Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 93723 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 469(@200wpm)___ 375(@250wpm)___ 312(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93723 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 469(@200wpm)___ 375(@250wpm)___ 312(@300wpm)
“I’m sorry, Josie.”
I don’t want to be the person who holds a grudge. Not because he deserves my forgiveness, because I deserve to live without this awful feeling weighing on my conscience. Anger is an unrelenting weight on one’s soul. It’s suffocating. And it’s been too long. I need to let this go.
“It’s no big deal.” It is. Or at least it was a huge fucking deal. He ended us—a near decade of friendship—and it crushed me. I told no one. I suffered in silence.
“Well …” He shrugs with an innocent and somber expression I haven’t seen since our recent reunion. It’s a glimpse of the Colten I once knew. And maybe that Colten is still inside of him, the way that young Josie girl still resides in my heart. “It was a big deal to me then. And you knowing that I’m truly sorry for how it ended … even if it was for the best…” his eyebrows pull together as he bites the inside of his cheek for a few seconds “…that means something to me now.”
I don’t walk away. It feels physically impossible. All these emotions that have been locked away for so long are on the verge of coming out. Things I should have said seventeen years ago. “Did you get married?”
His head eases side to side slowly.
Maybe that should make me feel better, but it doesn’t. I hope he didn’t get married because he is the asshole I thought he was, and no woman in her right mind would marry him. The thought of him searching for me in someone else, the way I’ve spent the last seventeen years looking for him in every failed relationship, makes me feel a little less broken.
“I have a daughter,” he says.
Never mind. I’m shattered. Again.
“No wife. But you have a daughter. I hope you’re just rejecting marriage and not a deadbeat dad who didn’t stick around and do the right thing.”
Colten winces.
I don’t. Not externally.
If I nailed the truth on the head, that’s his problem. Not mine, although I find it disheartening to think that he fathered a child and abandoned her and her mom.
“It’s complicated,” Colten says.
“Yes. Children complicate things.” I force myself to turn again and head back into the building. It’s his life. We ended a long time ago. What he’s chosen to do with his life is none of my business.
“Call me about Jacob Marsh. There’s a killer on the loose.”
“There’s always a killer on the loose,” I say as the door closes behind me.
CHAPTER SIX
I agreed to let Josie be my girlfriend. Then she broke up with me right before school started. Two weeks later, Annie Nelson asked me to be her boyfriend. Being one of the new kids at school made me an enigma of sorts. All the girls wanted to be my girlfriend.
“You can’t be Annie’s boyfriend.” Josie ran to catch up to me after the school bus dropped us off at the end of the street.
“Why not?” I didn’t bother turning to look at her. The sting of her breaking up with me made it difficult to make eye contact with her. Unfortunately, our parents had become friends, and we lived across the street from each other, so totally avoiding her wasn’t an option.
“Because she’s so annoying.”
“Maybe I think you’re annoying.”
“That’s not very nice.”
“But it’s nice of you to call Annie annoying?”
Josie’s shoes slapped against the sidewalk as I picked up my pace forcing her to jog behind me. “Because she is annoying. All she ever talks about is her stupid brother who plays football in college. Ethan goes to school for free because he’s so good at football. Ethan’s going to be in the NFL and make millions of dollars. Ethan … Ethan … Ethan. It’s SO annoying!”
“What I do is none of your business, Josie.”
“We’re friends. So it’s kind of my business.”
“We were friends.”
“Colten, we still are.”
“You broke up with me.”
“Yes. But I said we should just be friends.”
I darted across the street to my driveway, hiking my backpack farther up my back. “I think we should just be neighbors.”
“Colten …”
“Josie …” I mimicked her with the same tone she always used to mimic me.
“Derek asked me to be his girlfriend. I think I’m going to say yes,” she goaded me. God … she always goaded me.
I didn’t give a shit about “Derek, brace-faced, thick glasses Hoffman.” But his family was rich, and that made him one of the cool kids. It was too early to determine my status at school, but Annie was more popular than Josie, probably because her brother was a big deal, and that meant I’d be popular too if she was my girlfriend.
So I became Annie’s boyfriend, and Josie became Derek’s girlfriend. We didn’t talk for the month she spent holding hands with Derek from the school to the bus stop, nor did we talk for the two weeks after they broke up while I was still Annie’s boyfriend.