Total pages in book: 68
Estimated words: 67490 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67490 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
I looked deep into her eyes before saying, “If that changes, promise you’ll wait for me. I’ll go with you as soon as I get back.”
She leaned up onto her tippy toes and placed a kiss on my jaw before pulling away, going back to the oven. “Now, show me how to turn this bad boy on.”
CHAPTER 22
Sometimes, you just need to beat them with a stapler.
-Text from Ande to Keene
ANDE
Having brothers was hard, because they were all bipolar.
On one hand, they wanted to annoy the shit out of me and make life impossibly harder than it needed to be. The constant nagging, ribbing, and teasing was something that I came to deal with despite the need to smother them in their sleep.
Then there was the other side of the coin. The one that literally caused them to turn into horrors with their overprotectiveness.
Not a single one of my brothers wanted me to do what I was about to do.
Yet… someone had to do it.
“Are you sure?”
I looked back at Quinn where he was standing at his car. “I’m sure.”
“It doesn’t have to be today,” he pointed out.
No, it didn’t. But it needed done, and my brothers got a queasy look to them every time it was brought up or mentioned.
Cleaning out Addison’s place was going to kill me. But it might very well break them.
They felt like they failed—we all did.
And being in the presence of all of Addison’s things, forever frozen in time, felt like a sucker punch straight to the gut.
That was why, when my parents came home with her things, as well as her ashes, they’d all gone straight to her house.
None of us, even my parents, had been ready to deal with the aftereffects of her ‘suicide’ yet.
Except, again, I reminded myself, it had to be done.
It’d been over a month. And now was as good a time as any. With Keene gone, I had a suddenly free day to do this. Or, at least, get it started. Because there was no way I was going to get through it all in the six hours I had before the funeral.
“No,” I agreed, “but it’s been a month, Quinn. It needs to be done. We’re paying for a rental that nobody uses.”
“You can use it,” he pointed out.
I could.
But I was going to head back out in…
That thought immediately stalled inside my brain.
For the first time since my bad breakup senior year, I wanted to stay here.
“You know,” Quinn said, seeing my hesitation. “You have a man now.”
I guess I did.
“And seeing your ex-piece of shit will be great when you have Keene at your side,” Quinn continued. “You don’t have to hide from the world anymore.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Does me hiding from the world, AKA taking travel nursing jobs that pay me so well I can afford to take six months off out of the year, really bother you? Or is the fact that I take Shayne with me what really bothers you?”
Quinn snapped his mouth shut.
Then his face completely closed down.
If he looked upset before, now he looked completely blank.
And I immediately regretted bringing up Shayne.
Shayne and Quinn had kept their breakup fairly tight-lipped.
However, none of us were stupid.
It was quite obvious what had happened.
Quinn had fallen in love. He’d asked Shayne to leave her brother and the gang he ran behind, and she’d refused. Leaving them at a stalemate.
Quinn couldn’t be with someone who had clear ties to a faction that killed people every single day in Dallas and all the surrounding areas. And Shayne couldn’t leave her one and only family member behind—her brother, Costas.
So, even though they were both so fuckin’ in love with each other it hurt, they’d broken up. Then they’d both been miserable for the last ten years. Neither dated—or if they did, they didn’t share the fact with anyone—and both looked completely miserable when the other was mentioned.
And, God forbid, they actually see each other on the rare occasions they were actually in town together.
There was one time, at my birthday party a couple years ago, that I distinctly remembered the two of them seeing each other for the first time in a while.
Quinn had been fresh out of a fight with someone who’d decided they’d rather be free than go to jail. He’d had to fight some six-foot-six jacked dude who was high on lord knew what, and had come out with a broken jaw.
Quinn, sipping whiskey through a straw, had seen her and had immediately shut down.
Meanwhile, the look on Shayne’s face when she saw him there, hurt and in pain, had literally broken my heart. I could see it on her face, her desire to go to him. To wrap him up in her arms and make sure that he was okay and would stay that way forever.