Total pages in book: 60
Estimated words: 56651 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 283(@200wpm)___ 227(@250wpm)___ 189(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 56651 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 283(@200wpm)___ 227(@250wpm)___ 189(@300wpm)
Or maybe he was.
Maybe this was my penance for all the stupid shit I’d done over the years. Lord knew there had been a lot of that. With life. With easy women. With drinking and fighting and gambling. Hell, I was well known for betting on bar fights, a frequent occurrence amongst bikers.
But I wasn’t going to give up. Not yet. Not ever.
I would find Sunshine.
And I would make her mine.
CHAPTER ONE
Dana
“That’s… weird,” I said, staring at the hose outside my tiny garden apartment. It was on again. Not full blast, but not exactly just a trickle either. A steady stream. A steady, deliberate stream.
Someone had turned it on again.
That was the third time this month.
Definitely weird. Concerning. And since I paid the water bill, it was more than a little bit annoying.
I had just started my first job as a nurse and still had my school loans to pay, among other things. Money was tight. And I had big plans for the future.
So yeah, a super high water bill was more than a little bit annoying. It was a set back. A road block. And more than that, it was a waste. Auntie had taught me not to waste anything. Old clothes could be mended, transformed, or turned into pillows, quilting scraps, or rag rugs. Leftovers became soup or a savory pie. Leaves, food scraps, and plant cuttings went into the compost. Even spare time could be used to complete a project in the garden, deep cleaning, or other task you had been avoiding.
So yeah, waste was something I tried to avoid at all costs. Especially on the job. As a nurse, I saw a lot of waste, mostly in the human being department. It was my theory that even a tiny nudge towards healing started the ball rolling in the right direction. I never gave up on a patient. Not until the doctor called it.
And my heart broke every time.
Another reason I was very grateful to have been moved into the maternity ward.
I closed my eyes to think. Who would do this? And what could I do about it. And most of all, why?
A kid taking a drink would have turned the hose back off. And this was a repeat offender. Not to mention it often happened in the middle of the night.
How many thirsty children were running around at 4AM? Answer: none.
Did someone in the apartment complex not like me? I couldn’t think of anyone. After all, I was barely at home with my nursing school schedule and even less now with my new job. Being new at the hospital meant getting the worst shifts, though thankfully I was out of the ER after a couple of months. The head nurse had taken a shine to me, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t still low on the totem pole. I was paying my dues, something I was prepared to do without complaining.
But this? This I could complain about. I was starting to get angry, a feeling I rarely indulged in. But I was also starting to get spooked. There was something deeply disquieting about what was happening. And something was happening. I couldn’t brush it off the way I had the first couple of times. Now, it was a pattern.
I frowned, looking around the empty courtyard.
I could’t understand why someone would do something like that. It didn’t make sense. We did have plenty of teens in the neighborhood, but why would they bother? I tried to imagine what the motivation would be.
And the hose wasn’t the only strange thing that had been happening. A card or box of cookies from Auntie that never arrived. Flowers on my tiny patio that were about to bloom beheaded, their stems mysteriously snapped.
Then there was the thing with my laundry… I shivered as if someone had walked over my grave. Almost every time I put a load in, something went missing. One or two things, sometimes. And it was always my underthings.
I had started staying in the laundry room with a book, just to keep watch. It was annoying. But also a little scary.
At first I had assumed I dropped or misplaced a bra or pair of underpants. But it kept happening. Then I started paying attention to how many pairs I was putting in when I started a load.
Counting your own panties was a very strange thing to do. But once I started, I realized that things were definitely going missing. Every. Single. Time.
How? I could understand once or twice? But every time? It started to get under my skin. I found myself looking over my shoulder when I went into the bowels of the building.
Were the teenagers in the apartment complex also stealing my panties? And why just me? I’d asked around and no one else was having their hoses or laundry messed with. I had a little garden patio, nothing to speak of, but the fence was easy enough to jump over. There was nothing I could do to stop someone from turning the hose on or stealing packages, something that had only happen once or twice, thank goodness.