Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 73398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 294(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73398 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 367(@200wpm)___ 294(@250wpm)___ 245(@300wpm)
He looked over at me as he turned out of the parking lot of his business. “You just go right for the heart, don’t you?”
I shrugged. “It’s easier to say what you want than to sit on it so the other person doesn’t know that you have a problem.”
He grunted. “Amen to that. Can’t tell you how many fuckin’ times I saw that when I was a drill sergeant. There were times that I’d know that something was wrong, so I’d watch the recruits, waiting for them to tell me. But they were so fuckin’ scared that they’d say something and then they’d get in trouble that they just held it in. Sometimes it was comical, and other times, not so much.”
I found myself grinning, thinking about what he would’ve done to a recruit who wasn’t speaking his mind.
“Anyway, to answer your question,” he started. “Beatrice and I met our senior year of high school. I was the boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and she was the good girl who wanted to defy her daddy.”
I winced.
“We met, and she convinced herself that dating me, the poorest boy in six counties, was the perfect way to piss off her strict father. She even went so far as to convince me that she loved me. Then, not realizing that she was a bitch who was just playing me, I thought I had hit the jackpot. Beatrice was beautiful, wealthy and loved me. What more could a boy like me ask for?”
Since I knew this story didn’t have a happy ending, I looked down at the floor instead of the emotion now boiling deep in Coke’s eyes.
“The one and only time we slept together in high school, I fucked up and got her pregnant. Though, I didn’t learn until much later that she’d been using me to just have a bit of fun, pretended to be more into me then she was, and finally threw me a bone by sleeping with me right before she was planning to end our relationship. The pregnancy was an accident—at least on my part. When her dad found out, he forced her to marry me—it was the right thing to do for the baby. Beatrice’s anger stemmed from the fact that me and the baby fucked up her grand plan of becoming a trophy wife. Now she had to marry me. I loved her in the beginning, but she never loved me—not like a woman should love her man.”
I bit my lip and looked back up at him with pity.
His ex-wife sounded like a real bitch.
Not that I would tell him that.
“Anyway, long story short, I was forced to live with her for years trying to make that shit work. Shit that she didn’t want to work out. Shit she sabotaged by being her bitchy self. Trash talk her own daughter? Why not? She didn’t care. Treat her kid and her husband like shit? No problem as long as it didn’t hurt her. I’m convinced we only made it as long as we did because I was in the army from the age of nineteen until I was thirty-one. While I was gone, and I’m pretty sure even when I wasn’t, she fucked anyone and everyone and then blamed me because I cheated.”
I hesitated before I asked my next question. “Did you cheat?”
I didn’t question my need to know. It was a compulsion, though, that urged me to find out…I just really needed to know.
He turned into the parking lot of the Taco Shop and shut the truck off before shifting in his seat to look at me. “Can you blame me?”
After what he’d explained? Hell no, I sure as hell couldn’t. But, one wrong didn’t make a right. Not to mention that if he did cheat, that wasn’t a good thing. Once a cheater, always a cheater…right?
He must’ve read my indecision on my face because he put me out of my misery with his next explanation.
“I didn’t actually cheat on her, though,” he admitted. “I got close to someone that I considered a friend. I was happy just being her friend. She was a student at a nearby college. It was the only sliver of happiness that I had outside of my daughter. Beatrice took offense to that because if she wasn’t happy, then I couldn’t be either. She threw a wall-eyed fit, and I decided that I’d rather face her father’s wrath, and the possibility of him taking away my business, rather than continue in that farce of a marriage. Beatrice was making my daughter and I miserable.”
I started to wonder about this college student that he was speaking of.
I was also a college student—well, a graduate student actually, but close enough.
I was working on my master’s degree in fine arts, and I was still technically in college—even if the remainder of the courses were online, and I was down to taking one course this semester.