Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 87155 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 436(@200wpm)___ 349(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87155 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 436(@200wpm)___ 349(@250wpm)___ 291(@300wpm)
He was drunk, the smell of alcohol on his breath nearly burning my nostrils. I asked him to leave no fewer than a dozen times before giving up and waiting for Ramsey to get back and handle him. While he slurred random conversation, I stared at my watch, counting the seconds as time ticked on.
It took ten minutes and sixteen seconds for Josh to snatch my blanket.
It took eleven minutes and fifty-five seconds for him to pin me to the ground after I’d punched him.
Twelve minutes and twenty seconds for him to cover my mouth, silencing my screams.
In the end, it took only nineteen minutes and thirty-nine seconds for him to ruin my entire life.
I’d been right. Ramsey had gotten caught trying to snag the condoms, which had resulted in a huge fight with his dad.
It was twenty-two minutes and three seconds before he got back.
Time had never been my friend.
Everything happens for a reason is the biggest bullshit adage that has ever been spoken. It’s incredible if you think about it though. One tiny change in a sequence of events could alter your entire life.
What if we hadn’t rented that house when we moved to Clovert?
What if I’d picked a different tree to hide in the day my mom left?
What if Thea’s mom had died an hour later?
What if I hadn’t broken her leg?
What if I hadn’t failed fifth grade?
What if I hadn’t caught Hairy that day in the woods?
What if her dad hadn’t sucked?
What if she’d never stopped hating me?
What if she hadn’t become my world?
What if…I’d never left her that night?
None of that happened for a reason. It was all pure chance. I should have expected it and been ready for life to once again snatch the rug out from under me.
I guess I never expected it to snatch it out from under Thea too.
After a near brawl with my piece-of-shit dad, I finally got back to our tent in the hayfield. She was on her hands and knees, simultaneously crying and dry-heaving. In all the years I’d known her, I’d never, not once, seen a single tear fall from her seafoam-green eyes.
It was the most ludicrous thought in the entire world given the situation, but for a minute, I panicked that maybe she’d regretted having sex with me. I mean, seriously, how fucking self-centered could a person be?
God, if only I’d been right.
The earthy fragrance of freshly cut grass hung in the air, and the cicadas sang on an otherwise silent night. The blankets were a mess, and wrappers from our food were haphazardly strewn around the small tent. It was the same as it had been when I’d left.
However, when she threw her arms around my neck, violent sobs shaking her shoulders, and stammered out the rusty knives disguised as words detailing what Josh had done to her, nothing was ever the same again.
My mind raced, frantically trying to piece together the who, what, when, and most of all how this had happened. My Sparrow—the girl who had held me together more times than I could count—was falling apart in my arms, and I had not one damn clue how to fix it.
Shit like this didn’t happen in our small town. Kids got in trouble for smoking weed or bribing one of the homeless guys to buy beer. But assault and rape? From someone we knew?
It didn’t take long for the anger to find me. It all became too real when I helped her get dressed. A thunderstorm of razorblades rained from the sky as I took in the red welts and purple bruises covering her body.
A body she’d just given me.
A body I should have been able to protect.
Her tears soaking the shoulder of my shirt burned like acid straight to my soul. Because that’s exactly what Thea was.
My soul.
I honestly only remember snapshots in time over the next few hours. How they started and ended were jumbled in a sea of pain, guilt, and helplessness.
I carried her home. We argued that she didn’t want to tell her dad because he’d find out what we’d been doing before it happened. And I snapped at her like the dick I so obviously was that she was being ridiculous.
Yeah. I said that. I’d spend the next twelve years regretting it too.
She begged me to stay with her, and despite the adrenaline firing through my nervous system demanding for me to find Josh Caskey as quickly as possible and make him pay for every single one of those tears, I agreed.
I didn’t sneak in that night. I walked in the front door with her tucked under my arm and went straight to her room.
She took a shower while I paced a path in the carpet in her bedroom.
I think she spoke to her dad to let him know she was home, but my mind was lost in a toxic storm of failure and revenge.