Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 91961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 460(@200wpm)___ 368(@250wpm)___ 307(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 91961 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 460(@200wpm)___ 368(@250wpm)___ 307(@300wpm)
“No, I get it. I feel that way too, even on the training side.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Do you think I feel totally normal telling you to heel?”
I laugh, but then say, “Say that again?”
“What?”
“Heel.”
He chuckles.
“I was being serious. I like the way you say it.”
“Heel,” he says in a low, commanding voice—that voice that gets me all worked up when we’re training.
I growl softly, and he doesn’t skip a beat: “Quiet.”
I obey.
“Good boy…good, good boy,” he says before offering me a gentle belly rub.
I kind of want to keep going, but he says, “Okay. I think we need to save the rest for our session tomorrow.”
He’s right, but I’m kind of bummed, because I’m enjoying the playfulness of the moment.
“I’ll do better with it tomorrow,” I say, though a little uneasy.
“Don’t worry, Ev. We’ll figure it out. You’re doing really well, and from what I’ve read, it’s not always easy to shake off those normal insecurities that we all have. We have plenty of time to figure this out.”
In a way, I feel like he’s talking about more than my puppy space. That he’s talking about us and whatever the fuck we experienced when we shared that kiss. There is no rush. We’re not desperately trying to figure out what it means or if it means anything at all.
Frankie will always be the one who gets me the way no one else can. That’s something I’ve known for a long time.
And I get him in a way other people don’t.
He wraps his arms around me. “Come on, Pup. Time for bed.”
He lifts me up and throws me over his shoulder, carrying me through the hallway to our bedrooms. When he reaches my doorway, he plants me down on my feet. “Don’t stress about this, Ev. You’re doing fine. We’ll figure it out together, okay?”
His words offer me some much-needed confidence.
“Okay,” I say. He leans in to me and kisses my forehead, the way we used to, but this time, there’s something much more meaningful behind it. There’s a connection we share through it that I don’t feel like we had before all this puppy-play stuff started. I close my eyes and savor the moment. Then he pulls away and runs his hand through my hair. “Night, Ev.”
“Night.”
14
Frankie
“You okay, kiddo?” Mom asks as we again sit in the chairs on her back patio. I try to come and visit once a week, or at least biweekly if things are crazy for me. It’s funny how alike Jackson and I are when I think about it—how much our families mean to us. I think that’s why I gave him shit after the divorce and before he fell for Derek. There had always been a part of me who understood him on a bone-deep level. I knew that need to take care of your own, but unlike Jackson, I’d always managed to find a way to take care of myself too. It had always been important to me to enjoy life, to grab it by the fucking balls, because I always knew how much Mom had been denied that by my sperm donor.
She’d been smart as hell, had wanted to be a nurse, but had dropped out of college. She’d loved flowers, but he had denied her working. She’d walked away from her friends for him. He’d moved her from California to Georgia where she was away from her close-knit, Mexican-American family to isolate her until she had nothing except me and him. Once he got locked up, that had always been her biggest wish for me—to do what I wanted, to have fun, to never let fear hold me back, and if there’s one thing I can say for myself it’s that I’ve always tried to do that.
For the most part.…It’s not that I’m not afraid of shit. I am. More so than most people probably know, but I try my damnedest not to let it hold me back, the way she does. Even when he had been released from prison, she hadn’t been afraid anymore and it had made it easier for me not to be afraid either—though I still hated him in ways she didn’t.
“Hello? Earth to Frankie.” Mom waves her hand in front of my face and I chuckle.
“Sorry. Spacing off.”
“Really? I couldn’t tell.”
She grins, and I roll my eyes at her. “Funny lady. Anyway, yeah, I’m okay. Just have a lot on my mind.”
“As you always do around this time of year.”
Well, yeah, there’s that too. “I don’t want to talk about him.”
“You never do and that’s fine but…” Mom scoots her chair over beside mine and drops her head to my shoulder. “You still carry too much weight for your father’s actions on your shoulders. You were a child.”
“He’s not my father.”
“Not in the ways that matter, no, but that doesn’t change what I’m saying. You always struggle around the anniversary of—”