Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 57897 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 289(@200wpm)___ 232(@250wpm)___ 193(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 57897 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 289(@200wpm)___ 232(@250wpm)___ 193(@300wpm)
I went into the dining room and grabbed the glasses, tossing the whiskey into the sink and washing the glasses quickly before I could let myself think about it any further. What extra insult to injury to have to clean up after her when she left me in the middle of the night. I grabbed a couple of bottles of water from the fridge and cracked one open to down it in a couple of big gulps. The next one I got half down before I stopped for breath. I grabbed the third one and stuck it in my back pocket while I worked on the second and went back downstairs.
Covered in a sheen of sweat that was now drying cold on my skin, I knew I needed a shower. Stepping into the bathroom, I noticed that there was a hair tie on the counter. There was only one person it could belong to, since Carter said Lauren never came down there.
I grabbed it in my palm and dropped it into the trash can before turning on the water. I made it as hot as I could stand it, despite the heat outside, and stepped under the spray. The water ran over me, and as the soap got me clean, I felt the adrenaline finally leaving my body. As the sore muscles relaxed under the heat, my energy disappeared, and it was everything I could do not to lie down in the shower and fall asleep there.
I had hoped to shower with Beth Ann this morning. I thought about it before I went to sleep. How nice it would be to climb into the warm water with her, to see the soap dribble down her body and pool at her feet. How slick her skin would be and how it would feel under my fingers as I ran them over her.
But that wasn’t an option. She was gone, and it would do me good to just let go of thinking about her. Let go of the night we shared until I could look back on it for what it was. A one-night stand. I needed to just accept that she was only interested in that one time, and I needed to be okay with that. Maybe one day I could look back on our night fondly.
For now, it was only a preview of a life I could never have.
I got out of the shower, wondering if my knees had enough strength to hold me up. I walked into the bedroom and yanked the sheets off the bed, the covers off the pillows. I didn’t want to smell her anymore. I put new sheets on and balled the others up and put them in the dirty laundry. Then, I put on pajama pants and a new T-shirt and crawled into the bed to lay down again.
As I lay in the bed, feeling like all of my energy was gone, and yet, struggling to let my eyes close, I let myself think about her one last time. How perfectly she had settled against me. How it felt like we were designed to fit together like a jigsaw puzzle.
I shut my eyes forcefully and eventually fell back to sleep.
19
BETH ANN
I made a plan that for the rest of the weekend, I was going to keep my phone on Do Not Disturb. Finding that thong on the floor under Jason’s bed had most definitely disturbed me, and I wasn’t interested in any more of it.
I was humiliated and angry, hurt and disappointed. It was a lot of emotions to stuff down into my chest, especially when they were all centered around a man I barely knew and yet couldn’t keep out of my mind. I decided to turn off the possibility of anyone calling or bothering me and instead buried myself in working on the house so I didn’t have to think about Jason.
There was plenty of work that needed to be done, and I still had to make a decision about what I was going to do with this place. I still hadn’t even fully explored the property or gone into the house, which meant I didn’t really know the full scope of what I was facing, much less what it was going to take to fix it all up so it could be potentially used again.
That should have been plenty to keep my thoughts away from Jason, but I kept finding myself sinking back into those thoughts when I woke up the next morning. While I made myself coffee and stared out of the window of the trailer, I wondered how it could possibly have turned out this way.
It had been such an amazing night. Jason was charming and sweet, and he made me feel beautiful and special and like the time we were spending together actually meant something. I’d managed to convince myself that this could be something and was thinking about when I was going to get the chance to see him again.