Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75833 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 379(@200wpm)___ 303(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Lyric was exactly where I figured she’d be—out back on the short strip of cracked concrete behind the hotel, where the building’s shade kept a little pocket of air cooler. She had a water bottle balanced on her knee and a pen tucked behind her ear like she might start taking notes any second. She was always like that—poised between running and staying in place, between humor and tears. Seeing her steadied me the way watching a tide come in steadies the shore.
“There you are,” she said like we hadn’t spent the day within a hundred feet of each other. She stood up and opened her arms. Although, I had to admit since Tiny had given her another room so they could have time together without interrupting my sleep, I did miss her. I went into her open arms without thinking. This was natural, normal. We were almost the same height; we’d been eye to eye since we were kids. It felt like standing with my reflection in a mirror that didn’t judge.
“You okay?” she asked into my hair.
I breathed, catching the clean, cheap shampoo smell we both used because it was in the employee shower room. “Working,” I said. “You?”
“Also working.” She pulled back and searched my face. Her eyes narrowed a little. “And worrying. About you. You looked far away today.”
Far away. That was one way to put it. I tilted my head toward the curb under the half-dead oak tree. We took our usual spot, knees bumping, shoulders touching, the bark rough against my back. The cicadas filed our silence with their electric buzz.
Lyric rolled the bottle cap around on the concrete between her fingers. “Okay. I’ve been rehearsing this in my head, but I’m just going to say it.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “When I got with Tiny, it wasn’t about romance. It was a calculation.”
I blinked. She was brave to just lay it out like that. “A calculation.”
“Yeah.” The cap made a little click as she set it down. “We walked into a hotel run by a motorcycle club. I didn’t know the rules, but I could tell they had them. And the girls who were marked—belonging to somebody—looked…safer. Less likely to get hassled. I thought, if someone like Tiny, if he wanted me, then maybe that meant people left me alone. Left you alone.”
My stomach pulled tight. “You shouldn’t have had to do that.”
She shrugged one shoulder, the shrug of someone who had done harder things and lived. “I know. But I’ve done worse for less. At least this time it was my choice.”
The word choice hung there like a bright flag in dirty wind. We knew what it meant to not have a choice. BJ’s shadow stretched all the way to South Carolina, even if we never said it out loud. He’d taught her the shape of fear and how to fold herself into it. Logan had taught me what it felt like to keep small, to keep quiet, to keep going until the day I ran because running was the only thing left.
Lyric looked down at her hands, at her fingers that were never without some small cut from kitchen prep. “But the thing is, it’s not a calculation anymore. I didn’t see it coming, but I…” She winced, and the word came out like a confession. “I’m falling for him.”
I watched a moth fight the gravity of the porch light above the back door. “Does he treat you good?”
“He does,” she said simply, and I heard the wonder in it, like she still didn’t trust the ground. “He’s gruff and bossy and thinks he can fix everything with money or muscle, but when I say no, he stops. When I say I’m scared, he listens. He makes me laugh when I don’t want to. He brings me coffee how I like it—two sugars and one of those tiny creamer cups because he says ‘milk’ is vague.” She huffed a laugh. “He remembers every detail. BJ never remembered anything unless it served him.”
The name moved between us like smoke again. There was a pause because I didn’t know what to say.
“Does that make me dumb?” she wondered. “Falling for the man I…chose as shield?”
“Maybe it just makes you alive,” I comforted her. “We didn’t get to be alive for a long time.”
She smiled at that—small, crooked one she gets when she’s anxious. “Maybe.”
Since we were sharing, and I always told her everything, it was time. “I have to tell you something.”
Lyric’s attention sharpened, warm and ready. “Yeah?”
I looked at my hands. The tiny white crescent scars near my knuckles were from dish racks, from drying too fast, from hurrying in kitchens where breaks were a myth and your boss’s nephew got to order everyone around. Church kitchen dishes were my job back home. These were the kinds of marks I understood. The new marks were all inside left on my soul from a man I barely knew. “Last night I was with Thrasher.”