge.”
“You’re not in your room!”
“Oh. Yeah. I went home.”
“Went. Home?” She says these two words in a weird way. Like I’m speaking a foreign language or something. “With him?”
I huff out a small laugh. “Yeah. He’s still here. In the bathroom. I’m just about to kick him out. And I didn’t even have sex with him, Bryn. Was I like super drunk or what?”
Silence.
“Bryn?”
More silence.
I shake the phone. I do this sometimes. I don’t know why, but it’s a habit I have because of all the vintage phones I’ve owned over the years. Sometimes the speaker wires get loose and if you shake it a little, it pops it all back into place. Of course, this is irrelevant for a cell phone. It’s just a habit. “Bryn? Did I lose you?”
She lets out a long breath. “OK. Let me get this straight.”
“Oooo-kayyy.”
“You took him home?”
“Yeah. I don’t remember how we got here. I don’t actually remember anything.”
“Wait. You don’t know who you took home?”
“Nope. I woke up, looked over at the guy next to me—who is fucking hot from the back, Bryn. But I didn’t see his face. He had it buried under the pillow, but—” Then I pause. Because this head-pillow behavior reminds me of a guy…
Now I go silent.
“Lowyn?”
No. No, it can’t be.
“Loooowww-wyn.”
And just as she says this, the floorboards—those perfect, hand-scraped, carefully salvaged and repurposed walnut floorboards—creak behind me.