Total pages in book: 134
Estimated words: 134746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 539(@250wpm)___ 449(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 134746 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 674(@200wpm)___ 539(@250wpm)___ 449(@300wpm)
Then she tilts her head up and punches me square in the chin with one glance.
She knows I’m here, watching her like the emotionally stunted creeper fuck I am.
My heart squeezes into a lump of coal as she stares at me, and the sloshing waves and the crying gulls become part of a hollow silence.
I’m definitely not expecting her to smile, thin and sad.
I don’t know how the fuck she can stand it, but she smiles at me for the briefest second, right before she ducks her head and walks barefoot across the sand to meet Rick.
I want to call out for her, but I don’t have the faintest clue what the fuck to say.
I’m left alone with my brain spinning, watching helplessly as she disappears from my life and into the waiting car.
XIII
SUNSHINE STATE OF MIND
(ELLE)
You know that meme with the stuffed monkey in the light-green shirt?
You know, the one people trot out when someone says or does something that deserves serious side-eye. And the monkey is just looking at the person, then away, like, “I’m gonna mind my business, but yikes.”
That’s how I felt, like everyone was looking at me, when I showed up at the office this morning—the morning after that night.
That night.
I felt like that was how Rick looked at me when he took me home. I’m sure he came because August called him.
August, who clearly didn’t want to talk to me or even see me. Despite spending God only knows how long watching me while I stood in the morning light, trying to pull my head together.
If I had any common sense, I’d quit this whole thing.
Crossing that red line with August was an epic mistake. Whatever silly infatuation I’d gotten into, August is so unreachable that he’ll just call that one quick crashing torrent of desire and wild sex a momentary lapse in judgment.
Maybe it was for both of us.
But what sucks the most is that we’d just started becoming actual friends, trusting each other with personal secrets.
That’s ruined now.
So hey. It would be really easy to let this bleed into our publicly advertised breakup moment, right? It’ll just happen sooner than planned.
That’s what I told myself on the drive home.
It’s what I told myself when I asked Gran to go back to bed, lied that everything was fine, and said that I’d see her at breakfast.
It’s what I told myself through a cold shower, curling up in bed to lick my wounds and cry a little more and fight off another creeping migraine.
How could I have been so wrong about him?
I thought August was a good man who just didn’t see the goodness in himself.
That thought falls out of my head when my alarm goes off, the one that tells me it’s time to get up and get dressed and go spend the day worshipping my childhood idol, trying to learn everything I can from her.
That alarm is the reminder I need.
I’m not just doing this for August.
I’m doing it for Clara Marshall, too, and I can’t bear the thought of abandoning her.
No, maybe I can’t salvage her lost love for Inky the Penguin. Maybe I can’t convince her to keep plugging away, or to weather the court fight either.
But that doesn’t mean I won’t try.
A story about the night the Titanic sank comes to mind. We mostly hear about the people who died on that ship.
The tragedy, the horror.
Kate Winslet telling Leonardo DiCaprio to draw her like one of his French girls.
What we don’t hear about is the heart-wrenching story of bravery behind the ship that picked up the survivors, the Carpathia.
The Carpathia was fifty-eight miles away when it got a distress signal. Too far to help. Too far to get there in time to save people as the massive ship sank, broke apart, and doomed over a thousand people to their icy graves.
But over seven hundred people lived.
All thanks to the Carpathia’s captain, Arthur Rostron, who saw that impossible chance to reach the Titanic in time. He thought he couldn’t do it.
He did anyway.
Everyone on board stepped up to help, prepping the ship to receive survivors while Captain Rostron shut off everything to divert power to the steam engines. Hot water, central heating. All of it. The engineers, stokers, and firemen pushed the engines beyond their capacity.
For hours, the RMS Carpathia surged through the night, through icebergs and fear and desperation.
They made it to the site of the Titanic’s sinking in just over three hours.
How, no one is honestly even sure. Even with their superhuman efforts, what they did shouldn’t have been physically possible.
The first time I read the post summarizing it on Tumblr, I cried like a baby because it felt like it could only have been the sheer need to save those people that moved the Carpathia so fast, pushed by the hopes of everyone on board. We may never know how they did it.