Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 74577 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74577 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 373(@200wpm)___ 298(@250wpm)___ 249(@300wpm)
He was the one who’d been there during my brief stint at amateur street racing, pulling me out of a wrecked car.
He was no stranger to my stunts or the injuries I got because of them.
The difference was here, that in the past, he was always my first call. Even when our ma was still alive, it was him I called out for, or rang on the phone.
This was the first time I’d been injured, especially seriously, without so much as shooting him a text.
And, judging by the look on his face, that hurt.
“Why didn’t you call me?” he asked, voice low, the pain clear in his voice.
“I didn’t have my phone at first,” I said. Which was true. But an admittedly shitty excuse. “And then I was just trying to get home.”
“Yeah, and I could have helped with that. I could have at least picked you up at the airport. How did you get home?”
“A ride-share,” I admitted.
“How’d you get in the house? Doesn’t look like you can walk.”
“Had the driver come in and get me the chair,” I said, nodding to it, even though I knew each word was just digging my grave deeper, making him feel even worse, given the lengths I’d gone through not to call him.
It wasn’t personal.
Not really.
I honestly hadn’t been thinking clearly with the pain screaming through every inch of me. All I could think about was getting home and sleeping.
“Christ, Atlas,” King said, sighing, his gaze moving away, trying to think of something to say that wasn’t going to make this whole thing worse.
Not wanting to talk about it anymore either, I went ahead and changed the subject. “So, who the hell is the woman and the dog?” I asked.
I watched as King’s face scrunched up, looking guilty as fuck, as he looked toward AJ.
He let out a deep sigh.
“Yeah, about that,” he started.
“You rented out my place without asking me?”
“I called,” he told me. He didn’t sound accusing, but it felt that way regardless. “Several times. Your place got broken into. Someone must have been watching it, noticed it was empty, and decided to come in. Stole your TV, stereo, and I don’t know what else. Nixon, Rush, and I got together to try to figure out what we were going to do about it.”
It was there in the silence.
Since we couldn’t get in touch with you.
“But then Scotti,” he went on, meaning our sister, “told us she put some fliers up to rent the place out.”
“And you didn’t think to tell her to take them down?” I asked, shaking my head.
“The place was sitting empty fifty-odd weeks a year,” King said. “It’s not just about it being empty and prime for burglaries. It’s the other shit. Not knowing if the heat is coming on to keep the pipes from freezing, to suck the water out of the basement after a heavy rain, it’s… all the shit that comes with homeownership, Atlas.
“And we’re all busier now than we used to be, so we can’t just drop over all the time like we used to. This made the most sense.
“Though,” he said, turning to AJ, “I really should have mentioned to you that the house didn’t belong to me,” he said.
“I probably should have suspected something was up,” AJ said, finally placing the frying pan down. “The rent is unreasonably cheap. For a house. With a fenced yard.”
“It wasn’t about the money,” Kingston assured her. “I really just wanted someone here to keep an eye on things.”
To be fair, he was right.
I’d been a careless homeowner.
I didn’t even know the basement took water.
Maybe a part of me wanted to blame them for this, for making me get this house in the first place. But at the end of the day, I had made the decision myself. I could have rented a storage unit, and told King and the others to just shove all my shit I sent to their places in there.
But I’d bought the house.
Because maybe over the years, my family’s lectures about having a “home base” and a “place to land” had started to sink in, whether I wanted to admit that or not.
I did like knowing that when I came into Navesink Bank, I didn’t have to sleep on someone’s couch. Especially these days, when everyone was reproducing, and sleeping on the couch was dangerous.
I’d woken up covered in makeup with nail polish three times and smattered with stickers twice. And once… in permanent marker. The guilty party had told me that they’d drawn “cherries” on my face. But, damn if they didn’t look like balls. A bunch of balls.
My nieces and nephews might have been cute as fuck, but no one wanted to spend their first waking moments using cold cream to remove makeup, or plucking stickers off of their brows and lashes, and they damn sure didn’t want to have to try to remove permanent marker balls before they even had their coffee.