Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 92743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 464(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92743 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 464(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
I can’t let that happen. I’ve worked too hard to put the past behind me to let the Tripp whirlpool suck me back in. I’ll have to find a way to manage the transition into a new business model from the city.
I can’t get back there fast enough. I’ve only been in Sea Breeze two days and look what a mess I’ve made. I’ve become the target of expensive adolescent pranks and developed a fascination with a woman I never should have laid a finger on.
I avert my gaze as I pass by the Sweet Pussy Cat Café, refusing to think about Gertrude Sullivan’s sweet pussy or how much I’d like to have her under me again.
Back at the dock, I fetch the materials to clean the car and take care of the mess with just enough sunset glow left to lock up the yacht for the night without turning on the deck lights. Before I go below, I pull up the gangplank, just in case. I don’t want any surprise visitors tonight, not even ones with killer curves and a plush mouth that fits perfectly against mine.
Not that I really think she’ll show up, not after her behavior today. She’s clearly horrified by our connection.
As she should be.
I destroyed her family. I didn’t intend to do so, but destruction is my superpower. Even in New York, far from the chaos of my clan, I have a knack for breaking things.
As a younger man, I chalked it up to being focused on my work, with no time to invest in romantic relationships. But as I aged, and forged connections with women I would have liked to keep in my life, longer term, it became clear there’s something not quite right about my relationship style. I’m too blunt, too reserved, and demanding, too…something for most women.
I don’t consider myself an unkind man, but I don’t understand courting games and have no wish to engage in them.
Eventually, I quit trying to find “The One” and leaned into my identity as the cool, detached billionaire who’s good for one thing. I’m the man you fuck for a month, maybe two, while you’re in between better prospects. I can be trusted to deliver multiple O’s and to pay for the car service back to your apartment and not much else.
There are no car services in Sea Breeze, only a single taxi that operates on its owner’s random, sporadic schedule. There’s very little public transportation, either. If you want out of this town, you have to drive, or wait in the pedestrian shelter by the old courthouse for hours until the bus trundles by on its undependable route.
It’s logical to feel trapped here. Most people are trapped.
But I’m not. Not anymore.
I remind myself of that the next morning as I dress for the funeral and make the drive to the cemetery, arriving just seconds before the minister asks everyone to be seated for the service.
I take my place in an empty chair beside Laura. Mark leans forward from his position on her other side to shoot me a judgmental look, but I ignore him. I’m here, in a suitably somber black suit with the poem I promised committed to memory.
I don’t owe Mark or anyone else at the funeral anything more.
Laura cries softly throughout the service, her tears reaching a fever pitch as Mark talks about what an inspiration his father was to him, but the rest of the crowd is notably unmoved. As we file past the coffin at the end of the service, dropping white roses onto my brother’s casket, I’m struck by the sudden realization that my own funeral will probably look much the same from the outside.
None of the people I work with or my friends in New York would be secretly celebrating my death the way I suspect many of my family members are celebrating Rodger’s, but there won’t be tears. Even Bella, my closest ex-girlfriend, who’s become a friend in recent years, will remain dry-eyed. She’s learned to hold me at an emotional distance. Even Bella’s abundant warmth couldn’t melt the permafrost around my heart, so she stopped giving me access to that part of her.
She’s a smart woman.
So is Sully. I realized that within a few minutes of meeting her.
So why is she waiting for me when I return to the yacht early that afternoon, after an equally uncomfortable post-funeral lunch? She leans against the ice cream shack in a striped sweater and yellow raincoat that make her look like the poster child for Sea Breeze’s famous Seafood Seasoning Salt.
And cute. She’s very fucking cute.
“Can I help you?” I ask, my voice rough from disuse. I didn’t speak much after the last line of the poem. I didn’t have anything else to say to my dead brother or the people gathered to say their goodbyes to him.