Total pages in book: 89
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 84913 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 425(@200wpm)___ 340(@250wpm)___ 283(@300wpm)
Suddenly, I felt like I should have maybe tried a little to know him better, to connect with him more.
Everything between us had always been about the mission. About molding me to be able to do it on my own.
We didn't sit and have long conversations about our paths or our hopes and dreams for the future.
It never even occurred to me to try before.
Just like it had never occurred to him to tell me I could—or could not—do something.
Inwardly, I bristled, feeling a telltale tingling on my nerve endings. The start of anger, before it went deep, infected everything inside me.
"I'm not sixteen anymore, Vance. You can't tell me what to do."
"Ferryn, I don't think you ever let me tell you what to do," he told me, shaking his head. "And I'm not trying to tell you what to do now. I'm trying to remind you that you need to be here in this shithole for a few days. If someone drove down the street and saw you picking up food somewhere, it would be all over this town in ten minutes flat, and you know that. There is no anonymity here."
"That's true," I agreed, feeling the anger fizzle out as suddenly as it had started.
"I know it has never been in your nature, but you're just going to have to let me take care of you for a bit."
Take care of me.
Once upon a time, those words would have given me shivers, would have made my heart full to bursting.
Now, though, there was mostly a void where that heart used to be. But, much to my surprise, I did feel a bit of a warmth spread across my entire upper chest, a flush that was both comforting and alarming at the same time.
My tongue felt fat and clumsy in my mouth as my lips formed around words. "I, ah, I guess that will work. I could probably order in, too. The delivery kids have to have changed by now—What?" I asked when his smile spread a bit as he moved across the room to stoop to retrieve the other bags, making me suddenly realize that I probably should have been helping out.
"Kids. Last time you were here, those kids were all older than you. I remember you saying you wanted to get a job delivering for the pizza place but your dad said absolutely not."
"He said 'absolutely-fucking-not,'" I clarified, smirking at the memory.
"You were so hot about that."
"It was sexist of him to say that I couldn't be a delivery person."
"Maybe."
"Definitely. I bet Fallon and Finn were allowed to do deliveries. Such a double standard."
"Sometimes those double standards exist to protect you, not to take away your freedoms. What?" he asked, making me realize I was small-eyeing him pretty hard.
"Nothing. You just never used to be that backward."
"Backward," he scoffed, shaking his head, deliberately turning away, moving so he could have his back to me as he shuffled through the bags.
"Yes, backward. Weren't you the guy who once told Iggy that she better not save herself for marriage? Weren't you the guy who told us both that we would learn a lot more about the world by being exposed to it than we would reading about it?"
"Yeah, babe, but that was before the world threw you into a basement then ripped you away from everyone who cared about you, okay? Shit changes."
"I don't see why my shit would change your shit."
"You're fucking kidding me, right?" he snapped. Snapped. Vance, the Vance I had always known, was someone incredibly slow to anger. He was always the sort to let things roll off his back, to shrug it all away. And the girl I had been—so easily riled, so reactive to everything—had always appreciated his inner calm, his easy self-assurance.
There was no mistaking, though, that Vance was most definitely the riled one right in that moment. His blue eyes blazed. His jaw tightened so hard that a muscle ticked there, something I found almost alarmingly fascinating.
"I'm not kidding you," I told him, arching a brow just because I wanted him to keep going, I wanted to get a rise out of him, I wanted to see more of his rage. I didn't stop to wonder why it was so important to me that he even had any. Had I maybe considered it in the moment, I likely would have concluded that a small part of the girl I used to be was thinking that if he had a little of his own rage, he might be able to accept mine.
"You fucking left, Ferryn. We worried ourselves fucking sick about you for days after you were taken. And the minute we know you are safe again, you tear out of town and we never see you again. We are going to skip right over the bit about how selfish that shit was because I'm sure one of your aunts or uncles will unleash into you about that since your parents will be too relieved to do it themselves. Putting that aside, your shit, whatever that shit was, it affected every fucking person you left behind. Just because you needed to start a new life didn't mean you got erased from all of ours. We couldn't just move on like there wasn't something always missing. Your shit was our shit too. Thought in about nine years, you would have grown up enough to see that."