Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 111959 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 111959 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Her laughter danced over the surface of the water. The silence was okay after that, but it lasted only until she tipped her head toward the gate he’d jimmied open. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but that wasn’t the first time you’ve picked a lock.”
“No. But it has been a while. Good to know I’ve still got it.”
“Where did you hone these skills?”
He started to explain, then stopped. “I’m saying a lot of things this morning that make me sound like bad news.”
“Don’t worry, I already knew you were bad news.” She smiled, letting him know she was kidding. Thank God. “I also . . . like you, anyway.” She lifted her blue toes out of the water, wiggling them in the moonlight. “Remember?”
Josephine liked him.
You already knew that. She let you come on her tits.
Right. Maybe every time she said it out loud—or gave him proof—it would make him feel like a hero? That was something to look forward to. Recently, he’d been looking forward to a lot of things. Reassured that he wasn’t making himself sound like a supervillain, Wells continued. “I didn’t just fall in with a bad crowd growing up, I started the bad crowd. Kids who had too much freedom. Most of us got attention only when we landed in trouble, so we made a lot of it.” He hesitated before telling her the next part. “On nights when my parents were using the house for a party, I used to break into my middle school to sleep in the gym. It was too loud at home. The party might end, but they’d fight after too much alcohol. I just . . . got really good at picking locks.”
Josephine slid a little closer, until their hips were touching. “I wish you didn’t have to do that. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” He rubbed a circle into her lower back, sort of entranced by the way their feet looked together in the water. “When I moved in with my uncle, I didn’t have to sleep at school anymore. But later, I got caught with a stolen bike and the family court judge gave me an ultimatum. Spend time in juvie or get a job. I took the second option, but I wasn’t about to let some judge teach me a lesson, so I started stealing the odd watch out of lockers, purely out of spite. Or maybe peeling a few hundred-dollar bills off a wad of them. That all stopped once Buck got ahold of me, but yeah . . . the pool gate wasn’t even a challenge.”
For a moment, there was nothing but the sound of their feet sluicing slowly through the water. “But you never totally stopped getting into trouble, did you? That fight a few weeks ago . . . and all the ones before that.”
Wells sighed. “Yeah. I guess it’s not something that has ever fully left me. The inner battle. I find that kind of comforting sometimes. Is that bad? I don’t ever want to be a man who backs down from a fight.”
“I think that’s okay. As long as you’re fighting for something worthwhile.”
Mentally, he jogged back through the last few punches he’d thrown. “Let’s say I’m sitting in a bar, minding my business, and some drunk stranger in a DraftKings hat starts calling me every name in the book for ruining his fantasy golf lineup. Then, let’s say he throws a very saucy chicken wing at me. Would it be worthwhile to break his nose?”
“Obviously, yes.”
They shared a growing smile, then went back to looking at their feet in the water. “What about you, belle? There has to be some trouble in your past. A school suspension or a little trouble with the cops. Public indecency. Give me something.”
She squinted into the darkness. “Tallulah likes to party. More than me. She has this crazy high tolerance for alcohol and she’s a fun drunk, so it never mattered how often I drank Diet Coke at the bars, she’d still make it fun. More often than not, she went out with casual friends or a guy and I stayed home and waited for an entertaining report the next morning. But this one time, she convinced me to go to New Orleans for her birthday . . .”
“I like where this is going.”
“Do you? Because I smoked pot for the first time and went on a ghost tour, which, in case you’re wondering, is the number one thing you should not do after smoking weed, probably right behind sky diving and attending a live birth. Especially in an unfamiliar city.”
Wells’s ribs were starting to ache from holding in his laughter.
So he finally let it out on a shuddering gust of breath.
“We ended up in a graveyard, where I swore that bony fingers were poking up out of the ground.” She gave him a solemn look that sent him over the edge. “Spoiler: it was grass.”