Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 80495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 402(@200wpm)___ 322(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
For the record, even when I was working, I never had to discharge my weapon, and I only ever punched one guy out, and it was because he started swinging at my client, who happened to be his ex-wife, first. Yeah, he wasn’t a class act, and he fully deserved the self-defense-induced black eye he got from me for his efforts.
I put my shaking hands up on the dash and let the heat vents blow warm air on them. I know diabetics don’t have the best circulation, and I do get cold sometimes, but this is ridiculous.
I run through options in my brain even though it feels cold and stunned.
Maybe Ignacia is home, and she doesn’t want to see me. She has every right not to answer the door. I should respect her wishes, shake and shiver my way back to the city, and fly my ass back home.
Or maybe she’s not home, and I should continue to sit here, looking droopy and wet and pathetic for a little while longer. Her truck is here, but it doesn’t mean she hasn’t gone somewhere else. She’s not in hiding anymore, and it’s been two and a half months. She could have made friends, and they could have picked her up.
She could be out anywhere, doing anything with her life.
I haven’t kept tabs on her. I have purposely not invaded her privacy. The only thing I know is she deleted her account on the hot bedding website. I had to make another fake account to find out because I deleted mine before she even learned I betrayed her. I couldn’t think about another man sharing her bed, even platonically, without losing my damn mind.
For the past two and a half months, all I have done is lose my damn mind.
All I have done is think about Ignacia. She haunted me. She haunted me until I cracked and couldn’t take it anymore and had to fly and drive back out here to…to…I don’t even know what.
Nothing, I guess.
If that’s what it takes…
Jesus, how pathetic are we now?
Yeah, I know. I think that’s what happens when a person catches feelings. Alright, I’ve done more than that. I’ll admit it. Right from the start, I knew there was something off with me when it came to Ignacia. I couldn’t keep her out the way I kept everyone else in my world out. I couldn’t keep her from getting under my skin. I couldn’t keep up the cold, hard surface I’ve perfected. I was never emotionless, but I couldn’t tell her because I was also working on a case. It was complicated. But even if it wasn’t, I don’t think I would have confessed. I think I would have run. I would have finished our contract, made some excuse, and gone back to my old life because that was enough to satisfy me before, and I would have made it enough to satisfy me again.
The only problem with that is I fucking can’t.
I can’t make it enough to satisfy me.
No amount of work, working out, sleeping or sleepless nights, reading, being busy, or being quiet—nothing works.
I don’t know why everyone says emotions are good things. Feeling nothing? That’s a nice thing. That’s a thing that’s worked for me for years. It got me through when I needed to get through. It’s kept me here, and it’s made me good at what I do. Having emotions? They make you want to die. They make you believe you’re a curse, and then they tell you that you’re being ridiculous and hurting, and you go on to hurt and hurt and hurt, and it never stops. I know that. Because that’s what happened to me after my parents both died. I know the heaviness in my chest now isn’t something I can undo easily. I know it sucks. I also know losing Ignacia is going to keep haunting me for the unforeseeable future, and there’s nothing I can do about it because it’s too late to go back and undo the fact that she’s inside me, and I feel it. I damn well feel it.
It’s not possible to move past this. It’s how I’ve felt, and it’s how I feel right now. But I know if Ignacia shows up and taps on this window and tells me she never wants to see me again, I’ll respect that. I’ll survive somehow, even if it’s not the way I did it before. Because I can’t go back to that. I wish I could, but it’s not a thing for me anymore. It was a piss-poor survival mechanism.
Zero out of five stars. Do not recommend.
Even her silly sayings have burrowed their way into my head.
An hour later, I’m a little bit warmer and hardly any drier, but at least my teeth have stopped chattering. I think an hour is about tops on the time scale for how long a person can sit in someone else’s driveway and not be considered top of the super suspicious and creepy list. I look toward the house, which is so still. Granted, right now the rain is pelting down so hard that I can barely see through the sheets of it, but I think it’s still. There aren’t any lights on. It’s daytime, but it’s grey as hell out here. I don’t think she’s home.