Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 75478 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75478 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 377(@200wpm)___ 302(@250wpm)___ 252(@300wpm)
I never would have thought that playing poker would be something I enjoyed. But I had. And it wasn’t even just the cards themselves, but the men gathered around, easily pulling me into their conversation, not seeming to mind when I was occasionally my usual quiet self.
It was so strange and wonderful to feel so welcomed and accepted just as I was.
I guess when you had an organization their size, and the extended family and friends that came with it, you got really comfortable with vastly different personalities.
Even with my limited time with her, it seemed like Luna was much like me. On the shy side, bookish, happy being alone with her books.
The only difference for her was that she had this big, crazy, loving family group to pull her out of her shell a bit, to involve her so that her aloneness didn’t morph into loneliness like it sometimes did for me.
Excitement sizzled across my skin as I sat on the edge of Sully’s bed and waited to be escorted out to… whatever he had planned for the night.
There’d been a lot of noise in the common room for over an hour until, finally, I heard footsteps making their way down the hallway toward me.
The door opened.
And there was Sully.
There was no stopping the burst of laughter that escaped me.
“What are you wearing?” I asked, taking in his bright blue smock with yellow piping and several large pockets.
“You like?” he asked, swirling around to show it off. “Because I got you one too,” he said, reaching out into the hall to produce a matching smock, only mine was pink with purple piping.
“Okay,” I agreed, beaming at him because his excitement was contagious.
“Come over here so I can get you suited up.”
“What are we getting suited for?” I asked, getting to him and turning my back on him, so he could slide it over my head, then tie the strings. “And why do I get the feeling that it is going to be messy?”
“Because it’s Sully,” Rune said as he passed on his way to the prospect room at the end of the hall. I hadn’t been inside it yet, but I heard it was a massive space, something like a school gymnasium, with bunk beds, lockers, and a giant bathroom.
All the men lived there from when they first started to prospect until they were patched. When they hopefully got their own rooms.
“He knows me well,” Sully said, reaching down to take my hand in his.
I knew that for someone like Sully, handholding was probably casual. But for me, I couldn’t help but notice a tingle where our skin met that quickly moved up my arm and across my chest as he pulled me down the hall.
I don’t know what I was expecting, even with the smock, but it certainly wasn’t to find the entire common area set up with card tables, each one of them featuring a different craft to work on.
“Oh my God,” I said, having to blink quickly because my eyes went watery. Not because of crafts. I mean, crafts were a big part of my life. But because Sully not only accepted my hobbies but embraced them.
The last guy I was close with had teased me relentlessly about my ‘old lady’ hobbies. You know, while he killed imaginary people in video games for twelve hours straight on the weekends. When I’d once said I wanted to spend my birthday doing one of those wine-and-painting classes, he’d laughed in my face and then told me to take someone else, because he wasn’t going to do that.
And here was Sully. A guy I’d just met. Setting up a craft night extravaganza for me.
“Now, listen, I’m a crafty virgin,” Sully admitted. “So all our projects are from some blog I found online. I have no idea if they’re gonna come out right or not.”
“But that’s half the fun,” I told him, smiling. “This is really, really nice. Thank you.” His only response to that was a squeeze to my hand. “Okay. Where do we start?”
“Easiest first,” he said, leading me over to one of the tables. It was loaded down with an absurd amount of beads. This table alone probably had hundreds of dollars’ worth of brand new supplies. “Jewelry,” he said, genuinely seeming excited at the prospect. “I have about a dozen bracelets I need to make for the girls for Valentine’s Day.”
“Oh,” I said, my heart sinking. “The club girls?”
“The princesses,” he said, too distracted by gathering his beads to notice the relief that moved through me.
“You buy for the princesses for Valentine’s Day?”
“Well, I usually just do flowers and chocolates. But I’m gonna add bracelets this year. Gotta remind them they don’t need no dusty-ass man to have a happy V’Day.”
“Um, you’re a man,” I reminded him as he set up rows of beads, presumably one for each princess with colors or beads he thought would suit them.