Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144571 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 723(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 482(@300wpm)
He let her rock against him, a familiar rhythm from childhood he found infinitely soothing.
“Do you think about her?” his mom asked after the longest time.
He knew who she was talking about. “No. It’s you I want proud of me. She doesn’t know me and she never will. I’m okay with never knowing her name. This is not me yearning for my birth mom. It’s me going over that night in my head and wondering if I could have done it differently. If I hurt you by loving her.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Absolutely not. You know what, I am interfering where I should let things play out. Not the sex part. You are not ready for sex and neither is she, but the rest of it…” She sighed. “I’m being a therapist and not your mom. If you want to be Kala’s boyfriend, I will support you. I told you. I love her, too. But you have to be prepared. She is going to need more than love for a while.”
“I’ll give it to her. Anything she needs,” he vowed, leaning against the woman who’d changed his life utterly when she decided to adopt him. He knew the adoption had been closed and his birth mom didn’t want contact at all. He was cool with it. He didn’t need her. He had his mom and dad.
And he had his answer. He was being insecure, and he needed to work on it.
He would. He would do it for himself.
He would do it for Kala.
Chapter Four
In the end it had been strangely uneventful.
“You okay, kiddo?” her dad asked for the five hundredth time.
“I would be better if Kyle stopped making me want to vomit,” she replied, yawning.
Her cousin sighed and stopped making out with MaeBe. “You really are a menace.”
She got that a lot.
After a long talk with Julia and some halfway decent pizza, her family had shown up and taken out all the bad guys. Not that she’d been allowed to watch. No. She’d been hustled out via secret tunnel by her mom and Tennessee Smith and coddled like a baby.
They didn’t know she wasn’t innocent anymore. Maybe never had been.
In the end it had been her dad, uncles, Aunt Erin, and MaeBe who’d taken out Julia Ennis.
She’d been free for hours now, but there was a weight on her she wasn’t sure would ever come off again.
“Sweetie, your dad only wants you to talk to us.” Her mom sat across from her, looking elegant even after what they’d been through. After they’d done what they had to do, they had her on the MT jet in mere hours. She was on her way home.
Would it feel like home?
They were an hour into their flight, and she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it. Uncle Sean had tried. Aunt Erin had offered her a soda and told her it was okay if she wanted to punch something. Uncle Theo had asked if she wanted his phone and AirPods to listen to some music.
Knowing her uncle it was probably some whiny girl rock.
She didn’t feel like she belonged here anymore.
“I did. I told you what happened. Cooper’s an asshole, and I’ve learned my lesson. Boys aren’t worth it. Consider me asexual from here on out. Ground me all you like. I won’t be going anywhere anyway. I’ve seen my share of dead bodies now. I think I’ll ditch the whole spy thing and become like a librarian or something.” She bet Julia fucking Ennis never thought about becoming a librarian.
Her dad pointed her way, his eyes narrowing. “And that is why we worry.”
She needed to deflect the parental units or she would find herself at the Ferguson Clinic for Tender Feelings. She wasn’t going to have feelings anymore. “I’m fine. It was scary and I had to see Kyle in a towel and that was gross, but I’m fine. I spent my time in a cell in the basement watching the guard sneak YouTube walk-throughs of the video game he’s playing. Well, played. I assume someone killed him. Should have done a walk-through of this life level, buddy.”
She couldn’t quite dump the sarcasm. It was a part of her.
“Kala, you need to talk,” her mom said.
Was this what her mom and dad had been discussing earlier? They’d huddled together like they often did when trying to figure out what to do with her.
“About what? Do you want me to say I was scared? I was.” She had to give them enough so they thought she was normal but not so much they ever figured out the truth. Because they would be…not ashamed, exactly. They would blame themselves when this was fully on her. She’d had a long talk with Julia Ennis while Kyle had been showering. She’d convinced her jailer that she was going to die of hunger, gotten him to take her to the kitchen where she’d managed to steal a knife, and then gotten caught by the wicked witch of the world.