Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 74078 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 370(@200wpm)___ 296(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74078 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 370(@200wpm)___ 296(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Everyone said their goodbyes, and we climbed back into my car that we’d taken so it wasn’t so rough on my sore stomach with all the bumps and potholes.
“I wasn’t raped,” I told him as we drove in silence. Cato’s gaze cut to me. “I know you were worried about that.”
“For the record, I was worried for you.”
“Why would you need to clarify that?” I asked, shaking my head.
“Knew this asshole years back who had a girlfriend who was jumped and raped on her way home from work. He told her that he felt like she cheated on him. Fucking broke that girls heart to pieces saying that shit. Just wanted to make sure it was clear I wasn’t like him.”
“I wouldn’t have thought that of you,” I said, my own heart aching for that poor girl. And any other woman who dealt with some shithead partner like that after going through the worst thing they’d ever experienced.
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Cato asked as he parked my car in my spot, and we started to walk toward my apartment, my oversized sunglasses doing little to hide my bruising, and people were looking at me with sympathy, and Cato with suspicion.
He didn’t seem to give a shit, though, as he led me into the elevator and then up to my door.
“Yeah,” I said, sucking in a deep breath. “But I need ice cream to do it.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Rynn
“Let’s see what he brought,” Cato said, opening Eddie’s insulated bags on the counter and listing their contents.
“Cheesy scrambled eggs,” he started, and I was already doing “gimmie” fingers at him. You couldn’t get easier to swallow than soft scrambled eggs. And I needed the protein and the fat from the cheese. “Okay. And… mashed potatoes with homemade gravy,” he said. “Then there is some… some sort of soup with those little star pasta. Baked mac & cheese. This is some sort of… cheesy rice, I think,” he said as he went to another container.
“How long has he been up cooking?” I asked, feeling a little guilty that he’d spent so much of his time on me.
“Dunno. But he loves doing this, so stop looking all worried,” Cato said.
“Have something,” I said as I forced down my first bite of eggs. It wasn’t the most pleasant feeling, swallowing solid food, but it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting either, especially after the throat spray.
“He made me some of everything that’s here,” Cato admitted, taking out his own eggs.
“This is good,” I said, pointing my fork at the eggs. We finished eating mostly in silence as I had to keep washing down the eggs with a cold drink to ease the soreness.
Then Cato brushed me off to relax while he put the rest of the food away for later, coming back with the ice cream I requested to tell this story.
“So you know how I told you my mom is a psycho and my dad was always absent?” I started after Cato thawed my ice cream while I did a quick whore’s bath and changed into a fresh tee and panties. I tried to put shorts on, but got frustrated with the bandages and just went without.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I did have someone else in my life growing up.” Albeit not for as long as I would have liked.
“Yeah? Grandparent?” he asked.
“Uncle,” I corrected. “He was older than my mom and absent a lot of my young childhood because he was… stationed overseas.”
“Stationed. In the military?”
“Actually, ah, the CIA.”
“Your uncle was a spy?” he asked, catching on quick.
That wasn’t exactly something I knew right away.
All I knew at first was that he was coming back to Miami, and that my mom was actually cleaning the house and cooking a meal to have him over.
And since I spent most of my childhood eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches as my dinner and junk food for the rest of my meals, this was a pretty big deal for me.
If I really gave it thought, I could probably only pinpoint half a dozen times my mother had cooked over the course of my childhood. And most of those times were because she was having one of her many boyfriends over for dinner, trying to impress them, make them believe she would be a great wife to them someday.
I didn’t get to eat at the table during those meals, of course, but there were leftovers that I could heat up to eat after she and her boyfriend of the week were locked in my mom’s room.
So, yeah, the fact that my mom was actually standing in the kitchen all day, slicing and dicing and frying and baking, it felt like a huge deal. Like someone really important was coming to dinner.
The weird thing was, she never really even talked about my uncle much. When I, a curious kid wondering why our family was so small, would ask about her relatives, she would mention she had a brother, but hadn’t seen him in years.