Total pages in book: 112
Estimated words: 107944 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 540(@200wpm)___ 432(@250wpm)___ 360(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 107944 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 540(@200wpm)___ 432(@250wpm)___ 360(@300wpm)
“What?!” Violet gasped. She sat up straight and grimaced. “You can’t do that. We are paying customers.”
“Yes, but as our policy states, if you become a bother to our other customers, we reserve the right to remove you from our premises.”
“But we haven’t done anything!” Marna remarked.
I smiled and leaned in toward her. I tapped her wrist. “That’s a beautiful charm bracelet.” I pulled out my cell phone and showed her a photograph I’d saved earlier that morning from the tabloids. In the image of Aiden and me was also a stretched-out arm with a charm bracelet that was remarkably like Marna’s.
Her face dropped. “Oh fuck.”
“Oh fuck indeed,” I agreed.
“You were supposed to double-check the pictures before sending them in!” Violet scolded her friend.
“I know, I know. My bad.” Marna gave me a wide-toothed grin. “They paid good money for those pictures. And on the plus side, aren’t you happy it’s out in the public now? Honestly, we did you a service.”
“And now, you’ll be doing me another service by packing up your bags and leaving town.”
Violet shrugged. “Valid request.” They stood, whispered between one another, and then Violet turned back to face me. “Do you think we can get a picture with Aiden before we leave?”
“Go!” I shouted, making them scurry away like the little rats they’d been. Then I returned to my life because I refused to let the world steal any more moments of my happiness.
The greatest thing a person could ever do to be happy was to shut out the opinions and judgments of the outside world.
39
Aiden
* * *
For the past few weeks, Hailee and I kept falling more and more for one another.
I felt the happiest I’d been in a very long time, and I knew that was because of the freckle-faced girl who let me back into her life. When we weren’t making love to each other’s bodies, we were making love to one another’s brains. The conversations with Hailee came as easy as ever before.
My father and I hadn’t spoken much, except on the surface level at Thanksgiving, and I only did that to please my mother. She didn’t push for me to reconnect with Dad because she knew how much damage he’d done with the choices he made.
On Thanksgiving Day, Jake came to dinner, and Dad gave him money again. Something I’d never understood. Jake asked me for a handout, too, but I was beyond the point where I felt as if I owed that man anything. Of course, Jake made a big scene about it, calling me a famous selfish asshole. Saying that I had more than enough to help family.
I knew enough that family was much more than Jake had ever been to me. Still, for the life of me, I couldn’t understand why Dad kept feeding the beast. He’d given him more money through the years than made sense, and it only went to feed Jake’s bad habits. At that moment, when Dad pulled out his wallet on Thanksgiving Day, I realized how toxic love could be. My father gave and gave to his cousin and never got anything but disappointment back from him. Each time he gave to Jake, it was as if he was breaking a piece of my mother’s heart. She didn’t speak about it much, but it was easy to see if my father took the time to look into her eyes.
“Sometimes he feels like a stranger to me,” she confessed on Thanksgiving evening after one too many glasses of wine. “Like the man I once married was a completely different person.”
I couldn’t blame her.
He felt different to me, too.
He tried to force me to talk to him, but I set a boundary and said I’d come to him when I was ready. I wasn’t to the point where I wanted to converse with him about what he’d done.
December brought cooler temperatures with it, along with our first snow. The closer I grew to the new year, the more I started overthinking my return to Los Angeles. How was I going to leave this small town where the woman I loved resided? The break from the Hollywood world felt much better than I’d ever thought it would’ve felt. A huge part of me didn’t want to go back.
One afternoon, my father kept calling me repeatedly as I walked beside Hailee to take her home after her workday. It was damn near a blizzard, and truthfully, we would’ve been better off driving. Her rosy cheeks were damn near frozen as I wrapped my arm around her to pull her into my side, trying to keep her warm.
“I think it’s rude that you set a boundary with your father, and he keeps reaching out to you,” Hailee said.
“Yeah, well. My father never really was good at having boundaries set against him.”