Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 77415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 387(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 258(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77415 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 387(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 258(@300wpm)
Though, that was irrelevant. I didn’t forget his number.
Each year that went by, I knew that number. Knew it like I knew my middle name.
I pulled that number up now, knowing that he didn’t have it anymore.
I’d texted that number over and over throughout the years. One of the many times I’d tried calling it, about a year and a half after he’d left, I’d found it disconnected.
Now, the phone number was like my lifeline. Something I used when I needed to escape.
To talk to the boy that Jessie used to be, not the man he’d become. The one I didn’t know.
I pressed on his name in my address book, then typed out a text, hitting send before I could even think about it.
It was such a habit, to share my life with the disconnected phone number, that it never occurred to me that it actually might be in use at this point.
But, like the dumbass I was, I continued to do it.
I hate the new you. I miss the old you.
***
Jessie
I watched her out of the corner of my eye, her brother’s bulky arm wrapped around her neck as he kept her close to his body.
I should’ve fucking known, now that I thought about it.
Tommy Tom was actually Tommy Tomirkanivov. Ellen Tomirkanivov’s brother.
The girl that held my heart.
How I’d never put their two names together, was beyond me. My only excuse at this point was that back then, I’d only ever heard Ellen pronounce her name. Tom-kann-of.
When I’d started prospecting, Tommy had introduced himself as Tommy Tom, and that’d been that. I’d read the name, of course, on ledgers and such for the club, but I’d never put together the two names since what I remembered hearing, and what I was reading, sounded completely different in my head.
Goddammit, I was so fucking stupid sometimes.
“Do you want to play, Dad, or do you want to leave?”
I turned to study my son.
Fourteen years ago, Ellen had loved him. She’d been enamored with my little black-haired pain-in-the-ass, and I’d been enamored that she was enamored.
Now, watching him all grown up, talking to her once again, it brought back memories that hurt too badly to dissect.
“I’ll stay for an hour or so,” I told him. “But I have to be at work at six, and it’s already half past ten.” I gestured to a seat that was about as far across the room as it could get from Ellen. “I don’t want to hear any bitchin’ when we leave, either.”
Linc gave me a droll look.
“When do I ever complain when you need to go to work in the morning?”
“Smart ass,” I grunted as I took the seat.
I tried, really I tried, not to look across the room to see where Ellen sat, but I couldn’t help myself.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, but I ignored it, instead watching Ellen out of the corner of my eye as she fiddled with her own phone.
Then cursed inwardly as I realized that I was watching her.
Nothing good ever came out of that.
At least, this time, Sean had someone with him. It wouldn’t make me feel absolutely terrible if I was caught watching her.
Though, seeing the haunted look in her eyes when she caught me looking at her was enough to make me feel like I’d just taken a boot to the gut.
But I’d done the right thing!
She was successful—although not in the field I thought she’d be successful in—and was happy. I’d done the right thing!
Maybe if I kept telling myself that, it would be true.
I had to think that I’d done the right thing. Because, if I didn’t do the right thing, I just caused both of us needless heartache.
I knew, on my end, that I’d done the right thing.
At the age of eighteen, I’d still had a lot of growing up to do. I’d made a lot of mistakes. I’d almost fucked my life up royally.
Thankfully, I’d climbed my way out of the hellhole that was my old hometown and started traveling wherever the oil field needed me.
Ideally, the oil field wasn’t the best place for a family. I’d had that proven to me over and over again throughout the last fourteen years, as I tried to juggle being a single father and working.
Sure, it would’ve been a hell of a lot easier with someone else to help, such as a certain brown-haired goddess, but I didn’t have an easy life. Neither did Linc.
We were dirt poor for the first ten years of his life, and even now, I still didn’t have what I wanted. Until Linc was eight, we’d lived in a trashed out bumper pull RV that was seconds away from falling apart. Each time I hooked that bitch up to my truck, I feared that it’d collapse on the way to where we were going, leaving us homeless and me fucked in the ass since I’d had no back up plan.