Total pages in book: 185
Estimated words: 175455 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 877(@200wpm)___ 702(@250wpm)___ 585(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 175455 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 877(@200wpm)___ 702(@250wpm)___ 585(@300wpm)
I know if I asked, Carter would try to find a way to help me pay for it, but that’s over the line. I’ll let him buy me a homecoming dress or even a plane ticket to New York, but he has offered those things, I have never asked. It’s too presumptuous to assume we will end up married, that the debt for enormous school loans would inevitably be ours, not just mine.
I may hope for the best, but I plan for the worst, and the worst case scenario is I give up a free ride at a great school to follow Carter to New York. Fast forward six months, I catch him with some vicious pre-law brunette who doesn’t even bother to cover up her perfect breasts when I walk in on them in our bed. Instead, she smirks at me, knowing she’s won the game and the prize is all hers now.
I trust Carter, but I also know I’ll always have to deal with other women chasing him. He’s too much of a catch, especially on the surface. The average woman won’t know his dark side or his baggage, but she’ll see his money in the clothes he wears, his intelligence in the classes they take together, how handsome he is because she will inevitably have eyeballs. Even if he’s never interested in anyone but me, there will be women who think they can steal him away from me—who will actively try. And while I do have faith in Carter, the reality is if the worst happened and I’d already given everything up for him, I would absolutely hate myself.
I can’t take that risk. I won’t.
I also can’t look at him when I’m thinking such awful things, so I sigh and look up at the ceiling instead.
“What’s wrong?” Carter asks.
“Nothing. Just thinking about the future.”
“You have your defensive, daddy issue face on,” he informs me. “Are you thinking about me on a beach with a super model again?”
Even though it’s hardly funny, I can’t help smiling faintly as this little game of Infidelity Clue he has gotten used to. It’s not the professor with the candlestick in the kitchen, but in my own personal hell, it’s some pretty girl in some location with the guy who’s supposed to be mine. He’s remarkably tolerant about my worries. Poking fun at them instead of getting annoyed seems to work for him, so I go with it.
“In this bed with a gorgeous but vicious future lawyer. She seduces you and ruins my life, then I hate myself because in this scenario, I gave up college in PA to move here and go to City College instead. Now my pride demands that I leave you, but I’m broke, so I end up in a shared studio apartment with a crazy, loud roommate, living on Ramen noodles and cursing your name.”
“A lot of scenarios end up with you cursing my name,” he points out.
“There are a lot of ways you could be a disappointing jerk,” I tell him.
“Maybe by the time I retire, you can tell me every last one of them,” he suggests.
“I think we’d need a couple lifetimes for that. The doubtful side of my mind is very prolific.”
Even though we’re just playing, he looks over at me seriously for a moment. “You know I love you, right?”
Guilt pinches me because I know these are my issues, not his. Since everything happened with Erika, Carter has been 100 percent trustworthy, and when I think about it logically, I really don’t believe he would do anything to jeopardize our relationship. It’s just that sometimes fear takes hold, a fear he isn’t even entirely responsible for putting there, and it makes me go to crazy places in my mind, places that convince me I need to protect myself from the one person in the world I want to give every bit of my trust to.
Trust is scary by nature, but I tell myself if Carter can trust me with his baggage, I can certainly trust him with mine. My baggage might be a nuisance sometimes, but his is next level, and I deal with all of it without complaint.
Being here like this, though, seeing the life I can’t have… it does kind of make me want to push him away. He’s giving me more to miss, and I had enough already.
As if he can read my mind and he wants to drive it home even more, he reaches over, snakes an arm beneath me, and tugs me against his side.
“Get over here, you.”
I wrap my arms around him and snuggle up close, but my mind won’t stop wandering to unpleasant places. Even things I was looking forward to are starting to wilt into unpleasantness. Conjuring an image of the twin-sized bunk bed in the dorm room I’ll share with three other girls… while Carter, bless his heart, is living like a king in New York, single and eligible, attending what would have been my dream school if my dreams weren’t grounded in reality. Even in the wildest of my dreams, I can’t go to Columbia, and he fell right into it. I hope he appreciates all of this, because Carter Mahoney is the luckiest person I have ever met.