Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
I knew the thought of any kind of meat coming from a can made him look green in the face.
There was no way to feign disconnect when the connection had always been there.
So many things I thought long-buried clawed their way back to the surface. Long conversations we had. The fact that I had once made suggestions to a song he'd written, and he'd implemented the changes. The way his body looked when he'd gotten out of the pool. The lazy, sexy smile he'd beamed in all women's direction. Except for me. And how I so dearly hoped that once I was old enough, I would be the recipient of one as well.
I'd been sappy and girlish, sitting there picturing him making a move, realizing I was the one girl he wanted to get serious about, getting engaged, getting married.
I had spent untold hours both with him and fantasizing about him.
And while I had buried that under the years of hard work and self-denial and devotion to my cause, it was still there, still a part of me.
Being around him, it was making me feel things, things I didn't know I could feel anymore. The scary thing was that this was just the beginning.
If Vance could bring this old stuff up, what about Iggy and my parents and my siblings and my aunts and uncles and my cousins?
I had grossly underestimated how big a deal this would be, how much of an impact it could have. Which would therefore alter everything. Meaning my plans for the future.
As I turned my bike back down the road that would lead me to my temporary home, I promised myself to keep the visit as short as possible, to minimize the potential for too many changes, for too much emotion.
I could visit, make some amends, then head out with the promise of stopping by for big events.
I could handle that.
A night or two here or there.
Then get back out again before I started feeling too much, before it broke down the shields I had built up.
Because I needed them.
If I didn't have them, everything would fall apart.
I would fall apart.
And then I wouldn't have what it took to do my job anymore. No one would be there to save those women and girls and the occasional boys. They would be stuck in hell with no hope of getting away. More and more traffickers would pop up because they had nothing to be afraid of.
Now... now they knew my name.
They knew my signature in their comrade's blood on the walls.
They knew I was looking for them, coming for them.
Every shithead should have someone on this Earth that they were afraid of, someone who kept them awake at night, someone who made them look over their shoulder when they were walking alone.
That was who I was.
That was what I did.
I didn't get to just give that up. It was too important.
Important things required sacrifices. Those sacrifices were mine.
It had been wrong, I was coming to see, to force my family to sacrifice so much as well. Especially because my job had a high rate of a short lifespan. They would never recover if I got killed on a job before they got a chance to spend time with me again. So, I would give them time. Just enough. Enough to make their lives feel like something wasn't missing anymore. But not so much that it softened me too much, it made my shields start to disintegrate.
"I've got some bleach if you are out," Finch's voice called, once again smoking out front his apartment.
I wore black.
The blood that was on me wasn't visible. I wouldn't have gotten back across two states if I was covered in red on a bike, plain for all to see.
I figured it said a lot about Finch that he knew when no one else had looked at me twice. Maybe he smelled it. I swear I could smell blood from twenty yards after all of these years getting so acquainted with it.
"Good to know," I agreed, not wanting to say too much, always aware of the possibility of being found out by the wrong kind of person.
"Supposed to pour tonight," he added, looking casually up at the sky, though it was clear his words had more meaning than they did at surface level. "If someone just happened to, you know, accidentally spill some soap on their vehicle, it would be cleaned like magic."
That wasn't exactly a bad idea since I wasn't supposed to hit the car wash and even standing out in the open hosing down the bike might be a bad idea in a town where dozens of people knew who I was and would report back if they happened to see me.
"You're just a fountain of weird information, aren't you?" I shot back, giving away nothing, still having no idea who this Finch guy was.