Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 72060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 360(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72060 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 360(@200wpm)___ 288(@250wpm)___ 240(@300wpm)
"Not usually." She gets up and walks over to the balls. "No rest for the wicked."
"You are a lot of things, Harlow," I state, looking into her eyes. "Wicked isn’t one of them." I want to say she’s the most loyal person I know. I mean, she attended my fucking wedding because she made me a promise. A promise that I made her make, thinking she would be there on all my best days. A promise that every single time I have one of the best days, she was the person I always thought of at the end of the night. Until it got so hard, and I forced myself to stop.
She picks up the pink ball again. "If you think you can say sweet things to me to throw me off my game." She shakes her head. "Think again."
After two balls, she finally knocks down nine pins. "I can feel it." She sits down while I get up, taking a drink of my beer. "The next one is going to be a strike."
"Is that so?" I ask her, grabbing a ball, and when I finally let it go, I get a strike. I stand here in the middle of the lane, turn around, putting both my hands up by my head. "You called it."
She flips me the bird, making me laugh. "I don’t know why you are flipping me off."
"So seriously, when is the last time you went bowling?" she asks, standing up and walking toward the balls. I don’t move out of the way. Instead, I stand next to her. My hand is itching to hold her hip. My fingers also twitch to pull the sash of the bow down and see if the dress opens up.
"Four years ago," I tell the truth. I leave out that every time Jennifer asked me to go, I would bow out at the last minute. I just couldn’t do it.
She picks up her pink ball and holds it up. "There are two things I hate in life." She walks over to the middle of the lane and holds up the ball. "One, surprise." I laugh because I already knew that. "And two, losing." She takes four steps before she lets go of the ball, and it looks like it’s going to be a strike, but the two back pins stay up. "Fuck," she hisses out, turning and going back to get another ball. "What about you?" she asks, bowling the other ball, and it ends up in the gutter. "What have you been up to?"
She stands in front of me, waiting for me to answer. Her green eyes glisten in the almost dark lane. "After I graduated, I stayed on with the emergency clinic for two years. Then I ventured out on my own and opened a practice here with two other people," I say.
"That’s amazing," she says. "It must be so good to have to share the responsibility with the other two." She walks over to the chair and sits down, drinking some beer. "So jealous." I walk back to the chair instead of taking my turn. "What do you do in your spare time?" she asks, and I wonder if she’s as interested in finding out everything about me as I am with her.
"I don’t really have spare time," I admit to her, taking my glass of beer and finishing it. "I’m the only one without a family, so I work most weekends, and I’m on call for the holidays." As soon as I say the words, I feel a little bit of emptiness inside me that I didn’t know was there. "What about you?"
"I wish I could say that I’m out galivanting, but the truth is I barely have spare time, and when I do, I usually spend it with Sofia." She smiles at me, and even when we were dating, she used to call her all the time. I used to tease her during her FaceTimes with her. "She’s a teenager now." She beams. "Thirteen going on thirty."
"Thirteen." I shake my head. "I remember her when she had two missing teeth in the front." We both laugh.
"It’s funny that I don’t see myself as older, but then I look at my nieces and nephews, and I’m like, how did they grow up?" she says, and I can hear a hint of regret in her voice also. She fills me in about her family, and hearing her speak, I know that regardless of how much it hurt when I let her go, taking her away from her family would have been too much for her, and I couldn’t do that to her.
I’m about to say something when the lady from the front counter comes to us. "Sorry, folks, but we are closing up." She looks over at the screen and sees that we’ve been here for over an hour and have played two frames.