Total pages in book: 150
Estimated words: 143633 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 718(@200wpm)___ 575(@250wpm)___ 479(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 143633 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 718(@200wpm)___ 575(@250wpm)___ 479(@300wpm)
“He is,” she went on. “He’s a cunt who should be strung up for what he did to you.”
“He’s a cunt who should be strung up even more for what he did to YOU.”
She didn’t shrug it off with a just a temper or arguments comeback. She nodded. She agreed with me. For once in my life, she actually agreed with me.
We stood in silence. I still had the door open, paused to leave. But I didn’t. I didn’t move my feet.
“Julian would have really killed him? He meant it?” Mum asked, finally, and there was just the faintest hint of approval in her eyes.
“Yeah, he would have. I’d bet my life on it.”
She was still leaning against the wall, and the silence between us was deafening, but it wasn’t horrible anymore. There was a sad closeness in it. And I dared to hope. I dared.
I risked it. I asked her.
“Will you get to know him? Can you accept me being in love with him?”
She was crying again. I saw her battle, and I got it. From the outside it would look horrendous, with all the gossip and bitching about him, and me being a young girl on the arm of someone three decades older than me, but I prayed she would try. I prayed she would at least give it a chance.
But she couldn’t. She took a breath before she answered me. My heart fell through the floor as I saw the hurt in her eyes.
“I can’t. I don’t want to speak to him, and I don’t want to see you with him, and nothing is ever going to change that. Not ever. He’s not your boyfriend, Rosie. He’s a guy who likes to play dirty games with vulnerable girls like you.” Her tears fell, but her jaw tightened. “Don’t go up there. Stay here with me. We’ll work things out, no Scottie, you don’t need the dirty prick upstairs.”
My jaw tightened too.
“I don’t need him, I want him because I love him. And if you can’t accept that…”
“I won’t accept that.”
My heart was swimming in the depths but I took hold of my suitcase again and my feet finally moved for me.
“You know where to find me if you change your mind,” I said and closed the door behind me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Julian
I’d learnt long ago not to be optimistic about situations, but when Rosie opened the door with her face streaming with tears, lugging a battered suitcase behind her, I knew things had been particularly bad. I took her suitcase and set it down in the living room, then wrapped my arms around her as she cried.
“Mum wouldn’t listen to me,” she said through the hurt. “I told her everything, about Scottie, about you saving me, about how what they spout in the Brewery is nothing but bullshit, but she wouldn’t accept it. She wouldn’t accept me being with you.”
If truth be told, I didn’t blame Beverly for that. The pub would have been rife with enough accurate gossip to put Beverly off me in its own right, let alone combined with the exaggerations.
Part of me wanted to set Rosie free and send her back to rebuild her relationship with Beverly. It must have shown on my face, and Rosie was coming to know me well enough to read me. She pulled away to look up at me and shake her head.
“Don’t even think about it. I’m not going back down there. I want to be here, with you!”
“Rosie–” I began, but she shook her head again.
“No. This is MY decision. MINE.”
“And I respect that absolutely, but sweetheart, listen to me.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “I lost my family, and it cost me and them dearly. Please, don’t make the same mistake I did. A mother’s love is a sacred thing. You will feel the separation hard, and so will she.”
Rosie’s eyes were fierce. “Then she can be the one to build bridges. I’ve spent enough of my life respecting her decisions, no matter how shit I thought they were. She can do the same for me for once.”
“And if she doesn’t?”
Rosie shrugged, but tensed with the pain. “Then she doesn’t.”
I felt terrible for her. I hated my part in their fallout.
“You really want to choose this, over your life downstairs?”
“I don’t want to have to choose, but I’m not leaving you, Julian. You’d have to throw my suitcase outside and kick me out, and even then I might not go back to her.”
I stroked my thumb across her cheek, trying to lighten the mood, even just a little as I smiled.
“I’d have to throw that case pretty hard. That thing weighs a bloody ton.”
Rosie’s eyes lit up through her tears. “Yeah, so don’t bother then. Let me stay.”
There was no doubt whatsoever I’d be doing that.