Total pages in book: 91
Estimated words: 87863 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 87863 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 439(@200wpm)___ 351(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
“I feel the same way about him. But he’s not very…parental. Some days, I think he’d rather be my friend than my dad. Gray was the strict one when I was growing up.”
“Gray? He’s so mellow.”
“Don’t be fooled. Gray can be a real hardass. He’s tough but in a good way, while Dad is just…flighty. There but not there. Nothing’s changed. He’s frustrating as fuck sometimes, but even though he’s not the world’s best dad, he tries.” It might have been the uncharacteristic mellow vibe between us or perhaps I’d hit my personal PC limit. I pulled the hair on his calf and met his scowl with an innocent smile. “What about your dad?”
“Back to me, eh? You really want to know?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
Ky jumped up abruptly and grabbed an acoustic guitar from the wall. He moved his beer and pushed my wine back, then perched in front of me on the coffee table with his legs spread and his head bent over the strings. He paused to tune it before meeting my gaze with an intensity that kinda scared me. I swallowed hard and gave myself a fucking gold star for not flinching. Ky didn’t make it easy. He vibrated with a violent energy that made my heart slam against my chest and my pulse skitter out of control.
He fixed me with a feral smile as he strummed. “I’ll give you a musical breakdown.”
Ky made his instrument scream. Not an easy feat on a rhythm guitar. He bent the notes to an Alice in Chains classic before switching to Linkin Park’s “One Step Closer.” He didn’t sing or hum along. He careened back and forth, lost in turbulent thoughts. He looked like a haunted man. Then he stopped suddenly and started over with a slower melody.
He played the chorus to Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle,” but this time he sang. And wow, Ky had a beautiful voice. Smoky yet clear. He closed his eyes and leaned into the notes, bending them to expose another layer of emotion. This was the magic of music. It made you feel things you’d never experienced firsthand. It made you dig deep into your own story to find the pieces that fit so you could lend emotion and meaning to words you didn’t write and somehow call them your own.
I watched his fingers trip over the strings as his hair fell into his eyes. I noted the curve of his mouth as he sang about lost time and an inheritance of broken promises. And fuck, it broke my heart. Just like it was supposed to.
The funny thing was, I sensed that none of these songs told his story. They simply hinted at his emotional state of mind. Angst, sorrow, melancholy…and finality. I picked up the clues he offered and did my best to arrange them into a narrative, but they couldn’t tell me his story. Only he could do that.
I set my hand over the strings and caught his wrist. “Stop.”
He did. Well, his fingers stopped, anyway. His body trembled. I sat up taller and scooted to the edge of the sofa so our thighs touched. This time when he looked at me, the intensity nearly brought me to my knees. No joke. I didn’t know what was happening here, but it felt…big. Significant.
“Did you want to know why I hate him, how much I hate him, or if I’ll ever not hate him?”
“You’re scaring me,” I admitted like an idiot.
Ky’s Cheshire cat grin faded fast. He propped the guitar against the coffee table, then flopped beside me. “I don’t want to scare you. I just don’t have anything nice to say.”
“Did something happen or—”
“Jesus Char, it’s not one thing that happened, it’s a whole lotta things.” He shook his head and shot to his feet before pacing from the window to the sofa and back again like a caged tiger. “I hate him. I don’t mildly dislike him. I don’t wish he spent more time with me or called more often. The day he left us felt like a lifetime of Christmas mornings wrapped into one. No fuckin’ kidding. I’ll never forget it. I was ten and Karly was twelve. It was November…eighteen years ago exactly. I came home from school with a stomachache and a cast on my arm. I walked in the door and my mom said, ‘It’s okay now. He’s gone.’ And just to be clear…he broke my arm.”
I gasped and covered my mouth. “Your father hurt you?”
“He was an abusive prick, Char. Verbally and physically. He went away, but he didn’t stay away. He’d make an occasional guest appearance every so often to ‘check in’ with the fam. Fucker.”
“But if he hurt you, couldn’t you make him stay away?”
“How? With my supernatural mind-melding powers? I was a kid. I had no power.” His nostrils flared as he clenched his fists. “It wasn’t always terrible. I mean, it was better after he moved out. The visits weren’t great, but he wasn’t as angry, so it was usually just an hour of watching a clock and wishing time would move faster. He’d ask about school and what I wanted to be when I grew up…that kind of thing. And every single visit, he’d start out apologizing for the way he ‘used to be’ and then tell me what I shouldn’t be doing. ‘Don’t smoke, don’t drink.’ Parental stuff. He usually added his two cents about my friends, my band, skateboarding too.