Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 76227 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 381(@200wpm)___ 305(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76227 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 381(@200wpm)___ 305(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
HallowedHallie: Oh, he's the type to defend your honor too? Swoon. Is Huck single?
"Ah, yeah," I said, finding the words left an oddly bitter taste on my tongue.
"Alright. Before the whole chat falls in love with me, I will head out," Huck said, chuckling in that way that made my stomach feel wobbly. "I am going to go and take a swim," he added, smirking as the girls were quick to send drooling emojis. "Hey, maybe I should get myself a channel," Huck said as the comments kept coming.
"Oh, for the love of God. I will make you anything you want to eat if you just please leave, so I can get back to my game," I said, exasperated.
But only I knew what I was upset about.
All the thirst toward Huck.
As if I had any right to him.
Especially after practically rejecting him.
"Did you all hear that? Anything I want. Hold her to that," Huck said, moving to stand upright.
As he lifted his hands from the armrests, his fingers grazed up my forearm in a way that seemed too deliberate to be an accident.
But it was over before I got a chance to analyze it.
And then he was out of the room, and I could hear him a floor below telling everyone to keep it down because "Harmon is working."
There was a strange skittering feeling in my chest listening to him.
Maybe because it was the first time I'd ever heard anyone else refer to my gaming and taping as "work." Everyone always brushed it off as a hobby or a pastime, something inconsequential, something I could start and stop on a dime.
HallowedHallie: Oh, I miss him already.
MissiontoMayberry: Bunch of thirsty-ass bitches in here tonight.
Okay.
I needed to get control back over this comment section.
And stop thinking about freaking Huck.
The former proved easy enough once the game got going.
The latter, though, seemed like a pipe dream. Because whereas my game usually allowed me to completely escape from the real world, I found myself drifting back into my own mind, to thoughts of Huck.
As I signed off and got up from my chair, I had a sobering realization.
I was going to be sleeping with Huck.
There was no way around it.
And that meant I was going to do something I'd never had to do in my life before.
Beg for it.
Chapter Eight
Huck
I couldn't stop thinking about those dickheads talking to her in that chat.
Sure, I played it down, focused on the supportive women she seemed to have around as well, but the assholes were on my mind as I went downstairs, as I caught myself trying to overhear her one-sided conversation with them, as I considered logging in to listen and watch myself along with all the others until, eventually, I realized what a fucking pussy I was being, and took my ass outside to dive into the pool, doing laps until my arms and lungs were burning .
It wasn't my fucking business how men talked to her online. She wasn't mine. I didn't want a woman to be mine.
At least that was what I had always believed. That they were good for a night or a weekend, and then it lost its appeal.
That said, Harmon had been in my life longer than that, and in my house longer than that, even.
Maybe the difference was, I hadn't fucked her yet.
I'd never bought into that idea that men liked to chase. I didn't know a single man who wasn't over-fucking-joyed when some good pussy just landed in his lap, no effort at all. I was a busy man. I didn't have time to convince a woman I was worth fucking. Besides, it seemed creepy as fuck to do shit like that. If a woman didn't want to fuck me, she didn't want to fuck me. She'd be missing out, but I wasn't going to try to change her mind about it.
I guess another difference here was, Harmon did want to fuck me. There was no mistaking that. She was just insisting she didn't because, why? Because we were neighbors? Because she didn't want to get any more involved with an outlaw biker club than she needed to?
I didn't know.
It shouldn't have mattered.
I should have been able to shrug it off, move onto the next.
Why, then, was every unoccupied thought all about her? Why did I want to know about what she got out of this online community of hers, this game that took up a good part of her life, what incident had made her afraid of cars, and if it was connected to the PTSD and the pot she used for it? I wanted to know why she moved out into the middle of nowhere, why she had no apparent real-life friends, why she didn't seem close to her family, except maybe her brother.
Basically, I wanted to know what made her tick.