Total pages in book: 126
Estimated words: 129881 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 649(@200wpm)___ 520(@250wpm)___ 433(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 129881 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 649(@200wpm)___ 520(@250wpm)___ 433(@300wpm)
Then he slouches in the booth as he adjusts and re-adjusts the hat, pulling it down lower until most of the dark hair underneath is hidden.
“Um. My hair does this thing sometimes.” His voice is so weak now. “Like. It has the audacity to not wanna be on my head or something. I don’t know.”
“Look. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.” I hold his gaze and hope he hears how much I mean this. “It doesn’t look bad on you or anything. I was just curious about it.”
He flicks a sprinkle across the table. “Okay.”
“I’m serious. I like your beanie.”
I don’t know what else to say, but I don’t have any friends here (or at all anymore), and I think maybe this guy could be one, and I feel a little desperate to make sure he doesn’t walk out and never speak to me again.
“Yeah?” he asks, sounding so much younger than twenty-three.
“Yeah. I mean it.”
He tugs off the beanie, and a mess of deep, chestnut curls spill onto his forehead and hang over his ears.
Huh.
His hair looks fine to me. I don’t know why he insists on covering it, but whatever.
Felix quickly runs his fingers through it before pulling the beanie back down to the position he had it in before I became a massive dick—slouched low on the back of his head so hair peeks out around his face. Then he sits closer to the table and drops his elbows there, and I tilt my head to admire the tattoos decorating his forearms.
Symbols and animals and words scrolled in different fonts. All solid black ink.
“I did that one,” he says.
I look into his face and then back down when he points to the sparrow on the back of his right wrist.
“You… tattooed yourself? Really?”
He grins. “Yep. It’s what I do. You know, for work.”
“Wow.”
“Do you have any ink?”
I shake my head.
His brow lifts. “Want some?”
“Uh—”
“Holy fuck. You can smile.”
A laugh bursts out of my mouth, and I swear to God, you’d think I just made Felix’s day. He looks so proud to hear it.
“Alright, so, I’ve been told it’s good to share our past with each other because we could both probably relate, so I’ll start.” He cracks his knuckles. “Drum roll, please.”
I chuckle quietly.
“Hm. I didn’t really have the best home life. Not like some sitcom shit, that’s for sure. My dad’s a druggie and a drunk, so he let me drink with him when I was ten. He thought it was funny when I got tanked.”
“I was twelve. My brother let me try it.”
“My dad smoked pot all the time too, but I didn’t get into that until I was eleven.”
“Thirteen,” I say, pointing at myself.
“And then, shit, whatever I could get my hands on, you know? Coke. I loved coke.”
“Yeah,” I grunt.
“But I’m hyper enough as is, so once I discovered downers and mellowed the fuck out for the first time in my life, that was it. Xanax rocked my world. Painkillers too. I fucking ate them like M&M’s.”
I nod, remembering the taste of Oxy. “Why does that shit have to be so good?”
“It’s not fair.”
“It really isn’t.”
We smile at each other.
“So, what do you do? What’s your job?” he asks, and I think he knows we need to get onto another subject before we go from remembering to wishing to wanting, because he tries to crack his knuckles again, like he’s anxious, but none of them pop.
I feel the smile slip right off my face.
“Construction,” I practically growl.
“And that’s not what you want to be doing?”
No. Not at all. But it’s a job and I’m grateful for it.
This is what I want to tell him, what I mean to tell him, because I don’t ever want people to know about how I went from career military to a fucking jobless loser. It’s embarrassing. I hate even thinking about it. I don’t want anyone knowing. Not even the ones who already know. I wish it wasn’t real.
So, I can’t really explain why I bombard him with a full recount of Jake Tully’s Greatest Fuck-Ups Volume One. But once I start, I can’t stop.
I share everything with him.
“—and then he said he’s always hated me, which, what? What the fuck did I ever do to him? I mean, except for stealing his pills and destroying most of his stuff, but I had literally just done all of that so, that doesn’t explain his entire fucking problem with me.”
“It sounds like he just wanted to get back at you, so maybe he didn’t really mean it?”
“Oh, I think he meant it.” A laugh catches in my throat. “If we were cool, he probably wouldn’t have fucked my girlfriend.”
“Wait,” Felix says. “What.”
“He fucked her.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the last time she came out to visit me. Maybe one of the other times… sometime in the span of two years. Hell, maybe it happened more than once, and he didn’t get to share that with me because I broke his nose after that, and then he couldn’t do much besides bitch and moan and bleed.”