Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 76396 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76396 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 382(@200wpm)___ 306(@250wpm)___ 255(@300wpm)
“Maybe I don’t want you to.”
I press a kiss to her nose. “Slowly, remember?”
She leans back on my lap, and crosses her arms. “Are you changing the rules up on me, Slater Knight?”
I grin at her.
“Baby, you made the rules, remember?”
She laughs.
And it’s the fuckin’ best day of my life.
Hands down.
~12~
NOW – ELLIE
Slater’s house.
I know it.
The moment we step out of the car, I look up. I tip my head back and stare. It’s run down, and it’s old, but I know this house. I know it and the familiar feeling it brings me nearly brings me to my knees. It feels like home. A strong sense of warmth washes over me, and I want to run inside it and never leave.
My head turns to the left and I stare at the house next door.
I stare at it, and also, I feel such a strong sense of familiar. But not as heavy as this house. This house, this house is home. I know it, and I feel it so strongly that I stop walking, and I just stare, and stare, and try to make my brain work with me. I want it to open up, to just let me remember. Not just this, but everything. No more scattered memories.
I can tell you a few things about my life with my parents, I remember when they died. But every part after that is hazy. I only have maybe a handful of clear memories, the rest are kind of...distorted. Like I can see them, only they’re really fuzzy, so I don’t know what exactly they’re about. I dream a lot, though it’s never me in the dreams, they seem familiar somehow. Like my brain is trying to show me, and I don’t want to let it.
And of course, I remember the horrid years I spent with him.
I wish my brain would let me forget those.
Though the beginning of my time there, is a foggy mess.
I remember seeing Charlie, and being scared and confused, and trapped in a basement.
And then that’s it. Drugs, and abuse, and hell filled my life for so many years after that, I don’t recall where I was, or what I was doing, just flashes of horror.
Only in the last five or six years with him, did I start to regain some of my mind back.
And that’s only because he laid off the drugs, and I started to get a better idea of what was doing on, but it was already too late for the rest of the memories. Those were already locked away in my mind, in a safe place, refusing to come back out.
“Y-y-y-you...you lived here...didn’t you?” I whisper when Slater stops beside me.
He tips his head back, and looks up at the house, almost as if seeing it for the first time himself.
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “And you lived next door,” he points to the other house. “With Bob and Marlene Robertson. They died two years ago.”
Bob and Marlene.
Frustration bubbles in my chest that an instant image of them doesn’t just pop up like I need it to.
Anger grips me.
“I can’t remember anything, and yet it seems so familiar to me. Like my body knows what my mind doesn’t.”
Slater looks down at me, just as the other trucks and bikes pull in. They’re all here to talk about what happened.
“Let’s get your hand cleaned up. I’ll call Erin again.”
I nod, and we walk into the huge but run down old house. I step through the front doors, and that feeling of home only gets stronger. My eyes move around the huge living area, and settle on a large bookshelf, full of old frames. Photos. I walk over, without hesitation, and stop, staring.
And my eyes burn.
They burn.
Because there are so many photos with me in them.
Me with what is very clearly all the guys when they were younger. Me on Damon’s shoulders, Finn and I dressed up for Halloween laughing with a beer in our hand, no doubt a beer we shouldn’t have, Lincoln and I at a football game and I’m giving a big thumbs up, and then Slater and I. So many photos of Slater and I. Laughing, kissing, on a boat, in a cabin, hiking...we look so...so...happy. And so incredibly in love.
I can see it so clearly.
Even in my own eyes.
And my chest aches. It burns.
I forget everything else that’s happening around me, and just stare at the pictures.
“Good photos, huh?”
I turn my head and see Damon standing and staring at the photos. Slater must have called his brothers, too. He’s grown now, no longer the young, care free guy he is in these pictures. He’s a man now, and yet I can still almost feel a certain level of playfulness coming from Damon. He’s not as hard as the other three. I like that about him.