Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 148704 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 744(@200wpm)___ 595(@250wpm)___ 496(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148704 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 744(@200wpm)___ 595(@250wpm)___ 496(@300wpm)
“I am, Dad,” I tell him, and it’s the truth.
I did work my butt off to graduate, to earn a degree they wanted for me in a subject I enjoy. I’ll figure out what to do with it, eventually, but right now, the “right steps” are pointed in one direction and one direction only.
Toward the brown-haired, hazel-eyed man before me.
Something in his gaze sharpens, and then he’s headed right for me.
“Hey, guys, I have to go—”
The phone is pulled from my hand, hung up, and my lips are met with liquid, lavish ones.
Crew kisses me senseless, and when he pulls away, it’s with newfound determination in his gaze.
I just wish I knew what it was he wanted so much.
I wish it was me.
Crew
Growing up in the Franco’s house was a confusing, frustrating fucking time, but if I went back, I’d still stand at the front of the courthouse and tell the judge the same thing, that their home is the one I wanted to be in. And it was.
At first, things were simple, and then they weren’t.
I never would have thought the love I had for my best friend would hurtle into hate, just like I never expected my best friend’s little sister to become the one I wanted.
In the beginning, we were both young, then she was too young, and then suddenly, she wasn’t.
I knew the minute I kissed Davis on that fair ride, I’d lose myself in her if I got too close. Willingly. Pathetically.
I’d have stopped chasing the calm I heard so much about, that I saw in her home when I first moved in, and, at the time, I couldn’t allow that to happen. Not when I had so much to prove, so much to learn about what being a man worth a damn meant. My dad was shit for a role model, but Garratt Franco was a great one. He taught me more in my four years under his roof than I learned in my fourteen years with my own.
We spent hours in the garage, taking Memphis—or Davis’s now—truck apart and putting it back together, weeks learning how the engine worked and what made the wheels spin. How to cook a steak and how long you had to work to afford one.
I learned it took maximum effort to get the things you wanted, was taught what responsibility and respect could do for a man. I began becoming one under his roof, found myself looking back at my life before them, worrying about my brother, after my parents took off with him, and knowing an easy, worthless path wasn’t one I wanted, while hoping like hell Drew discovered the same.
I wanted to build a life I could be proud of, like Garratt did. For the first time in my life, I began to believe I could.
The longer I was with the Franco family, the more peace I felt. They were strongly and solidly in my corner, and slowly, that feeling of being an outsider, the one I tried not to feel but couldn’t help, faded. The last thing I wanted was to be a burden to another family when I spent all my life before that feeling like one in my own. That was gone too.
I belonged, and they made sure I didn’t doubt that, but then things with Memphis started to change. Unfortunately, no amount of fosterly love could change the fact that no matter how much they cared for me, I wasn’t their son, and he was.
When shit got dark, those protective parental reflexes—the ones my parents never gained—kicked in without a hint of realization. They didn’t mean to look at me and see fault, it was simply natural, and I understood the facts, even as a teen.
Memphis was the son of a correctional sergeant and third grade teacher. He had scouts in his sophomore year and played for the USAA travel baseball team. He loved his sister and his best friend was a poor kid he treated like an equal, who his parents took in for no other reason than they were good-ass people who cared for him, a bastard of a boy who used his fists to speak too often, was decent at ball, but had no real future to speak of—me.
No way would their son be the one to pinch a pint from the neighbor’s RV and get the girl down the street so drunk she blacked out. And he definitely wouldn’t leave the poor thing alone after, without calling for help to make sure she was okay. And he would never get the idea to break into a vacant house down the road and squat there with a keg for the weekend… but me? Seemed more likely, considering I came from a thieving drunk, right? After all, a few good years with a good family doesn’t change the stripes you’re born with. A zebra’s still a zebra when sheltered in a stallion’s stall.