Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 72853 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 364(@200wpm)___ 291(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72853 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 364(@200wpm)___ 291(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
“I’ll sleep too. If that’s what you want, I’ll do it.”
Well, if that’s what it takes to get this conversation to stop. We’ve gone from shallow waters to the deepest parts of the ocean really fast, and neither one of us is ready for that. My heart is pounding so hard that I can practically feel it in my ears since they’re picking up on the wildness going on in my neck just below them.
I’m running out of time. Two weeks is two weeks not long enough. I know I’ll have some line of communication with him after. I don’t think he was joking about the pen pal thing, and I could probably push for more, but it doesn’t feel like enough. It doesn’t change the fact that in ten days, I’m not going to be here anymore. Still, I can’t push this any further tonight. I want to help, not dig deeper gouges into either of us.
“Okay.” I reach for my boots and stand on one of the wooden platforms so I can brush my feet off before putting them on. “Let’s get some sleep.”
I don’t know if he actually will, but I hope he tries.
For himself. Not for me.
Chapter nine
Rick
I’m an impossible idiot. Impossible because I didn’t think it was a thing for me to break down and say all the shit I said out loud at the park. It was a slip-up, a spill, but then it kept spilling. It was like the crap bottled up inside me could no longer be contained. It just flowed and flowed and flowed, which makes me a royal numbskull. A total toad. A fried-up fart.
I’ve been thinking about it all night.
After I made sure Aspen got to bed, I listened from my office down the hall. Not in a creepy way, but just to make sure she was okay. The park was heavy. I wanted to make sure what I’d said didn’t give her nightmares. I wanted to make sure she didn’t cry herself to sleep thinking about her brother. She didn’t.
Despite the caffeine, she settled right in, and within moments, she was asleep.
I kept listening. I kept watch. I sat in my office for the remainder of the night and made lists of charities and places where I could donate the remaining artwork and then the larger furniture pieces. I was serious about that. Everything. I wanted everything out.
I made lists and more lists and researched until my eyes felt like they were going to fall out from staring at a phone screen and my laptop screen in the dark. Then, I sat some more with my head tucked into my hands, staring at the desktop, staring at my knees, seeing nothing at all.
I thought about family.
That word. It always meant less than nothing.
It was something I never had. Something I was never going to have. The only family I had was the one I’d been adopted into when I joined the military and then when I went further. Jace was family because he was like a brother. They were all like my brothers.
We didn’t talk about it much, but Jace knew how broken I was. He knew the basics of me because he pulled it out of me, night after night, week after week, year after year. Maybe it was only a word here or there, a memory shared over cards, or something whispered when we were crouched down in the dark, thinking we might not get out of the shit we were in alive. We shared the good and the bad, and in the end, he knew enough about me to have a timeline and the facts of my life pretty straight in his head. I knew about his life too. That’s how he’d get me. By being more open than a body ever possibly could or should be. He wasn’t like anyone else, and maybe that’s why I felt safe enough to let him coax and extract information from me. He was always gentle. He would have never used it to hurt me.
And now?
He tried to give me the one thing I never had.
Someone.
Someone who cares.
Aspen is trying so hard. She’s trying because Jace asked her to. I know even after she leaves, that won’t be the end of it. She’ll keep trying and trying, and fuck, she shouldn’t have to. This isn’t fair to her. It’s not fair that someone like me got dumped on someone like her. When she saved me, hauling me over the railing with every ounce of brute strength in her body, and in the park, when she refused to let me be, trying to save me all over again, she proved she’s more than just pretty and sweet, innocent and young. There’s something under all of it that I didn’t see at first. She’s strong like Jace was strong, even if they were born more than a decade apart and took totally different paths in life.