Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 83190 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 83190 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 416(@200wpm)___ 333(@250wpm)___ 277(@300wpm)
A battle.
A loud, I wish I could hang up in her face instead of making an excuse to take a shit to end the call, battle.
“Don’t walk away from me, Brendan Anders Brickley!”
“Mom, I gotta find my fucking shoe!” I shout in return and lower myself back to the ground to resume my hunt.
“And I gotta know why you’re still there!”
“Because I wanna be here!” Tossing around the Christmas throw pillows I’ve grown to like, I add, “And I can’t like,” sliding the Frosty accessory under the bed makes room for me to crawl over to the nearby corner breakfast table, “completely explain it because it doesn’t actually make fucking sense to me, either, but like I want to be here, Mom. And I’ve never wanted to be anywhere like this. Not even A2.” I banish a jingle bell pillow next. “And it’s not just because she’s pregnant. I…like her. I like hanging out with her. I like this city. I like the number of sports bars there are. I-” my sentence is cut short due to the shoelace string I spot underneath the corner chair. “Fucking found it!”
Hastily crawling over is followed by aggressively grabbing the culprit at the same time Mom asks, “Found what?!”
“My-” trying to get up too soon has me bumping my head on the edge of the small wooden table and releasing a painful groan into the air. “Fuck, that hurt.”
Despite the fact, she can’t see me or do anything about the agony, she sweetly asks, “You okay, B?”
I rub the back of my head, drop down on the edge of the mattress beside the device, and sigh, “I will be.” Leaning over is done to allow her another glimpse of my face as well as my sweet smile. “With everything, Mom.”
“B, I know you’re totally fine with just uprooting your entire life-”
“Done it for most of it.”
“But at some point you really should at least try to put down real roots, or if that’s too much pressure—which I get it, it can be—then at least try to move from place to place with a little more warning than leaving, for what should’ve been a two day trip, only to text your friends and boss and roommates at the end of day one to basically say you’re staying indefinitely.”
Strangely enough, not my sloppiest move.
Oh, it’s definitely fucking up there.
Beat only by that time I decided to try to live in South Haven and work at Spike’s Shack, catching and throwing fish. One wasn’t quite dead when I caught it, and that was the end of that shit for me. I jumped on a bus the very next day and got off in the first town that sounded better. Camelot was decent enough for a biker town. Great bar culture, better bar babes, and some of the best booze I’ve ever had access to.
“This could finally be my indefinitely, Mom. Maybe Dalvegan is…” shoving my socked covered foot into the shoe is done at the same I optimistically sigh, “where I’ll finally put down roots or some shit. Maybe in a way I already am.”
“Do you mean because the young lady you’re having a baby with already has a place to raise the unborn child?”
“That,” I promptly begin while tying my lace, “and because for the first time in my life the instinct to just bail when I’m bored isn’t here. For the first—in like fucking forever—I’m thinking about what I gotta do to stay versus about where do I wanna go next.”
“Okay,” she quietly concedes, “I hear you.”
“Doesn’t mean you’re listening.”
Mom lightly chortles yet doesn’t completely give up. “What about your place back in A2?”
“I had a futon.”
“Your car?”
“Doesn’t start.”
“Your job?”
Leaning over the device again, I announce, “This one has insurance.”
The woman I got most of brunette features from lets a hand of shock touch her chest. “Really?”
“Medical and Dental.”
“You haven’t had that shit since you were a kid.”
“And now that I’m having one, it seems like a good time to maybe have it again?”
Her laughter suddenly becomes cut short by my bedroom door opening and Harlow grousing, “How are you not ready to go? How have you not learned your fucking lesson, brah? You’ve had to run after my SUV three times, and yesterday it was for four fucking blocks.”
“I-” my hand gestures her direction in preparation of explaining that I am ready, that I was just getting off the phone, that I don’t wanna run five blocks today, when my 3P fitness watch flies across the room, out the door, right past her.
For fucks sake, what is wrong with my wardrobe today?!
Why the fucking mutiny!
She shoves both hands into the pockets of the cropped evergreen workout jacket she’s wearing over her sports bra at the same time she declares, “I’m not buying you a new one, Baby Yoda.”