Total pages in book: 198
Estimated words: 186242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 931(@200wpm)___ 745(@250wpm)___ 621(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 186242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 931(@200wpm)___ 745(@250wpm)___ 621(@300wpm)
Maybe it really had left. I’d looked all over the apartment for it that morning and after Mr. Rhodes had extended my stay. And there’d been nothing. Maybe it had—
It swooped right by my face—maybe it wasn’t right by my face, but it seemed like it—and I squealed.
No way. Pulling the blanket over my face, I rolled off the bed with it and started crawling. Luckily, I left my keys in the same place all the time, and my eyes had adjusted enough so that I could see the kitchen counter. I reached up just enough to grab them.
Then I kept on crawling toward the staircase. For the second night in a row. I could never tell my aunt about this. She’d start researching rabies vaccinations.
I wasn’t proud of myself, but I took the stairs on my ass, the blanket tucked tight over my head.
I’d shoved my cell down my bra at some point, and at the bottom of the stairs, I slipped my feet into the tennis shoes I’d kicked off down there earlier, keeping as low as possible, and finally headed outside, still wrapped in my blanket.
Small animal noises rustled around as I closed the door behind me and locked it, before basically running toward my car, hoping and praying something wasn’t going to come swooping, but I managed to slip inside and slam the door closed.
Reclining the seat and then pushing it back as far as it would go, I settled in, blanket up to my neck, and not for the first time, I wondered—despite how I’d felt earlier when Mr. Rhodes had offered to let me stay—what the hell I was doing here. Hiding in my car.
Maybe I should go back to Florida. We had bugs the size of small bats, sure, but I wasn’t scared of them. Well, not really.
It’s just a bat, my mom would have told me. I used to be terrified of spiders, but she’d helped me work the fear out. Everything was a living, breathing being that needed food and water like I did. It had organs and felt pain.
It was okay to be scared. It was good to be scared of things.
Did I really want to go back to Florida? I loved my aunt, uncle, and the rest of the family. But I had missed Colorado. I really had. All these years.
That eased the harshest edges of my fear.
If I was going to stay here, I needed to figure this bat situation out, because there was no way, even if I stopped panicking, that I’d be fine with having a bat swooping around while I slept. I couldn’t keep doing this, and nobody was going to come and save me. I was a grown woman, and I could handle this.
Tomorrow, I’d start to figure it out.
After another night in my car.
I was going to get that damn bat out of the house some way, somehow, damn it.
I could do this. I could do anything, right?
Chapter Ten
I didn’t need a mirror to know I looked like hell because I sure felt like it the next morning.
My neck hurt from sleeping in every position imaginable in my car for the second night in a row. I was pretty sure I’d probably gotten a solid two hours of sleep on and off. But that was better than zero hours if I’d stayed inside.
I still made myself wait until the sun was totally out before going inside.
And then I immediately stopped when I spotted Amos’s face staring out at me from the living room window.
And I knew it wasn’t because of my incredible beauty, because fortunately, I’d managed to wrap myself with the blanket the same way I’d done the night before, covered from head to toe like it was a rain poncho. Without him saying a word, I knew he was wondering what the hell I’d been up to. There was no way I could pull off looking like I’d gone to the store or on a run in the early morning because I was tiptoeing with my shoes barely hanging onto my toes.
“Morning, Amos,” I called out, trying to sound cheery even though I felt like I’d gotten run over. I knew he could hear me because they opened the small rectangular windows under the big, main ones to keep the house cool.
“Morning,” he replied in a voice that was cracking with sleep. I’d bet he probably hadn’t gone to bed yet. “Are you . . . okay?” Amos asked after a second.
“Yep!”
Yeah, he didn’t believe me at all.
“You feeling okay?” I asked him instead, hoping he wouldn’t ask what the hell I’d been doing.
He shrugged a bony shoulder, still watching me way too closely. “You’re sure you’re all right?”
I replied the same way he had: I shrugged. Did I want to tell him about the bat? Yes. But . . . I was the adult and he was the child, and I didn’t want to remind his dad that I was staying in the apartment more than I needed to, so I figured I had to deal with as many things as possible on my own to make this work.