Total pages in book: 71
Estimated words: 70319 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 281(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 70319 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 352(@200wpm)___ 281(@250wpm)___ 234(@300wpm)
The funny thing was, I hadn’t realized how worried I’d been about losing my freedom to do that until I’d realized that I still had it.
The thought of marriage or dating had never really been a big deal to me.
I’d always liked the idea of independence.
That was why, I think, I allowed myself to get married to Hunt the way that I did.
I had the best of both worlds. I was married to an attractive man, and he left me alone.
Though, lately, seeing him walking around in his incredibly tight sweatpants was beginning to really work my nerves.
And definitely not in a bad way.
“Oh, good!” his mother said as she opened the door. “You’re here!”
She leaned forward to hug Hunt, and he tensed, his eyes squeezing shut as if he would rather not touch her.
I frowned.
That was another thing that I’d come to understand over the last couple of weeks. His aversion to touch.
It’d all started out when we’d gone to the DMV to get his driver’s license. The lady had handed him his new ID, and he’d asked her to put it on the counter so he didn’t get near her hand when he’d reached for it.
Then it’d been a checker in a grocery store trying to hand him cash. Again, they had to place it on the counter before he would touch it.
It was little things, here and there, where he avoided touch in any and all ways possible.
In fact, I hadn’t witnessed him purposefully touching anyone over the last two weeks but me.
His mother squeezed him hard, and a look of panic crossed over his face.
Instinctively, I reached forward and held out my hands. “Hello, I’m Wyett.”
The woman let go of her son so abruptly that I would’ve laughed had this been the least bit funny.
She whirled around and stared at me as if I’d startled her. Except I’d been standing beside Hunt the entire time, in plain view. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise at all.
“Who are you?” she barked.
My brows rose, and I was about to say my name again when Hunt said simply, “This is my wife, Wyett.”
Her mouth all but fell open.
“What?” she shrieked.
“My wife, Wyett,” Hunt repeated as if that was seriously why she said what.
It wasn’t.
But he answered her as if it was anyway.
“A wife? What? How?” his mother continued to shriek in a very loud, very pissed off voice.
“A wife,” Hunt confirmed. “We’ve actually been married for years now. We celebrate our fourth anniversary soon.”
Soon as in five months. But I was sure that he was embellishing, so they didn’t think that we started dating while he was in prison.
Though it wasn’t while he was in prison, it sure wasn’t by much. Hours, more like it.
“That’s… that’s ludicrous!” she wailed.
“What the hell is going on, Lora?” an older man asked, coming up behind his wife with his computer in his hand. “Oh, you’re here. Can you fix my computer? I got onto a, uh, website last night and it was, uh, bad I guess? I can’t get it to turn on anymore. It’s a good thing you finally can stop by. It’s been a while.”
It’s been a while.
Umm, it’s been like years.
From what I understood, they’d never visited him while he was in prison.
Not once.
“This, this woman is claiming to be his wife, Fred!” Lora pointed at me as if I was the one to make the declaration.
“Well, maybe she is?” Fred shrugged. “I mean, that wouldn’t surprise me. A marriage of convenience, obviously.”
I stiffened.
Was he implying that I wasn’t worth anything more but convenience?
What the absolute fuck?
“We married each other because we loved each other,” Hunt lied as he pushed past both of them. On the way, though, he’d grabbed my hand with one of his, and the computer out of his father’s other hand. “Were you on a porn website, Dad?”
There was a moment of silence at our backs and then, “Yes.”
Hunt sighed. “I showed you the safe ones you could go to. They won’t cause you to have any pop-ups or viruses. Do we need to talk about those websites again?”
“No, I remember them,” Fred answered sheepishly.
His mother came by in a huff and walked past us, not stopping to make any more small talk.
She walked right up to a group of three woman and started gesturing wildly with her hands.
They all turned at once to look at me, and I realized rather quickly that I was the topic of conversation.
Yay.
“There,” Hunt said three seconds after opening it. “You just had to end task, Dad.”
Fred took the computer with a grin and walked away without even a thank you. And I entered the next realm of hell.
After meeting all three sisters, Della, Willa and Rella, as well as the one brother, Will—why there was a Will and a Willa, I didn’t know—I was then introduced to the copious amounts of children running around. All of which I only had a chance to look at in their screaming banshee forms as they catapulted themselves into the pool.