Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76807 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76807 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 384(@200wpm)___ 307(@250wpm)___ 256(@300wpm)
I’d immediately felt the wave of grief wash over me.
One year without Clay. A whole Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years.
My engagement.
Our wedding.
The baby.
Things he didn’t get to share with us.
“Sometimes I worry there will come a time when I will miss him more than I remember him,” I admitted, squeezing my eyes tight against the wave of tears.
“We’ll keep his memory alive together,” Brooks said, taking another sniff of the lemon cleaner. It had been in a gift basket from one of the club moms who didn’t know the sentimental value it held. I hadn’t had the heart to open and use it since it showed up. But, god, I was glad for its existence right then.
“Yeah,” I agreed, leaning my head into him, glad to have someone to share my life with who loved Clay as much as I did, who could sit around with me on the kitchen floor and share favorite memories. As he said, keeping him alive with us.
Brooks - 9 years
“Don’t tell your father,” I heard Sully whisper as I came around the corner of the clubhouse.
“Don’t tell their father what?” I asked, making Sully and both my kids turn, eyes wide.
“Busteddddd,” Sully said, beaming at me.
“What are those?” I asked as all three of them tucked something behind their backs.
“Oh, nothing. Just super secret kid stuff,” Sully told me.
“Says the biggest kid of them all,” I agreed, shaking my head. “I’m going to go ahead and not ask anything else. With the understanding that my kids will stay alive and relatively unharmed at the end of this. And you’ll clean up whatever mess you make,” I added, looking around the backyard of the clubhouse for any signs of what antics they were up to.
Then out of nowhere, another set of kids came rushing out from behind the trees, each sporting a whipped cream dispenser, and taking aim at my kids.
“Alive. Unharmed,” Sully said, raising his own dispenser like a gun. “But I never made any promises about not being sticky.”
“And the clean up?” I asked as he poured whipped cream down on one of his kids’ heads.
“That’s what prospects are for,” he declared, ducking behind a chaise lounge before his kids could take their revenge.
Knowing the kids were in surprisingly capable—if not wholly irresponsible—hands, I made my way back into the clubhouse, finding Cali standing in the kitchen, giving me a raised brow look.
“Did I see my children being nailed with whipped cream guns?” she asked with a head shake.
“If it makes you feel any better, I imagine he will hose them all off before he lets them come inside.”
“My money is him letting them go in the pool,” she countered. “I mean, wasn’t it last week when he put his own kids in the pool instead of giving them a bath?”
“Good point,” I agreed.
“How long do you think we have before they start demanding we feed them again?” she asked, glancing at the clock.
“Well, we fed them half an hour ago. So… maybe twenty more minutes,” I said. “Why?”
She didn’t answer me with words, just grabbing the edge of my cut and pulling me with her through the clubhouse, down the basement stairs, and then rushing ahead of me up the ladder.
I wouldn’t say she was necessarily ‘cured’ of her fear of heights. She still got a little dizzy sometimes. Even shaky. But when you’ve literally jumped out of a plane and bungeed off of a bridge, you definitely built a bit of a tolerance to much less intimidating heights.
Like the spiral staircase to the top of the lighthouse we’d taken the kids to on Clay’s birthday. Or, of course, the ladder to the glass room on the roof.
Though, I was pretty sure, this was the first time she’d attempted going up it since that first night at the clubhouse all those years ago.
“You know, I agree with Sully—“ she started as I climbed in the room with her.
“I beg of you, don’t finish that fucking sentence. The last thing that man needs is anyone agreeing with his harebrained schemes.”
“I’m just saying, a slide down would be a lot of fun. And, I mean, he was right about the pool, wasn’t he?” she asked.
“I can’t disagree with that. And it bothers me,” I agreed.
I mean, objectively, I’d loosened up a lot on the club guys and prospects. Part of that was having Cali show me that life was about more than just control and rules. And, of course, a lot of it was because now my life and my wife and kids just took me away from the club more, leaving me not breathing down their necks like I used to.
But I swear, even all these years after he patched in himself, Sully was still whispering in the ears of the prospects with some asinine idea he thinks they should try out.