Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 73716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 369(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73716 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 369(@200wpm)___ 295(@250wpm)___ 246(@300wpm)
“My best friend, Jay, used to beg me to ask my parents to have him over. Me, not caring, always asked. I never once stopped to pay attention to the fear on my sister’s face every time his name was mentioned. I was only thinking about my own selfish self, and never stopped to look around. To wonder why the hell she was making herself scarce when he was there.” I shook my head. “One night I woke up, thirsty as hell, and got up to get some water. I noticed that Jay was gone, but figured I’d find him in the kitchen eating or grabbing a drink. What I didn’t expect was to find him in my sister’s room, doing things to her that she never asked for.”
“Tobias…”
He shook his head. “I killed him.”
Her eyes widened.
“What?”
I nodded, swallowing thickly.
“I did,” I said. “Killed him with my bare hands.”
I finally found the courage to make eye contact with her, and such fierce pride was shining in her eyes that I found it hard to breathe.
“Ghost wanted to kill my rapist, too,” she whispered. “Brothers are good protectors.”
She placed her hand on my cheek and then leaned down and kissed me softly on the lips.
I didn’t respond, knowing that she was still too shaken up for me to do anything more than to allow her to do whatever she wanted to me.
She didn’t disappoint, but I couldn’t let her think that I was the good guy in this situation.
Because I wasn’t. Not even close.
“I should’ve been there for her,” I started again. “For years, I let that go on. He made her promise not to tell, or he’d kill me. He was serious, too, because she wasn’t a stupid girl. If she thought that the threat was real, she would’ve done whatever he wanted.” I looked away from her concerned eyes. “By the time I’d caught him, he’d raped her over forty times.”
Bile rose in my throat.
“After I…pulled him off of her, I started to beat him with my fists. Then when those started to hurt, I picked up a lamp and continued the assault until my brothers and father pulled me off of him. But at that point, he was already dead. For a while, they suspect.”
I finally worked up the courage to look at her, and the gratitude I read in her eyes was enough to undo me.
“She never recovered,” I whispered. “She wasn’t strong like you. She’d always been a gentle soul. She never talked back. Never did anything out of turn. Always asked permission to do anything, even go to the grocery store down the street and get something for dinner. She was what I would like to call forever young. She didn’t see the problems in the world. Always had her head in the sand. She went to counseling, but she was never the same as she was before Jay. She was there, but she did little more than just exist.”
“I’m not strong,” she whispered. “You may think I am, but I’m not. Look at what just happened.”
I brought one lone finger up and curled it around a stray piece of hair that’d slipped over her ear where she’d had it tucked. “You’re here. You’re living your life. You’re looking for an apartment. You’re doing more than just existing. It’s more than some do after what happened to you.”
Like my sister didn’t do, went unsaid. But I could tell she was thinking the same thing as I was.
She tried to look away, but I wrapped my hand around her chin to tilt her face toward me. “When you’re ready—if you’re ever ready—I’ll be here. Until then, I’ll be your friend.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Let’s go shoot.”
Chapter 7
Control your orgasm. It’s just a beard.
-Said no man ever
Audrey
The day to embark finally arrived, and I was both nervous and excited about the prospect of going on my first ever cruise.
“This your first time?”
I looked down at the older woman who was standing next to me.
“Yes,” I said, peeking around the partition that separated her balcony from mine and Tobias’. “Yours?”
She shook her head. “No. This is our seventeenth. We go on one once a year now.”
I smiled. “That’s exciting.”
The ship’s horn blew, causing me to jump.
I jumped again when I felt a warm body slide in next to mine.
“That’s the horn they blow when they finally take off. You’ll hear that every single time we leave a port,” the older woman explained, her eyes flicking up past my head to the man at my side.
“Ahh,” I said, tilting my head to stare at the man at my side. “Did you know that?”
He shook his head. “First time for me, too, remember?”
I grinned and looked back at the dock. Then started to bounce when I realized that the dock was getting further and further away from the side of the boat.