Total pages in book: 52
Estimated words: 47819 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 239(@200wpm)___ 191(@250wpm)___ 159(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 47819 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 239(@200wpm)___ 191(@250wpm)___ 159(@300wpm)
The thing is, that for a man who’s lived the life I have, seen the things I’ve seen, I know there was never any sense in waiting, not once you were sure and everything in me said she was mine.
But she’d been burnt before and was a little hesitant to put herself out there again. Though I wasn’t stoked about paying for another man’s crimes, I understood that shit. The thing is, I could understand it just as well with my ring on her finger and my kid in her womb.
Chapter 16
ILENE
I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. You know that feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when things have just been too good and you just know it cannot last? That’s where I’m at.
My kid has been acting more like her old self here lately and seems happy enough with the new man in my life. I thought for sure she would be pushing for a parental reconciliation, which is the way I felt when my dad left my mom and I, but she seemed to be way smarter than I was.
From the conversations we’d been having in the last few days, she seems to have taken the stance that her dad didn’t deserve us after the way he’d treated us. She was still hurt yes, but she was choosing to move on instead of trying to hold onto something that was long dead, as I had been.
That brings us to Dane and the way the two of them were with each other. It was very easy to think that he might be pretending a liking for her in order to suck me in, but like Janine had said only yesterday when we were all at the soccer field; it only took two minutes in their company to see that there was a genuine fondness between those two.
That’s one of the reasons why it had been so easy to ignore Mark’s threats about what he would do if I didn’t break things off with Dane. That and the fact, that I was more in love with the man, than I’d ever been with anyone before.
I don’t know how he did it, how he broke down those barriers, and stormed my heart, but it didn’t seem to have taken much effort on his part that’s for sure. Now it’s as if I can’t do anything without him there. Not in a needy, stalkerish kind of way, but more like I couldn’t breathe if he weren’t around.
What I feel for him is nowhere near the innocent love of a teenage girl with her first love. This thing felt alive and hot and real and scary and beautiful all rolled into one. The more I have of him the more I want. There doesn’t seem to be a minute of the day when my body isn’t in need or recuperating from him.
I’ve never had this much sex in my life and it’s all good. Whether it’s a rushed quickie because we couldn’t resist each other ten minutes before it was time to get Alana from school, or a long leisurely session after he’d climbed through my window in the dark, it was always mind numbing good.
The only people who weren’t happy about this turn of events were Mark and my mom. Mom thought that like her, I should hold out for Mark’s return, which is what she did with my dad with disastrous results both times he came back, or she let him back in.
I’d learned that from her I guess, to hold onto what I know even if it was bad for me. A few months ago I would’ve been more than happy to take Mark back, and feel like I was winning no doubt, but now I see through new eyes. I see through the eyes of a woman who finally knows what it means to be loved, truly and deeply.
If what Dane felt started as physical lust it had certainly morphed into something bigger and I felt it every time he touched me, or in the way he looked at me, the way I caught him looking at me when he thought I wasn’t paying any attention to him.
I feel it in the way he holds me at night when we sleep. The way he now refuses to sleep without me by his side. He still sneaks out in the early morning for Alana’s sake, but he doesn’t let me sleep alone.
That’s why I was even now on my way to his place dressed like an idiot in the exercise outfit my daughter and my so-called best friend had chosen for me to wear. He had offered his services as a coach again and I’d decided what the heck. I wouldn’t mind losing the little extra flesh around my middle, though it wasn’t as bad as all that, a flat tummy would be nice again after all these years.