Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 134057 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 670(@200wpm)___ 536(@250wpm)___ 447(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 134057 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 670(@200wpm)___ 536(@250wpm)___ 447(@300wpm)
And someone called my name.
Mary.
I froze for the handful of seconds it took for her to approach me, smiling. I was ice when she hugged me. When she spoke normally, happily, not knowing the son she thought was buried was twenty hours away.
I managed the exchange. Somehow.
She said goodbye, something about a bake sale she needed to prepare for. I wanted to scream at her ‘your son is alive, and he is broken and you have no idea, you’re baking fucking cakes.’
But I smiled. Hugged her again. Promised to have lunch.
Then I calmly filled my cart up with as much booze as I could. I didn’t give a shit about clichés anymore.
Then I drove home.
Unloaded the car.
Locked my door.
And broke the fuck down.
My phone had long since died.
I wondered if my family had been calling, worried. But they likely just thought I was writing a story, and they knew not to bother me for that.
I wondered if Liam had called.
Of course he hadn’t.
Dead men didn’t use phones.
Liam was dead.
“How did you get in here?” I blinked at Scarlett as she closed the door and tore open the drapes.
The effect was painful and immediate. I flinched away from the sun like a vampire.
Cool air filtered through the window she opened.
“I picked the locks,” she said, like it was obvious.
I blinked at her, making out the tight white jeans, pink platforms and a barely-there pink tube top. Her blonde hair was piled atop her head. Her makeup was flawless, if a little over the top.
I idly wondered what the residents of Castle Springs thought when Scarlett breezed through. Then again, Scarlett wouldn’t have been wondering one single bit about what people were thinking.
“How do you know how to pick locks?” I asked, rubbing my pounding head and leaning forward to look for the closest bottle that wasn’t empty.
“How do you think I would know?” she countered.
Scarlett moved, not to try and stop me from drinking in the daylight when I was obviously having some kind of emotional break, but to hand me the half empty bottle of vodka.
No way was it half full.
I took it without thanks.
She sat down on the chair across from me, glanced around my immaculately decorated living room, full of empty bottles, dead plants, and dead souls.
“What are you doing here?” I asked after a swig.
She shrugged. “Have had a lot of free time now I’m not helping my husband prepare for a war.”
Something lanced inside me at her words. They were drenched in her own, hard kind of sorrow.
I used more vodka for that pain.
“Can I offer you a drink or something to eat?” I asked, my mother’s manners all but embedded into me. “Though the only thing nonalcoholic I have at this point is tap water and snacks that consisted of cold pizza and questionable Chinese.”
Scarlett grinned. “This isn’t a time for tap water.” She reached over to take the bottle from me and took a long swig.
She was silent for a long time after handing it to me.
“Are you here to bring me back to the club?” I asked finally. “Lecture me on what a mistake I made leaving?”
She shook her head. “Not my style.”
I took another swig.
Scarlett crossed her legs. “I’m here ‘cause I guessed you might need a friend and I needed a road trip.”
I raised my brow. “A twenty-four hour road trip?”
She nodded.
I waited for more. There was no more. “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said finally.
“I didn’t ask you to talk about it,” she countered. Her eyes ran over me. “I will ask you to take a shower, put on some clothes that aren’t covered in stains and maybe run a brush through your hair. More for my sake than yours. It’s just uncomfortable looking at you.”
I almost grinned. Scarlett obviously did not do sympathy. Or comfort. Which was exactly what I needed.
So I got up. Showered. Put on clothes that didn’t smell as bad as they looked, and I ran a brush through my hair.
Scarlett was in the same place as she was when I walked back in. The bottle was actually empty now.
“Okay, I’m gonna need to know one thing,” she said.
My stomach dropped. Here it was. The inevitable morbid human curiosity about how things were destroyed, the uglier, the better.
“Where’s the seediest and shittiest bar in this town and how okay are you to drive?” she asked instead.
This time I did grin.
“Would your husband approve of you being in a seedy bar in a tiny town in Castle Springs, drinking in the middle of the day?” I asked after the third drink.
We barely spoke during the first two.
Scarlett, I discovered, was not a woman to do girl talk over cocktails. And she was not a woman to order a cocktail.
She sipped her vodka, straight up. “My husband does not have the right to disapprove or approve of my actions,” she replied. “He knew this when he married me, so he knew things like this are part in parcel of life with a former club whore. Plus, he’s busy, hanging photos.” She winked, but I sensed some vulnerability there.