Total pages in book: 70
Estimated words: 68859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 275(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68859 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 344(@200wpm)___ 275(@250wpm)___ 230(@300wpm)
Davis closed his mouth.
So I was somewhat of a cynic. I didn’t believe in fairy tales and happily ever after. I didn’t think that there was “one special person” out there for everyone. Hell, I didn’t even think that it was possible to stay with someone, happily, for the rest of your life.
Even if you had something good, it could just as easily turn bad.
I didn’t know one single successful relationship that had gone further than fifteen years.
My parents were a prime example.
Look what happened to them.
They’d been together, happy, and then my father’s accident had happened. Now, I barely spoke to my own mother because she’d turned into a piece of crap.
“I…” Sara started to say. “That was why we ultimately decided it wasn’t for us. We would rather remain friends.”
So it hadn’t been a lack of chemistry. It’d been a lack of wanting to lose the friendship.
I didn’t know what to say.
“What about y’all?” Sara asked, changing the subject. “What do y’all have going on?”
“Not a damn thing,” Kobe said, sounding just as sober as Davis.
Meanwhile, when I spoke, my words tended to lisp slightly.
Folsom was leaning slightly in her chair, bobbing forward and backward. And then there was Sara, who was plain being propped up by the wall now.
Finn seemed to be doing okay, but he definitely didn’t look as unaffected as both Davis and Kobe did.
“Where are you from, Kobe?” I asked the quiet man.
Kobe’s dark, almost black eyes moved from the woman at the end of the table to me.
He studied me for a long moment, looking for any ill intent in my asking, and frowned.
I waited for him to come up with his conclusion and was rewarded when he answered.
“I’m from Japan,” he answered. “My mother and father got citizenship here when I was four. At the age of eleven, both of them died in a car crash. When that happened, I moved back to Japan to live with my grandmother. At the age of eighteen, I moved home so I could join the military.”
My eyes went wide. “Wow, that’s pretty awesome. Well, not that your parents died. I’m sorry to hear that. But how you lived in Japan and the United States. Have you been back? I’ve always wanted to go to Japan to learn how to cook.”
“Why?” he asked curiously. “And no, I haven’t been back.”
My shoulders slumped slightly. I hated that for him.
“I like anime. A lot. I watch it constantly. I actually learned Japanese just so I could watch the ones that hadn’t been dubbed in English yet,” I answered.
His eyes twinkled then. “Anime, eh?”
He then said a few words to me in Japanese, to which I replied to him in kind.
You are such a nerd, he said in Japanese.
My reply back in Japanese said: Takes a nerd to know a nerd.
We both laughed, which seemed to piss the man off across from me.
“What did y’all say?” Davis’s eyes bounced from me to Kobe and back.
Kobe leaned back into his chair and crossed his arms over his chest before saying, in Japanese, Wouldn’t you like to know? I think he wants in your pants. Just FYI.
I blinked at him wide-eyed.
It was then that I realized that possibly I should be careful here.
“They’re so cute,” Folsom said. “I want to learn Japanese. That was one affinity I didn’t have, though. Languages. I can tell you what the fortieth decimal in pi is, but I can’t tell you the days or numbers in Spanish. Which I took for four years because I couldn’t pass it. I love that you speak Japanese, Greer. That’s very cool.”
I smiled.
“Davis speaks Korean and French. He learned them when he was on a farm team. His friends bet him that he couldn’t, so he did. Now he likes to write us cards in French. He reads to Carrie in French all the time. She asks him to because his voice sounds ‘pretty,’” Finn said.
I blinked. That didn’t sound like Davis.
And then Finn’s filter all but fell off.
I learned things about Davis that I never knew I wanted to know.
I learned that he’d helped raise Finn, and that Carrie had helped raise both of them.
I learned that while in prison, he’d gotten into a fight with an inmate who’d tried to shank him.
I learned that when he was younger, he wanted to be a vet, but he couldn’t because he was scared of cats.
The more I learned, the more I started to see him as a person.
And surprisingly, or not, not one that I hated.
But surely, that was the alcohol talking.
Surely.
Right?
Hours later, after we’d gone through a bunch of tests—all of which I’d failed miserably—we were being dropped off in a police cruiser.
In the back like we were actual criminals.
That’s when I looked over at the last person in the vehicle with me.