Total pages in book: 72
Estimated words: 66453 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 332(@200wpm)___ 266(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 66453 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 332(@200wpm)___ 266(@250wpm)___ 222(@300wpm)
“Agreed,” Jake said, snagging it and taking a long drink of it himself. “Guess I should start calling before I drop by.”
I shrugged. I didn’t care what he did in the future. The damage had been done. Hadn’t it? Looking at Jake now, I didn’t see a trace of a grudge on his open, honest face. The tightly coiled tension in my gut loosened. I hadn’t let myself think about how shitty it would feel to have Jake hate me. To see disgust on the face that looked so much like his father’s, my surrogate father’s.
“Are you–” I frowned, trying to figure out how to put it. “Do you want to talk about anything?”
“Do I want to?” Jake took another drink of my beer, then shook his head. “Hell no. But I think we have to.”
I nodded in grim agreement. We had to. I cleared my throat, ready to get the apology over with. “I’m–”
“Shit, no,” Jake shook his head again. “I need to go first.”
I raised my eyebrows, more and more confused about this damn conversation. “You do?”
He took a deep breath. “Yeah, because I think you have the wrong idea. You think I’m pissed that you and Selena got together, but I’m not. It’s really fucking weird, but we’re all adults and it’s none of my business.”
Was that true? I frowned, trying to see my nephew as a full-fledged adult.
“I’m a month older than your girlfriend,” he pointed out, a laugh in his voice.
“She’s not my girlfriend. She’s–” I jerked my shoulders, uncomfortable. “Fuck, I don’t know.”
Jake studied me. “She’s what, Uncle Nic?”
I tightened my lips and shook my head. It was too hard to explain. She was a compulsion that had become an obsession that had become what felt dangerously close to love. But if I loved her, how was I able to walk away from her so easily? How was I able to pick Jake over her without a second thought?
Not that it didn’t hurt. Every time I thought about her, it felt like someone was using my heart as a dartboard. Stabbing, jabbing pain. But still, the choice had been clear.
“She was a mistake,” I muttered.
“That’s a shitty thing to say.” Jake put my beer down firmly. For the first time, I saw anger darken his face. “She’s a great person, and you’re crushing her right now.”
I started to shake my head dismissively. I couldn’t be crushing her. She was upset. Maybe embarrassed, but not crushed. But then I caught the scent of what Jake had implied, and every muscle in my body tensed. “You saw her?” I asked, my eyes lasering in on his face. “Where? When?”
“I went by her place this morning to make sure she was okay.” Jake pressed his lips together, his anger deepening. “She’s not okay, Uncle Nic. Maybe she was a mistake to you, but she fell in love with you.”
The words sparked under my skin like electric jolts. I wanted to grab Jake by the shoulders and shake all the information out of him. What had she looked like? What had she said exactly? Had he touched her?
“Did you?” Jake asked me, and I realized he had asked it more than once.
“Did I what?” I snapped, irritated that he wasn’t giving me more details about Selena.
“Did you fall in love with her?” he repeated the entire question.
I shook my head, instinctively denying it. No. It hadn’t been love. It had been lust. She’d surprised me. Intrigued me. Gotten under my skin. But that wasn’t love. It couldn’t be. You didn’t spend your entire life avoiding love only to have it curb stomp you in just over a month.
It had to have been something else.
“Are you sure?” Jake pressed. “You don’t look so good, Uncle Nic.”
“That’s strange because I feel perfectly fucking fine,” I muttered, pulling my beer back firmly to my side. “I’m coming to your mom’s place tomorrow at five to trim the tree.”
Jake rolled his eyes up in his head. “The plastic tree that doesn’t need to be trimmed? We’re still playing that game?”
It made him laugh when he was a kid. He’d taken the business of separating the gnarled plastic fingers of the branches so seriously. Once they were all separated, he made sure that each one got a shining ball or a glistening piece of tinsel.
“I guess so,” I sighed. “It’s important to your mom.”
Jake shook his head, looking sad. “I think the wrong damn things have been important to Mom for too long.”
It wasn’t that I disagreed, but it rankled to hear him say it. His voice was so world weary, so wise. Any other time, it might have made me laugh. Now it pissed me off. “You’re twenty-five. You don’t know shit.”
“You’re forty and you’re fucking up the best thing that ever happened to you,” Jake pushed back. “At least I know a good thing when I see it.”