Total pages in book: 45
Estimated words: 43920 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43920 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 220(@200wpm)___ 176(@250wpm)___ 146(@300wpm)
“Knock it off. I’m gonna be forty.”
Suddenly he was scowling. “You are nowhere near forty.”
“It’s four years away, and as I get older, I realize I’m all about an easy, streamlined life, which is why you, sir, do not fit in.”
“But I could, and you still haven’t answered the question.”
“You want more, you need more, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
“You’re not listening,” he stated, coming toward me.
When he did, I slipped around the side of my desk.
“You really want me to chase you around that?”
“No,” I assured him. “I want you to stand still and talk to me or, I dunno, even better, just go somewhere else. Don’t you have to look for a place to live?”
“I’ve got that sorted out.”
“What? How? Are you going to live with Ben too?”
He scoffed. “I lived with Ben for six months. Screw that. And anyway, it turns out I know someone who has a place they aren’t using.”
I knew someone as well. Someone I’d been talking to about that very issue the night before. What were the chances they were the same? “Are you kidding?”
“In Simone’s defense, she hasn’t lived there in quite some time.”
“She’s going to sublet her apartment to you?”
“It only makes sense.”
“And what’re you gonna say if her mother drops by?”
Slow, wicked grin then, and I remembered something completely ridiculous about Mrs. Sheryl White-Howard, Simone’s mother. For whatever reason, she had always adored Dawson. “I’ll tell her that her daughter moved out.”
“Which is technically true. But also diabolical.”
“That’s Simone, right?” he said softly, and then moved faster than I was expecting and was suddenly there, close, in my space, one hand on the edge of my desk, the other taking hold of the hem of my T-shirt.
“Go back over there,” I told him, pointing at the other side of the desk.
“Do I have to?”
I searched his face and saw how hopeful he was. “No.”
A trace of a smile before he looked down at my T-shirt, which he was rolling between his fingers. “If I’m not your home,” he said, his voice husky and low, “then I will work, really hard, to become that again.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I do. Because I want to prove to you that I’m a good man, the best one for you. And I’m so sorry, Chris,” he said, and I could hear the pain there. “I know I hurt you deeply, and I would give anything for a do-over and to take that pain away. All of it, everything was my fault, and if you decide you can’t take another chance or—”
I took a breath. “You have to give me some time. You just got here.”
He nodded, and I could tell he was forcing the smile, his cheerfulness, but in actuality, he was having a hard time.
“Hey,” I husked, and his head snapped up, his eyes on my face. “We don’t need to do all this. It’s not necessary for us to exhume the past and what could have been. We can just let it be.”
“As in?”
“As in we can just be nice to each other. Before we were anything, we were friends,” I reminded him. “And though I don’t know if that can happen again, at least I won’t walk out of a room when you walk in. Though I’d rather you didn’t pick up any guys in front of me. You can do your hooking up when you’re not in my club.”
He shook his head. “You haven’t heard a word I said.”
“How so?” I asked, stepping away from him, back around my desk, and this time he simply stood and watched me.
“When I was out there becoming Wild West, the harder I worked, the higher I climbed, the more I missed having a home, being home, with you.”
Calling bullshit when he was baring his soul was mean, so I stayed quiet.
“But instead of just coming home, I was a jackass and drank and took drugs to help get my mind off what I should have been doing.”
“Which was?”
“Coming home! To you! And yes, the fame was important to me, to the guys, but as soon as that last record was finished, I should have been on the next plane back here. I was so stupid, but if you could please find it in your heart to forgive me this one last time, I will spend the rest of my life being the guy you deserve.”
“Dawson…”
“I’m sorry down to my soul and—”
“You don’t have to be sorry. Not anymore. Because here’s what happened: while you were inside the eye of a hurricane, with the drugs and the touring, and then afterward, with the rehab, everything whirling around you, I was here living my life without you. And it took forever, but then one day, you know, it doesn’t hurt as much, and you go from being broken by it to being able to live with it.”