Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 64493 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 64493 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 322(@200wpm)___ 258(@250wpm)___ 215(@300wpm)
I paused at the bottom of the stairs to open the front door for him. “Later. Tuesday at practice?”
“Yeah. Sure, but I gotta see what it looks like up there.” He gestured vaguely in the direction of the second-story landing.
I chuckled. “Prepare yourself for the ultimate time warp.”
He closed the door and followed me upstairs, stopping every so often to study a photograph. I left him to explore on his own and moved into my childhood room to riffle through my dresser. I shook out a wrinkly tee with an indecipherable faded design and sniffed it.
“Moldy?” he asked from the doorway.
“A little.” I watched him in my periphery as I pulled it on over my head. He seemed lost in deep thoughts…not something I associated with Vinnie. “Been a while, huh?”
A crooked smile tilted his lips. “It brings back memories.”
“I bet.”
He wandered the small space, picking up trophies, pet rocks, and ancient stuffed animals on the built-in bookshelf opposite the twin bed I’d slept in till I was eighteen. “Why haven’t you cleaned out your room? Geez, I think my dad converted my old bedroom into an office the weekend I left for college.”
“Ask my mom. We’ve offered to help her go through this stuff, but she won’t hear of it. Although, she did give Mary-Kate Ronnie’s old room.”
“Hmm. Your niece is cute.” He perched on the corner of my old desk and crossed his tattooed arms.
“She’s awesome and brilliant too,” I bragged.
“Must get that from her mother’s side.”
I snickered at his deadpan delivery. “Probably. Hey, don’t take her hockey aversion personally. We haven’t figured out how to get her to pick up a stick since that admittedly nasty head wound. And…she’d rather read.”
“Definitely takes after her mother. What was she like?”
“Jasmine?” I leaned against the wall to face him. “I didn’t know her very well. Ronnie met her in rehab in Michigan. They got hitched at county hall. As you can imagine, my parents were wrecked about that. I was living in LA at the time and every phone conversation began or ended with my mom wanting to organize a second wedding and reception for the happy couple here in Elmwood. But they got pregnant and wedding celebrations gave way to baby plans. Mary-Kate was born in Ann Arbor, and Jasmine was gone five months later.”
“Fuck. That’s awful.”
“Yeah. You’ve heard the story a few times by now, I’m sure. Jasmine had a bad drug problem. There was concern she’d been using while she was pregnant and that it might have affected the baby. My folks flipped, then swooped in and took over. They organized a funeral instead of a wedding, helped Ronnie pack up and move home. A few months later, Dad died and I moved home too. And…here we all are again. Even you. It’s fucking weird.”
“Maybe a little,” he agreed. “Sounds like you’ve been raising your niece too.”
“I suppose so. She’s a really easy kid, though. She doesn’t have a mischievous bone in her body. She’s a rule follower to the extreme.”
“You were a rule follower too,” Vin commented with a sly grin.
“I followed you assholes everywhere. And unlike Mary-Kate, you were not cuddling up in your nana’s comfiest chair with a book.”
“No, I wasn’t.” He barked a laugh and pointed at the bookshelf. “Is that rock from the time you fell into the creek?”
I looked over at the smooth rock the size of my fist, narrowing my eyes. “Uh…I have no idea where that came from.”
“Liar. We were skipping stones. It was dusk and still hot as fuck. You picked that one up and you were about to throw it, but you put it in your pocket instead. You said it had diamonds inside. I’m pretty sure we made fun of you for that.”
“No doubt,” I huffed dryly.
“So you pretended to throw it at me, lost your balance, and ended up in the creek. Violence is never the answer,” Vinnie tsked. He hopped off the desk and grabbed the rock off the shelf, turning it in his big palms. “I guess this part sort of looks like a crystal…or a diamond.”
I snatched the rock from him and returned it to the shelf. “You can’t have it.”
“I don’t want your fucking rock, Nolan. I want—”
He didn’t finish his sentence and the longer he lingered, the more uneasy I became.
Vin filled a room like no one I’d ever known, and this already cramped space was beginning to feel claustrophobic. I was aware of him in ways I didn’t want to be. The smell of his cologne, the hair on his forearms, the sharp lines of his stubbled jaw…
What was going on?
“Vinnie?”
“I want…to skip rocks,” he sputtered. “We should go sometime. The creek is close to my place. It feeds into my pond, which might make it…not a pond. Supposedly, there’s a huge debate going on about whether my pond is actually a mini lake. It’s deep but small and by definition, a lake is over an acre and a half…or something like that.”