Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 84928 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84928 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
But the night I left, I turned my back on everything Johnnie Walker Allen. From that day on, he ceased to exist. His memories were things I buried deep and told myself never to uncover. With those memories went Dade.
At first, because there was no time to worry about people back at home. I had only a handful of money and no way to get from one place to another. I was constantly scared and hungry. But those were things I was used to so I pressed on. Until I found myself asleep against the wall of a building one day only to be woken up by someone kicking my feet.
That person ended up being Breaker. And that day I started to be somebody again. I was Shooter. I was Breaker's best friend. I was his partner. I was a valuable asset. I wasn't an outcast or a place to hang anyone's pity anymore.
So my town, my memories, my old best friend... they fell away amongst everything else, everyone I replaced them with. That makes me sound like a selfish fuck, but Dade was right when he said if anyone deserved a new life, it was me. And I wasn't going to stand outside the diner all day feeling guilty about making that choice for myself. I did what I needed to do to survive, to move on, to get myself out of a shit situation. So I was going to stay on that course.
But I was also going to have a couple beers with my old best friend before I skipped town again.
I went back to the apartment after spending some time completing my dad's arrangements and driving around the old roads, racking my brain trying to figure out exactly how my father knew about my job. No one knew about my job except for close friends and other people in the business. Even if he did some snooping, I had no idea how he came upon that information.
I had spent the night before tearing my dad's place apart, looking for something I couldn't name, something incriminating, something to contradict the story that Amelia told me- that he was sober, that he was good to her, that he turned his life around. I tore through the closets. I looked for loose floorboards. I overturned furniture. In the end, I found nothing. There were no liquor bottles stashed anywhere, no nothing except the gun I had picked up and tucked into my jeans, never feeling right without having one on me.
I slept on the couch even though I had stripped and changed the bed, too uncomfortable with the idea of sharing the space with the ghost of my father. The AC was up and working after some good, old-fashioned manly pounding and swearing. It kicked back on, sweeping out the heat and making my mood slightly less irritable.
"Hey Mills," I greeted the cat as she rubbed herself around my legs, purring in greeting. "The fuck am I gonna do with you when I need to go back home? You wanna get out of this backwoods town?" I asked, reaching down to pick her up. "I'll take you if you promise not to scratch up all my shit," I said, moving in to the bathroom and turning the water on cold. I dropped Millie and stripped out of my clothes and hopped under the cold spray which managed two tasks at once- washing away the sweat from the insane fucking heat everyone else seemed to have no problem with, and helping ease the worst case of fucking blue balls I had ever had.
It wasn't that I'd never been rejected before. I liked to claim I was irresistible and my track record certainly backed that shit up, but I'd come across women who saw me coming from a mile away and shot me the fuck down without pause. I had wanted women that I couldn't have. But no one had made me as hard as Amelia managed to by spitting fire at me, by pricking me with her thorns, by giving me her rare small smile, her quiet laugh, by just fucking... existing.
So I reached down my body, grabbing my cock and stroking hard, trying to ease some of the frustration that had my balls feeling like they had been in a vice grip all day.
Two days. It wasn't a long time. Well, I mean... it usually only took me a couple minutes, at worst... a couple hours. It wasn't the getting her into bed I saw as being a problem, it was the trying to pry myself back out of that bed and moving on. Which was totally new fucking territory for me. Sure, I'd had a few women here and there who needed a good repeat or two or five. But it was a superficial need, just bodies that connected well. That wasn't what I was feeling with Amelia. It felt like something more. It felt like I wanted to get in the bed with her and fuck until we were both nearly unconscious, then lie awake with her and talk about shit- our pasts, our presents, our futures.
I didn't just want to screw her.
I wanted to spend time with her.
I wanted to know more than the fine fibers of her bedsheets or the naked curve of her hip. I wanted to taste her, and not just the saltiness of her skin. I wanted to get an oral fix from the bittersweet flavor of her hopes and dreams. I wanted to get fucking drunk on her honesty. I wanted to touch the warm, wet rivers of her memories. I wanted to hear the bitter hum of her regrets. I wanted to know the scent of her happiness. Then I wanted to bury deep under her walls and wrap her up so tight that she never felt the need to have to protect herself ever again.
All of that, well, it wasn't going to happen in two days. It wasn't going to happen in two weeks or two months or two years.