Total pages in book: 238
Estimated words: 231781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1159(@200wpm)___ 927(@250wpm)___ 773(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 231781 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1159(@200wpm)___ 927(@250wpm)___ 773(@300wpm)
What was he talking about?
“Will and I are about the same age,” he said, “but I think we were probably very different in high school. He was the talker, right?” He smiled at me. “I was the quiet one.”
Now it was the other way around, it seemed.
“I wasn’t always like this,” he told me. “I was miserable. Six feet of weakness, fear, and cowardice.” He gazed at Will again as he talked. “‘You’ll be a doctor,’ they said. ‘You’ll study that. Work there. Go here on vacations. Spend your free time doing this. Marry her. Have three children. Live up there in that house after the honeymoon tour of London, Paris, and Rome.’”
I tried to picture him as he described himself, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t imagine him docile.
“Until one night, buried in my books, I saw her,” Aydin continued.
I listened, but I turned my gaze back on Will as Aydin spoke in my ear.
“It wasn’t her body or her face,” he told me. “It was how everything with her was effortless. Every movement. Every look.”
Will sucked in air between his teeth, his strokes harder and faster and the muscles in his arm tight.
“She loved to love,” Aydin said. “She loved to touch and to feel and to wrap her every breath around someone and hold them with it, because she was an artist.”
Everything warmed, and I envied how he described her. Whoever she was.
What would Will say about me?
“It wasn’t her job,” Aydin said, “but it was her calling.”
He paused, and then he dropped his voice as if thinking out loud. “It wasn’t her job,” he said again. “Then.”
It was like Will. He loved to love. He loved to be happy.
He’d wanted to make me happy once.
“I’d never wanted anything more in my whole life,” Aydin went on, “and I was studying to be a surgeon who would’ve gladly cut off his own hands to have her.”
Will squeezed his eyes shut, and I dropped my gaze to his cock again, my breathing nearly in sync with his strokes. What was he thinking about?
“Maybe I’m to blame,” Aydin told me. “In the end, I didn’t claim what was born to be mine because I was a shit twenty-two-year-old kid who knew nothing.” He trailed off and then continued, his voice lower again. “But later when I could finally stand up and claim her, I spit on her instead, because every effortless breath she wrapped around everyone else became another nail through my heart, and I couldn’t look at her.”
My chin trembled, and I wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t special. We’d all suffered loss.
But one thing was pretty clear. She was the reason he was here. Much like Will could saddle me with that honor, possibly, as well.
A woman happened to them both.
“I couldn’t look at her, much like he can’t look at you,” Aydin said.
My stomach coiled, and he released me, backing away.
I turned and looked at him.
“I just wonder…” Aydin said. “If he ever decided to run from here, would he care to take you?”
He turned and walked away, leaving me there and feeling more alone than I ever had in my life.
Will would leave me, and he would be right to.
• • •
I stood there next to the pool for I didn’t know how long, Aydin’s words hanging in the air even after he’d left the room.
Was Will planning on running? What would happen to me if he weren’t here? Or if he were sent home?
Would he fight for me?
I’d left him once. I’d let him be arrested and sent to prison, and in his head, I hadn’t cared at all. Maybe I deserved the same.
I walked to the pool’s edge, descended the steps into the water, and jumped in, sinking my entire body below the surface.
The water held me, warm and weightless, and I drifted back up to the surface, floating on my back.
The saltwater stung the cut on my lip, but the pain filled me with anger and memory, and I knew this was coming. I always knew.
I just figured it would’ve come after he got out of prison, and as the subsequent years passed, it didn’t. I got comfortable.
Where would both of us be if he had just left me alone like I told him to?
I stood up, walking to the side of the pool as the shorts and shirt stuck to me like a second skin and tears hung in my eyes.
I used to think that if I got out of Thunder Bay and lived my life for me, doing what I loved and inviting only the people into my life whom I wanted, everything would be perfect someday.
But I hated everything I had, and loved nothing as well as what I’d given up, all of it tainted from the moment he was charged seven years ago, because I knew I didn’t deserve to be happy.