Total pages in book: 62
Estimated words: 57064 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 285(@200wpm)___ 228(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 57064 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 285(@200wpm)___ 228(@250wpm)___ 190(@300wpm)
Oddly, I feel ashamed that I had to use my safe word, but at the same time, it warms my heart to know that as soon as I did, Gabriel stopped everything. He was willing to fight his friends and associates, rich and powerful men, to bring it all to a halt.
No wonder I feel the way I do about him. But I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know what I want or what he wants or . . . all I know is that I’m not okay.
I’m slow as I rise, forcing all the emotion down. My bare feet pad on the floor as I grip the blanket around me. The pain meds are either still working or I’m a fair bit better than earlier. Glancing at the digital clock on the oven, I note it’s been four hours now.
Four hours of being alone in a house that doesn’t feel like home anymore.
Opening a cabinet in the kitchen, I do see a few items that I’ve been able to keep over the past few months. There’s some peanut butter, which would be great if I had bread, but I’ve got some crackers next to it that might still be good. And next to it is a box of tea, which sounds just perfect.
Taking all three out, I find my tea kettle and rinse it out before starting a pot on top of my stove. I take my time grabbing my mug from the living room, and for some reason, I really look at it.
The images on it hit me hard. I got this mug as a Christmas gift my junior year at college, when I’d gone home and Dad included it in my stocking stuffers. It’s one of those customizable travel mugs where you can unscrew the whole thing and put pictures or other thin objects between the walls of the mug.
He said it was so that I didn’t forget the faces back home. But looking at it now, I’m amazed at how much has changed in the three years since then. How much I’ve changed.
I doubt my quiet, steady, working class father would even understand. Looking at his face smiling up at me from behind its clear plastic dome, I wonder if he knew even then that the cancer was eating him away inside.
Maybe he didn’t care. Mom had been taken from him when I was just two years old, and other than some nostalgic smells, I have no memories of her. Looking at the other photograph, I’m reminded that I do look a lot like her, although it’s hard to tell in the mid-eighties’ fashion she’s wearing while holding baby me.
Dad never recovered from her death. Oh, he smiled, and half of the mug contains pictures of me and him, grinning over everything he tried to give his little girl to make her life complete without a mother.
But when the cancer diagnosis came, it was like he was absolutely fine with it all. Like he was ready and had been ready. There wasn’t an option to fight it. It was terminal, so he could have also just been putting on a brave front for me.
In the last four years, everything has changed.
I start the water and recognize that while I might not have my parents any longer, I have good memories of my father.
Gabriel would probably spit on his father if he ever saw him again. His mother . . . well, who the hell knows? She ditched them when Gabriel was still in diapers. His father spent most of Gabriel’s childhood either ignoring his son or making ridiculous demands of him, forcing him to act like an adult in a child’s body as he showed him off as some sort of . . . I don’t know, accessory, maybe? Here, see the good single father. Isn’t his son such a fine young gentleman?
The stories he’s told me late at night when neither of us could sleep are unconscionable.
To say things were tense is an understatement, and from the start of sixth grade until his father died, they only saw each other for about two weeks out of the year as Gabriel was sent to boarding school.
Gabriel didn’t even go to his father’s funeral. When I asked him why, he said the dead man was a stranger, and the parts he knew of him were nothing he wanted to acknowledge.
Now his only true friend, the only one of the bunch he can trust, is a man named Joshua, who I’ve met at the club. He’s an intimidating man, but Gabriel speaks warmly of Joshua, who I’ve never met but Gabriel says is ‘a handsome sonofabitch.’
I know so much about Gabriel, and at this point, it’s impossible to deny what I really feel for him.