Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 122219 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 611(@200wpm)___ 489(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122219 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 611(@200wpm)___ 489(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Alex was a good, loyal man like my father. Wesley was on the list, too.
I’d only dated one man before Wesley, when I was a very young eighteen-year-old. That only lasted for a summer, too. Since then, I’ve spent most of my life single, and I didn’t have a problem with that. It wasn’t until Wesley came around that I saw the real possibility of being with someone again, of loving someone else. Before him, I was content with the idea of being an old maid and living my life to the fullest. I knew I didn’t need a man to have a happy life. Overall, the male species kind of annoyed me.
My youngest sister, Willow, the free spirit that she was, made sure to always remind Yara and me that the greatest love stories were with the ones staring back at us in our reflections, and men were just fun play toys that we could pick up and put down whenever we wanted.
I thought that was her way of excusing her promiscuous ways when it came to her picking up and putting down quite the array of play toys herself. Still, I believed her. I never let my life revolve around men. To be honest, I thought most of them were arrogant, smelly, and low in value. So when I found myself falling for Wesley, I knew he was different. He made me question all my sour beliefs about the male species.
At least, I thought so until I sat in our living room playing a game of charades with his friends.
With Drew.
Drew, the woman.
A few facts I’d learned about Drew over the past thirty minutes: she had a hyena laugh; when she lied, her mouth twitched; and she avoided refined sugar with every fiber of her spirit. Though, based on the twitch of her mouth, that was a lie.
Also, the more champagne the woman drank, the more obnoxious she became.
Drew stood in front of everyone, pulling her long hair into a ponytail and clapping her hands together. She made the hand gesture as if she were operating an old-fashioned camera.
“It’s a movie!” Wesley called out. A little too elated if you asked me. He hadn’t stopped smiling since that woman—and his other friends—entered our house. I swear, I’d never seen all his teeth before that night. My gosh, did he still have his wisdom teeth? Wesley was normally much more reserved with his smiles and somber with his expressions.
Drew nodded in agreement. She then put up one finger.
“One word!” Wesley shouted.
She nodded again, then started acting out a scene—poorly. She looked like a wild child, holding her hands out into the air, and Wesley stared at her as if she were Meryl Streep in an Oscar-winning movie. That was when my Spidey senses began to tingle. Something was amiss with how my fiancé was staring at another woman. Some might’ve called me paranoid, but my father taught me at a young age to never go against a hunch. And my hunch told me something was odd about Drew and Wesley’s connection.
Patrick and Lance laughed at Drew’s actions, having no clue what she was doing. I was just as lost as I studied the woman trying her best. I guessed her best wasn’t good enough. She might’ve been a rocket scientist, but the woman was not a charades queen.
“Come on!” Drew said, clapping her hands toward Wesley. “We did this for our first date, on the boat!” she urged.
And there it is.
My hunch had been hunched.
First date?
We weren’t just going to skip past that comment.
Or perhaps we were because Wesley shot up from his seat and clapped his hands together. “Titanic!” he shouted, doing wild karate chops in the air as he exploded with excitement.
This. Dickhead.
I stayed planted on the couch in an indescribable state of shock.
“Yes!” Drew replied, rushing over to my fiancé and wrapping him in a big embrace. He hugged her back tightly as if that was the right thing to do. My blood began to boil like no other as I sat there like an idiot, taking in the romantic scene unfolding before me.
What.
The.
Actual.
Fuck?
I stared at the two as if they had grown three heads. I was stuck in a state of complete disbelief. They might as well take off their clothes and start going at it on the living room rug, for all I cared. The amount of disrespect happening right in front of me was mind-blowing.
When they finally let one another go, I said, “It doesn’t count.”
Everyone looked at me, confused.
Drew narrowed her eyes. “What doesn’t count?”
“Your point for the game. It doesn’t count. You’re not allowed to use words during charades.”
Wesley laughed and sat down beside me. He raked his hand through his reddish-brown hair and shrugged. “I think we can make up the rules as we go.”