Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 90721 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 363(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90721 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 363(@250wpm)___ 302(@300wpm)
Score!
“Do you want to meet at The Back Porch tomorrow for dinner?” Winter asked me.
I looked up from rifling through my backpack for my keys and looked at Winter. “Is this a girl’s night thing, or is this a family thing?”
Winter smiled that devious smile of hers. “Well, the kids have a babysitter, but the youngest of the bunch will be there. Ember and Gabe’s youngest, as well as James and Shiloh’s. They’re too young to be left alone in a group full of rowdy kiddos. Hell, it’s hard to get Jack to leave ours alone and she’s sixteen months now. With all that said, there’s no reason it can’t turn into a girl’s night thing.”
“Okay, well I have Katy tomorrow night. If you don’t mind that she comes along, then I can come. I won’t be drinking though.” I said, before crying in triumph when I found my keys at the very bottom of my bag.
Yanking them out, Sebastian’s black baseball cap flew out in my exuberance, and I caught it as if it were a piece of glass that would shatter if it hit the ground. There was nothing really special about the hat. It was completely black with orrah embroidered in black thread on the side of the hat. It had sweat lines, and looked extremely broken in, which meant that Sebastian must’ve worn it a lot.
Which, in turn, made me feel a little gooey in my center to know that he’d put a hat on my head that was most likely a daily wear for him.
“Geez, don’t break yourself. It’s just a hat.” Winter laughed as I fumbled for the hat, nearly falling backwards when I tripped on my own feet.
Hell, I couldn’t explain the attachment to the hat. I felt like the geek in high school who got to wear the letter jacket of the superstar jock that every girl drooled over. Then all the girls would envy me and call me a bitch behind my back because I got to sit with the most popular boy in school during lunch.
Without saying a word, I carefully put the cap back in my bag, zipped it closed, and walked over to my Cutlass. “I’ll see you tomorrow, text me what time.”
Winter laughed as she crawled up inside her lifted Chevy Silverado. Her husband bought it for her a few months prior, and Winter joked that she could run over my car if I wanted to collect the insurance money for it.
I’d laughed.
The Oldsmobile Cutlass wasn’t the nicest car on the block, but it ran.
I’d received the grass green 1971 Cutlass from my father for my sixteenth birthday. I hadn’t minded; I’d wrecked my father’s truck twice, and I was just happy to be getting a vehicle under the circumstances. He could’ve not gotten me anything, so even though the Cutlass was an eyesore to the extreme, I used it.
The insurance on the big beast was affordable. It ran well, and it was safe. Those three things right there made me keep the vehicle. Only when it gave up the ghost would I get a new car. It just seemed a waste to me to get rid of a working car. Although every time I had to fill up the gas tank on the car, my heart palpitated.
I had to wait to get out of the station’s lot because the tones dropped for a house fire in a residential district on the north side of town. The fire truck left first, followed shortly by the ambulance. I was glad I didn’t catch that call. Fires were no fun, and they were time consuming. There was a lot of sitting around and waiting, which for me, was hard.
I had what they call ADHD. I was an awful child, and I fully admitted it. I couldn’t help it though, and my parents knew that. I’d gotten help when I was young, and luckily, the medication had worked well on me. Allowed me to focus better. To this day, I still took medication. If I didn’t, I couldn’t function.
Some of the side effects of the disease remained, despite the medication. For instance, my inability to focus for long periods of time. PCRs were the absolute worst in my book, but over the years, I’d trained myself to get them done in between calls, which helped me at the end of the day so I didn’t have to write out ten reports. I’d learned that the hard way.
Then there was my chronic lateness, distractibility, and disorganization. Those three things had cost me my last boyfriend.
My life with Jackson, my ex, was more like a soap opera. There were a few times, okay a lot of times, that I stood Jackson up for dinner. Not because I was doing it on purpose, but I became distracted either at home, or at work, and I just didn’t realize the time. Then there were the times I was sitting right next to him, and he would talk, or explain something, and I just didn’t hear him.
He thought I didn’t care, and I got frustrated that Jackson refused to understand that I had a disease, not that I didn’t care. I did care. A lot. However, Jackson lost the desire to try after I continued to be myself.
I was devastated the night, eight months ago, when I’d gone on a call to a woman who had an allergic reaction to shrimp, and found Jackson sitting at a table with a leggy blonde practically curled around him.
He’d had lipstick on his neck and cheek, and I’d died a little inside when Jackson saw me, knew that I’d seen him with the blonde. Then he proceeded to curl his arm around the woman, kissing her just like he’d done to me earlier that evening.
It took me a month of moping after I moved my stuff to realize I couldn’t stay in Casper any longer. My father and mother had completely understood, and I’d gone to Texas, into the open arms of my big brother. Although I couldn’t say I’d been happy here, I also couldn’t say that I didn’t like it either.