Total pages in book: 127
Estimated words: 122219 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 611(@200wpm)___ 489(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122219 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 611(@200wpm)___ 489(@250wpm)___ 407(@300wpm)
“Men are idiots,” I murmured.
“You don’t have to tell me twice.” She huffed. “But still, it would be nice to be someone who people stayed for.”
“I hate that he did that to you.”
“Did you hate that you did that, too?”
That felt like a stab to my chest. “Avery—”
“Sorry.” She shook her head. “I didn’t mean to say that. I want to leave us, whatever we were, in the past. What happened with Wesley just triggered something in me.”
“We can talk about it if you want. I have no issues talking about us.”
“But it won’t change anything. It is what it is.” She combed her hair behind her ears and looked at me. “Can we talk about anything else but this? But us? Remember our rules?”
I wanted to say fuck the rules, but I knew she was too sensitive that evening for me to push it. So instead, we spent the rest of the night talking about sports.
17
AVERY
“Are you okay?!” Yara and Willow remarked as I pulled up to Willow’s bus. After Chicago, Nathan dropped me back off at my vehicle Monday evening, and from there, I headed straight to Willow’s.
My sisters came rushing outside, shouting in sync as I climbed out of my parked car.
Before I could reply, their arms were wrapped tightly around me. Their embrace made me want to melt into them more than ever before. I would’ve cried, but I’d hit my ten-year crying quota on my actual wedding day.
“I’m good, I’m good,” I said. I felt emotionally spent, but it felt good to be back with my sisters after spending a long weekend with Nathan. A concept I was still making sense of. Even worse, I was considering living with him.
How could a life turn so far upside down in the span of seventy-two hours?
“I made some herbal tea for us. Let’s go inside,” Willow offered, wrapping her arm around my waist as she guided me to the steps of her mobile home.
Willow’s home was beautiful. It was a school bus that she and some guy she randomly knew transformed into a mobile home. It had everything a single girl could want, space-wise, including a living area, a kitchen, a shower, and a bedroom with a queen-size bed. It was remarkable how much space it seemed to have within it. Before she made the home, we watched dozens of RV and van transformations to make sure she had her dream home.
Some people probably judged her for her dream home being a mobile home, but Willow was like the wind and loved to move at her own will. That bus—or Big Bird as she called it—had seen more of America than I had.
The three of us took a seat on Willow’s sectional couch. Willow began to pour the tea into cups that she had set up on her coffee table.
Yara struggled to cross her legs and get comfortable before turning toward me with a look of heavy concern. “Avery…what in the world happened?”
“I’m sorry I disappeared like that. I should’ve called you guys. I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to face anyone or anything. It was as if my brain shut down, and I just needed to get out. Nathan happened to find me at the batting cages, and well, he offered me an escape. So I took it.”
“I’m not going to lie. Finding out you were with Nathan Pierce was the last thing I expected to hear. I figured you’d be on Mars before shacking up with Nathan Pierce at his penthouse,” Willow expressed as she sat down beside me.
“I wasn’t shacking up with Nathan Pierce at his penthouse,” I urged. “I was running away from my life. Two very different things.”
“Still. A little surprising,” Yara said calmly, placing a hand of comfort against my kneecap. “Tell us what happened.”
I sighed and told them the whole story.
“So he just called it off?” Yara asked.
“Yup,” I replied.
“He’s such a jerk,” Willow griped.
I knew that was true, but still, a part of me hoped to find love, or something close enough, with Wesley.
When I was young, before Mama and Daddy found each other, it was just me and her for a while with my biological father. He didn’t treat her well at all, and I remember from a young age watching her cry more tears than any person should’ve cried.
The day she found the courage to leave him, she packed up our things and put them in the back of her car. I’d never forget her turning to look at me and saying words that stayed with me for a long time. “Go where you’re loved, baby girl, and never stay a second longer when the love is removed.”
But what if there wasn’t a place like that for me?
What if there was no place where I was loved?