Total pages in book: 119
Estimated words: 114284 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 571(@200wpm)___ 457(@250wpm)___ 381(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114284 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 571(@200wpm)___ 457(@250wpm)___ 381(@300wpm)
“Now, Daddy! Now! Oh my fuck.”
Yeah, oh my fuck. I screwed my eyes shut and rocked into his ass. My muscles ached and protested—but thankfully, no leg cramp. But seriously, we were hitting the sack after this. Fuck me twice, would I be able to walk back to Macklin’s cabin?
We’d have to see.
EPILOGUE 1
One day later
Lane Sawyer
I could do this. I picked at my bottom lip and looked out the window as we passed another car. There was no reason to rush anything. My questions could wait. I was just being neurotic. Besides, everything was going so well. I’d caved. I’d caved and let myself trust Ty, and now we were together. Actually together. Why would I fuck that up? Huh? No. I was gonna shut my fucking mouth and slow my roll.
After yesterday, one might think shutting up wouldn’t be difficult. I mean, the night we’d shared with Walker and Macklin…? Just thinking about it gave me phantom shivers.
And yet…
Gah.
I hated myself sometimes.
Perhaps I could come up with a schedule for the questions. Each answer would secure another chunk of foundation in our future path, making it longer—hopefully—and that was what I wanted. I wanted us to last forever. I wanted our path to go beyond the horizon. But if I put too much pressure on Ty and basically forced him to face all the questions now when we were so new, he might step off our path altogether.
I needed a strategy, and the schedule was as good as any. Maybe I could ask one question per week. Do you want more kids? How do you think Marina will react to us being together? Would you mind if I changed your detergent? Will you grow bored if I said I need a resting day in between two social events? That was just the tip of the iceberg. If that.
I’d already asked one question last night, about him and Walker. And Ty had said we could talk however often I wanted, but people rarely meant that.
I caught myself bouncing my knee and immediately stopped. He was driving and eating bread and humming to a country song. Just bread. Plain bread he’d bought at a bakery.
The bottoms of the cupholders were filled with crumbs, man.
I bit at a cuticle and diverted my gaze out the window again.
We’d be at Mclean soon enough. Again. We’d just left the house—or Macklin’s cabin—this morning, and now we were going back.
“Can you grab me a fruit from the glovebox, darlin’?”
He stored fruit in the glovebox now? What on fucking earth.
I popped the latch and hauled in a breath. So this was his snack box. Got it. Pear, banana, two apples, half a dozen kiwis, and a wooden spoon.
I gave him a pear.
“Thank you. You sure you’re not hungry?” He rolled the pear along his jean-clad thigh.
“Uh, yeah. I, uh…I think I’ll eat at Mclean.”
We’d been together all day, and we’d both had a massive breakfast. Then we’d gone out for Thai for lunch before I was really hungry, so now at… I looked at the time. Almost seven. Still stuffed. Not entirely in the mood for a kinky photo exhibit with a bunch of people.
If I could choose, Ty and I would spend the night at my place wearing very little.
My problematic dilemma was that the more I suppressed the things that amped up my discomfort, the less I could handle. Noise, interruptions, other people’s tics, sometimes flashes of light, broken patterns…a car full of crumbs.
Ty was gonna get sick of me in no time.
“I read an interestin’ article the other day,” he mentioned. “It centered around three people who’d gotten their ADHD diagnoses later in life, and it went on to cover personality traits they’d more or less adopted as their own in order to fit in.”
Oh jeesh. He was reading about ADHD? Great, obviously—to the point where I kinda wanted to cry—but awareness would make it harder for me to hide the crazy I wasn’t ready to reveal yet. I needed to take this in steps. I’d show him inch by inch, so that I wouldn’t send him running.
Perfectly logical.
“One of the women being interviewed said somethin’ that stuck with me,” he went on. “That she—and many others with the condition, especially if they got their diagnosis as an adult—have grown up always bein’ two steps ahead. ’Cause most people join a conversation and say their piece and wait for a response, while this woman was listin’ all the shit she considered beforehand. How to phrase herself, what tone to use—because that didn’t happen naturally for her—and scenarios for the various responses she’d get, and how she could prevent all the things that could go wrong.”
Sounded familiar…
“This is where we close in on what I do for a livin’, baby,” he said. “I spent nearly fifteen years predictin’ outcomes. We can’t build every weapons system that looks good in theory, you know? We have to run them through tests and simulators. We have to map out possible results using nothin’ but code and the occasional guess.”