Total pages in book: 177
Estimated words: 173392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 867(@200wpm)___ 694(@250wpm)___ 578(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 173392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 867(@200wpm)___ 694(@250wpm)___ 578(@300wpm)
Maybe Trace will go for it, leave to work at some small inn somewhere that has a pub where he can learn the trade.
I raise my eyes, seeing Macon through the strands of hair blowing in my face. He dips a spoon in and out of his mug, staring at the melted ice cream dripping from its end, and I suddenly feel like my arms are made of steel, and so are his, and if he reaches around and I reach around, we’ll hold the table together.
But he doesn’t look up at me.
Liv serves me some of her cheese fries, which I dip in ranch, and Clay periodically checks my plate to see if I’m eating her stuffing, and then gives me a quick scowl when I haven’t yet touched it.
Finally, I roll my eyes, scoop up a glob, and shove it into my mouth, grabbing Trace’s shot of bourbon and washing the mouthful down with the only thing on the table that tastes worse.
Trace laughs, and I cough, swallowing about three more times to get everything down my throat.
Another bottle eventually comes out, and Trace spikes my drink—and Army’s when he goes off to put Dex down for a nap.
We talk a little, even Dallas relaxing as the liquor starts to take effect, but then Clay rises and Liv follows.
“Would rather stay, but …” She starts to clear their plates. “Mimi is expecting us for pie.”
Her grandmother. The one who doesn’t like that Clay is a lesbian, but she’s old and alone, and Clay knows she and Liv win at the end of the day. She has everything. No one can hurt them.
Within five minutes, they’re gone, Dex is asleep, Paisleigh and Mars have gone down the street to the bounce house at the Torreses’, and the tapers on the table flicker in the wind, only a few inches left to burn.
My mother hasn’t called.
My phone hasn’t rung at all.
Paisleigh hasn’t noticed.
“You gonna clean up?” Dallas asks.
It takes a minute to register that he’s talking to me. I put my phone back face down, looking up.
But Army shakes his head. “Ignore him, Krisjen.”
“We fed her and her brother and sister,” Dallas points out. “It’s the least she can do.”
Army rubs his hand over his eyes and up into his hair, looking suddenly exhausted.
He rises, taking his and Liv’s empty plates with him to the sink.
“Everything comes at a price.” Dallas eyes me. “Saints know that more than anyone.”
I pick up a black bean at the edge of my plate. We forgot dinner rolls. I love bread on Thanksgiving. “Yes, we’re always willing to pay for a kindness,” I murmur.
But I should’ve shut up. He’s looking for an invitation to continue the conversation.
“Everything you do is for money,” he spits. “You fuck the right sons—bosses even—as a way to elevate yourselves, because nothing in life is really about skill, talent, or knowledge. It’s about who’s willing to do whoever it takes to get what you want. The house, the club memberships, the board positions …”
My throat is tight. I swallow.
“And then, years later,” he goes on, “after you’re done having Jerome Watson’s children—so paternity isn’t contested, of course—you can have discreet affairs, right?
I raise my eyes. I guess that’s how it’s done in some marriages.
“You’ll meet him in hotel rooms,” Dallas continues, “or maybe his house in the Bay …”
Meaning I’ll be fucking one of them. Probably in the motel down the road. While wearing Jerome Watson’s huge, shiny rock on my finger.
“And you’ll let him rail you against a wall, because you like the smell of his workday on him, his dirty nails digging into your ass, and his tongue on your tits. It makes you feel alive.”
Dallas’s eyes sparkle. He’s dying for me to make a move, so he can make one back. I know that feeling. That incessant temptation to poke the bear, so you don’t have to feel guilty about channeling your anger onto someone you’re not really mad at. They’re just there.
“You know why?” he presses.
It’s a rhetorical question, but I know the answer. “Because I wish I could love the man I was married to in our home every day just like that.”
The problem is, Dallas is right. I want nothing to do with Jerome Watson.
I’d sell my body, but I know as sure as I’m sitting here that he’d be having an affair within weeks of the marriage, and just like Dallas said, I’d seek one out eventually to find even an hour of happiness—or an hour of mere escape—once a week.
And after it was over, I’d climb back into my clean, white Mercedes convertible with his sweat on my skin and the feel of Bay cock still inside me. I’d go home to wipe away the guilt and shame with pills or drinks before the feelings had have a chance to rise to the surface.