Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 109843 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 439(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 109843 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 549(@200wpm)___ 439(@250wpm)___ 366(@300wpm)
And, as far as I knew, Rowan wasn’t speaking to Kip. They were no longer attached at the hip as they had been for as long as I could remember. They didn’t come into the café together. Kip rarely came in period. When he did, I knew it was strictly for appearances. He’d sometimes lean in to kiss my cheek, and I’d have to stop myself from flinching away from his touch.
He didn’t look me in the eye, didn’t joke with anyone like he used to, and pretended Tina and Nora weren’t staring daggers at him before he all but ran out clutching a coffee that was likely bitter and burnt.
When I went to Nora and Rowan’s for dinner… which was often—when I wasn’t there, I was at Tiffany and Tina’s—I went alone, and Rowan was all broody and spoke in clipped tones whenever the subject of Kip was even broached. But he was kind and gentle with me. It hurt, seeing his ability to be like that with me, his wife, and his daughter. He’d been deployed with Kip, had seen some gnarly shit, I bet, yet his humanity hadn’t been filed away, ground down to nothing.
When I wasn’t at either of my friends’ houses, Calliope was at my place. She was quickly becoming another one of my best friends. Because of my history, my doctor had me coming in for a bunch of visits, each as stress inducing as the last. Each ending in good news and a respite from the worry… for a few days, at least. If Nora couldn’t come to those appointments, Calliope was there.
I wanted to be able to go on my own. Fuck, I’d broken things off with an abusive and powerful man, moved across the world with no support, had survived all these years on my own—I should be able to go to a fucking doctor’s appointment by myself.
But I couldn’t.
And I didn’t have to.
Calliope hadn’t had a lot of things to say about Kip’s reaction to the pregnancy, which surprised me. She wasn’t known as someone to mince her words. At first, I’d thought it was because her loyalty lay with him. She’d known him since they were kids, after all. Told me she considered him a brother.
Everyone else had turned their backs on him, so I thought she might be showing him some grace, some mercy.
But no.
She was gearing up to be the most ruthless of them all.
I saw that the first day she was at my place after she’d found out about everything. We were sitting in the kitchen talking. Well, she was cooking. I was sitting, because even if I hadn’t been an absolute disaster in the kitchen, I couldn’t stand the smell of vegetables or meat. Though I was on the other side of the counter with the crisp sea breeze coming in from the open window, I struggled.
Kip had come into the room.
I’d frozen, as I did whenever he came into my general vicinity, unable to control my reaction.
Calliope, on the other hand, didn’t miss a beat. She continued speaking and moving around the kitchen, not even glancing in Kip’s direction. It was as if he didn’t exist.
That behavior continued whenever he was around.
There was the cold shoulder, but this was something else. Calliope had severely and cleanly cut Kip out of her world.
Two friendships had seemingly been severed.
Both of which had existed since before I came on the scene. Fuck, since birth, it seemed.
Part of me felt guilty about that. About being the catalyst. But most of me was angry for feeling that guilt. Kip was the reason for his friends cutting him off. Rowan and Calliope were good people, with strong values and morals.
Kip had shown he did not have strong morals, that he might not have been the person they thought he was. He’d made his bed.
And he wasn’t sleeping in mine.
Which was a good thing, I told myself.
Except I couldn’t quite tell myself that in the middle of the night when I was staring up at the ceiling, the TV droning in the background to drown out the silence. That’s when I was the weakest. When midnight gave way to early morning. That’s when my fears and my past intermingled and my heartbeat would race, and all I wanted to do was escape my own mind. My own body.
Sex with Kip was the only thing I had discovered to do such a thing. Not other men, mind you. Otherwise, I would’ve dragged my ass out of bed and to the bar two towns over to get fucked, to get some relief—that’s how fucking desperate I was.
Even though I didn’t have these particular problems my entire life, I had plenty of demons that got a little too loud for my liking, and I quieted them like most slightly unhinged people did—with booze, shopping, food, binge-watching trash TV, and sex. Not necessarily in that order. And not necessarily all at once.