Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 69847 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69847 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 349(@200wpm)___ 279(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
I didn’t like ice cream all that much. If I was lucky, I’d eat half of it before it’d start to melt.
“What time is the flight?” she asked, calculating something up on her fingers.
“We go when we want to go,” Titus answered her question. “It’s a private plane. What time do you want to go?”
“Well…” She hesitated. “Long story short, I have sleep issues. Big ones. As in, narcolepsy, cataplexy, and I sleepwalk.”
Titus’s eyes went wide.
“Narcolepsy and sleepwalking I know,” I said. “What is the last?”
“Cataplexy is a disorder that has sudden onset of muscle weakness. Normally, muscle weakness like that occurs while you’re sleeping. In my case, sometimes strong emotions—laughter, witty conversations, and pleasant surprises. Like a dog runs up to me and then my knees get weak,” she explained. “That’s what happened today at the water park. The suddenness of the drop kind of threw me in a tailspin. It triggered my cataplexy, and when I got down to the bottom of the slide and went under, I almost died because I couldn’t physically get myself up out of the pool.”
My anger at her family sharpened.
“Does your family know you have these issues?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered. “I was actually performing in an act when I was around fifteen when the muscle weakness hit me. I was on a tight wire and fell—luckily we were only practicing so the net was underneath of us—and ended up catching my throat on the wire below me.” She made a gesture with her hand across her throat. “You’ll see when I laugh, or when I get really tired, my voice starts to go due to the vocal damage I received from blunt force trauma.”
The anger was only rising. “So if they knew that it could be dangerous, why the fuck did they send you down that slide?”
I could practically see the wheels turning in her head as she tried to explain away her family.
“Honestly,” she admitted, “my family is great. They love me. I love them. But when you spend a lot of time with your family, like we do, you start to kind of hate them and all of their problems. They knew there’d be a lifeguard down there to help me if my issues kicked in. That’s why they allowed it.”
“That’s not an excuse,” I all but snarled. “That’s abuse.”
“That’s living with five sisters and a brother.” She shrugged.
I leveled her with a look that clearly portrayed my feelings without having to utter a single word. “I have a sister, and I can guarantee you that I would’ve never done that to her when I knew that she had issues.”
“I locked my sister in a closet for hours,” Titus offered.
I looked at him incredulously. “You did not. You put her in there because she was drunk off her ass, and she kept trying to climb onto the roof and jump off. I think it was more like a drunk tank than ‘locking her in a closet.’”
“Anyway,” she said as she shrugged as if that was just life. “I have two things about me that need to happen in order to keep myself safe. One, I need to make sure I get enough sleep, no matter what. Two, I need a nap mid-day, regardless of the day’s activities. I’ve already pushed my day as it is. I got very little sleep last night, paired with a very stressful night before due to Simi’s attack. Stress and anxiety are a very big no-nos with my issues.”
I just shook my head, unable to come up with what to say. “So what exactly are the ‘signs’ that this is about to happen?”
“About what you would think. I start to nod off. I do nod off. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. But it looks like I’m about to fall asleep. Then I do,” she explains. “These episodes usually don’t last for more than two minutes—though there are the rare ones once in a blue moon where I fall asleep in the middle of a conversation for hours.”
That was amazing. And really fuckin’ dangerous.
To the point of it being rather freaky and terrifying for her.
“Anyway,” she said. “I just wanted to cover everything with y’all if I’m about to be spending any length of time with you.”
“That’s why you don’t want to come with me for real, isn’t it?” I asked. “You don’t want to make us responsible for you.”
She smiled at me, her teeth a white flash before she said, “That’s part of it. And the other part of it is that I’m vulnerable. It’s…no offense to you guys. Like absolutely none at all, because I can tell you’re great people after the way you helped us with Simi during and after her attack. But I’m guessing y’all are constantly with a whole bunch of men. And men tend to be a little…” She paused as if searching for the best word to fit.