Total pages in book: 65
Estimated words: 59489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 297(@200wpm)___ 238(@250wpm)___ 198(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59489 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 297(@200wpm)___ 238(@250wpm)___ 198(@300wpm)
Especially over a relationship that had barely gotten off the ground.
No, she was doing the right thing. I was also doing the right thing. Everyone could go to bed at night and know they were doing what they were supposed to do.
So why did it suck so bad?
I missed her like hell. I missed her being on campus. I missed her being in my bed. I just missed knowing that she was somewhere nearby, and not five or so hours away on a giant university campus.
I shook my head. I needed to focus. I had a couple of classes and a test to study for today that I was positive I wouldn’t actually study for if I just brought everything home. It was a business ethics test, the class she’d taught before she left. Just knowing it was still her course plan material but not taught by her meant that I was incredibly disinterested. I had checked out a bit, and though my grades were fine, I was worried that wouldn’t last long unless I got my head back in the game. I decided to take most of the afternoon and study on campus rather than going home.
The student commons was cram-packed as I walked in and immediately regretted going inside.
The crowd of kids pushing their way through the narrow doors lessened some as I approached. Being a community college, there weren’t any athletes around to take up space and throw weight around, so someone as big as I was stood out a bit, and people tended to clear a path. I often felt bad about that, but it wasn’t like I could help it. Every bit of me was hardened and muscular from years of working my ass off in the fields and with the horses.
Once in the courtyard, I made a beeline for the cafeteria, thinking in the back of my mind how appropriate it would be for today if they were just closed for some reason. It would go along with my luck at this point. Thankfully, they weren’t, and I ducked inside to the wonderous smell of bacon, eggs and toasted bread.
“Morning,” a cheerful voice said from behind the counter.
“Morning, Stella,” I said. She smiled her million-megawatt smile like she did every morning that I came in and waved.
“How you doing this morning?” she asked. “You want your usual?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
Nodding, she went about piling the plate high with the things I ordered each time I came in. I didn’t know if she was able to do that for every person that came in or if I was a special case, but I marveled at her seemingly perfect memory and how she could build a plate that looked the exact same each time, down to the droplets of syrup that were always in the same spots.
Stella was an increasingly rare type of person in this world. Cheerful, clearly a hard worker, talented and friendly. I knew she had worked her way up in the cafeteria to the point that she ran it now, and she could clearly start her own restaurant at any time if she wanted. The only stumbling block to that might be funding, since I could see it being hard to sell a sixty-some-year-old woman starting a restaurant from scratch in rural Texas, but I had no doubt she would be successful if she did.
It actually started wheels turning in my own mind. Part of the whole point of going to school was to learn what I felt like I needed to know to expand my operations even further. I wanted to put a restaurant on the property and have someone run it so we could artificially extend the town out into the unincorporated land just past the town limit at the edge of my property. If we could make the other end of Murdock thrive, I felt like I could help make the city as a whole thrive again, like it had seemed to when I was a kid before the economy hit the skids.
As I sat with my food, my stomach making gurgling sounds in anticipation, I tried to zero in on ideas for what I would do with a restaurant and how I could sell it to Stella to get her to leave the college. It worked for a little bit to get my mind off Kristen, but even still, I would get excited about the prospect, and my first thought was to text her and tell her all about it.
We had continued speaking since she had been gone, though we couldn’t seem to connect every day. Usually, we would send text messages that the other would respond to at some point, and I made sure we actually spoke to each other a couple times a week. But it was difficult. Every time I talked to her or we did a short video call, it hurt all over again.