Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 95080 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95080 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
“Oh yeah?”
“It’s not funny.” I was indignant.
“Well, honey, I promise you that bi is truly what I am. I like both.”
“That’s good, then. I mean, to be attracted to both, equally, that sounds pretty awesome.”
“It is. Now, what were you going to tell me?”
“I’m rethinking if I should,” I replied honestly. “It sounds like you’re probably really busy doing a lot of dating.”
He snorted out a laugh. “Please.”
“Fine. Would you go…” I started, but then trailed off, suddenly remembering who I was. I was not as beautiful as this man. We were not a matching set.
“Would I go…” he repeated, waiting.
“Forget it.” I shifted in my seat uncomfortably.
“I will go anywhere with you.”
“Ha! You’re just saying that because you don’t expect me to live.”
“You’ll live. And we’ll go dancing.”
“Dancing,” I said with a sigh, and then heard him talking to me from far away. He was telling me to open my eyes, but I just couldn’t, no matter how much I wanted to see him.
The waking up hurt, and when I finally did, my dad and Alex were there in the hospital room with me. Alex was asleep with his feet on the edge of my bed, and my dad was asleep in a chair by the window. The doctor—Breckin—was standing beside my bed, looking down at me.
“Hey, Doc,” I croaked.
“You’ve got an awfully concerned family here,” he said, smiling. “I couldn’t get either of them to go home.”
“There’s one more brother too,” I told him, just to be saying something. “And when he hears about this, he’ll be flying out from New York to make sure I’m really alive.”
“Well, you can tell him from me that you are very much alive.”
His smile was contagious—I had to return it. “Am I okay? Or are you getting ready to give them bad news?”
He ran it down for me: the serious concussion, broken right wrist, two broken ribs, the cut above my left eyebrow, and a gaping one in my left wrist that had needed fourteen stitches.
“But your feet are okay, so I can count on the dancing.”
“Aw, Doc, now that I’m okay, don’t sweat it. You’re off the hook for the dancing.”
He leaned down then, put one hand on either side of my head, and looked at me hard. “I don’t want to be off the hook.”
“Why not?” I asked him seriously.
“I don’t know, really. I just feel that we should go dancing.”
“It’ll be a while before I can,” I said, suddenly aware that he was looming above me, waiting, not moving.
“I’ll just hang around your place until you’re up to it.”
“Oh yeah? You gonna come by and just sit with me? Watch TV on my couch?”
“I think I have to.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. There’s something, I’m just not sure what.”
I reached up then, and with one hand in a cast and the other taped up with tubes coming out of it, put both around his nape. It was so strange to be touching him so intimately, to be thinking of kissing a man I hardly knew. Normally there were steps to a seduction, but my rulebook had gone right out the window.
“You’re going to follow me home?”
“I’d like to.”
“Why?”
“Like I said, I just have to.” He looked perplexed, almost annoyed. “I can’t promise I will feel like this tomorrow,” he said honestly, “because this has never happened to me before, and I’m not really sure what it is.”
“Like, maybe it might wear off in a while, and you’ll want to get the hell away from me?” I teased him, as was my way, at the same time holding my breath.
“Yeah,” he said softly, his voice husky. “Maybe.”
There was a long silence before I spoke again. “I feel like I’ve known you a long time.”
“I feel the same.”
Like old love, not new love. Not love at first sight, more like love rediscovered. An oh-it’s-you love. Comfortable even before it began. I pulled him down to me and breathed him in before I kissed him. No awkward moment, no jerky movement of uncertainty, no inhibitions. We fit. I felt it, he felt it. I relaxed, sighing in his arms, and held him tight. He would not get away from me. Not that he seemed to want to go anywhere. But he was right. It could wear off, the feeling of homecoming, and it finally did two years later, the day I walked into my house and my life with him changed as quickly as it had begun. As days went, it had been one of my worst. The relationship ended like it started: surprisingly.
“Tracy!” Breckin’s sharp tone jarred me back to the present.
“Sorry, my mind wandered.”
“No, I’m sorry, forgive me,” he pleaded.
“It’s fine, but I was just making conversation earlier,” I explained. “I wasn’t accusing you of anything or trying to be an ass. Just asking a question about your trip, like business-or-pleasure kinda thing.”