Total pages in book: 155
Estimated words: 152045 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 760(@200wpm)___ 608(@250wpm)___ 507(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 152045 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 760(@200wpm)___ 608(@250wpm)___ 507(@300wpm)
I was so fucking stupid.
I gaze out the window as Dylan stands just inside her closet door, with her shirt off. She thinks she’s shielded behind the closet door between us, but there’s a mirror on the wall. Her hair is out of its ponytail, and I can almost feel it on my fingers as I run my hand up her skin. The cool strands caress my knuckles.
She turns, her breasts bare in the mirror.
I drop my eyes.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen her. I accidentally walked into the bathroom at my house when she was cleaning up after we went swimming. The room was thick with shower steam. She still doesn’t know the door had been opened at all.
Still doesn’t know she’s the only one I’ve ever seen like that.
When I think about touching someone, it’s always the same body I see. Teardrop breasts. Full and firm. The skin looks so soft, with a tight waist, curving beautifully the farther down I let my eyes go. My fingertips hum, and so does my mouth, because God, I want to touch her with more than just my hands.
Slowly, I raise my eyes again, watching her stare at herself in the mirror. Her head tilts like she’s studying her body or something. She doesn’t know how many people would love the feel of her.
For a moment, I see myself standing behind her, both of us shirtless, and I’m about to touch her, but when I look up at us, into the mirror, it’s him. It could be me, but she’ll see Kade. Everyone does.
Even I do sometimes.
Grabbing my towel, I throw it over my shoulder, heading for the shower, but my phone vibrates on the bed.
I flip it over, seeing Ciaran’s name.
In person, I call him Grandpa, but for some reason it felt weird to have him listed like that in my phone once I moved in with Farrow. He sees him as Ciaran Pierce—Irish Mobster.
I answer, holding the phone to my ear. “Everyone’s calling to check on me today,” I say. “I’m still alive.”
My grandfather doesn’t hesitate. “What’s this about you not going to the barber for your weekly appointment?”
I throw down my towel. Farrow called him? Really?
“It’s not an appointment,” I retort. “It’s some old guy shooting the shit in his garage all day who’s good with a razor. I needed some time alone.”
“So, Samson Fletcher has twenty dollars less in his pocket this week, because you’re wallowing under your perpetual teenage black cloud of ‘Life just sucks so badly?’”
I close my eyes.
Jesus Christ.
“I’ll go.” I exhale. “I’m going now.”
“Good boy,” he replies. “And spend some money at Breaker’s for dinner. Hugo’s kid just had another kid.”
I snarl, shaking my head.
But I keep my damn mouth shut.
“Love you,” he says.
“Mm-hmm.”
And we hang up.
After showering, I pull on some jeans, a T-shirt, and a fresh hoodie, and leave the girls still cleaning our house as I head across the darkening street to Fletcher’s Barber Shop.
The sun is setting, the leaves sounding like paper as they blow across the pavement.
As soon as I walk in, Farrow starts chuckling from his chair.
“Fuck you,” I mumble.
That just makes him laugh more. Fletcher, a seventy-four-year-old Haitian who still wears the white barber’s coat from back in the day, drags a straight-edge up Farrow’s neck to his chin.
He lifts his gaze to me. “Haircut?”
“Do I ever want a haircut?”
I have things to do. I head past the guys sitting in the chairs along the windows and pull out a twenty. I drop it on the counter, in front of the mirror, and grab a pair of clippers to snip off a lock and call it a day.
But Farrow snaps at me, “Sit your ass down. This man works for a living.”
I drop the clippers.
He’ll tell Ciaran if I don’t stay. It was worth a try.
Fletcher continues to shave Farrow as some Nat King Cole song plays, because that’s all Samson Fletcher plays.
I gesture to the razor. “You’re gonna sterilize that before you use it on me?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Farrow mumbles.
“I know where you’ve been,”
“You don’t know everywhere I’ve been.”
“Is this a mom joke?” I chuckle, drifting to the wall of photos.
“I didn’t say it was a joke.”
Calvin and T.C. laugh along with him, and I stare up at old photos, some of them black and white, and some with the gradient color of the ’70s and ’80s.
The shop is filled with guys in all the pictures, some of them in uniforms for factory jobs, some of them in suits, and others with boys, getting their first haircuts. The pictures capture men of all ages sitting in the same spots T.C., Constin, Luca, Anders, and Calvin sit in now, and I notice the same street outside; but in the photos, it’s lined with cars and pedestrians on their way home or off to work.