Total pages in book: 135
Estimated words: 139088 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 695(@200wpm)___ 556(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139088 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 695(@200wpm)___ 556(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
As mentioned, I wanted all of this.
But I needed to bring it back to the meat of the matter.
“And she just left you.”
“She walked out on all of us. Just walked right out the door. Gone.”
Walked out…
Right out the door…
Gone.
My skin started prickling.
“Knox—”
“Then, I’m in Denver, training to be on the team, and she walks into the office asking for me.”
Holy shit.
“How did she find out where you were?”
“She still sent birthday and Christmas gifts down there. So she asked, and Gypsy told her.”
Gypsy.
A pain in the ass on multiple fronts.
“Okay,” I whispered.
“I sat down with her. I was curious. What made a woman walk out on her kids? Leave them to a man who consorted with criminals, because he was one. A man who was grooming his children to follow in his footsteps. And she knew this man was doing that to her children. She still left. And what made her stay away? But when we were sitting down, mostly I wanted to know what gave her big enough fuckin’ balls to think she could come back?”
“What did she say?” I asked carefully.
“She said she didn’t have any money. She said she was scared of Dad. I said I was thirty-one years old, I got out when I was eighteen, she found me when she felt it was time to find me, but she’d had thirteen years to reconnect, so what the fuck? She said she didn’t think I’d want to hear from her.”
When he didn’t go on, I asked, “What’d you say to that?”
“I said she was right. I didn’t when I got out of that mess in Tucson, only seven years after she left us to all of that, and I didn’t right then, when I was sitting at Fortnum’s, sharing a coffee with the bitch.”
At him referring to his mother as “the bitch,” I went back to pressing my lips together.
“My brothers were assholes, committing felonies in their teens. I had four ‘stepmothers’ between Mom leaving and me leaving, none of them official, all of them skanks, users, and every one of them was the same age when he started it with them, so the last one that I knew was only a few years older than me. Obviously, Dad always had cash, and he liked to be the big man, he liked to swing his dick. He threw huge parties. We were exposed to shit no kid should be exposed to. Drunks. Drugs. Fights. Porn. Firearms. He might have evaded the law, but he didn’t put on any pretense. Everyone knew the kind of man he was. Everyone knew he was garbage.”
He took in a breath, and he was looking at me so intently, I felt the burn of his gaze.
“And everyone thought we were like him.”
Oh God.
“Knox—” I tried again.
“And Crew and Poe confirmed it for them.”
Damn.
He kept going.
“I had a girlfriend all through high school. And her parents were so against her spending any time with me, we had to hide it. So we did. For four years.”
Hide it.
For four years.
I couldn’t hack it.
I shifted back and wilted to my ass on the arm of one of my living room chairs.
“I’ve told one other woman what I came from,” he carried on. “We’d grown tight. She meant something to me. But after I told her, she acted like I was some kind of creep. Like that was a latent gene that hadn’t woken up yet, but I was eventually going to turn into that and drag her down with me. She broke it off with me within forty-eight hours.”
I could not believe that some bitch was so stupendously dumb.
But I couldn’t get a handle on that thought because Knox wasn’t done.
“Growing up, I was the bad element, when I wasn’t. I was the freak, when I wasn’t. I was to be avoided, so the filth on me couldn’t get on them. I had my girlfriend, and one close bud, Matty. Everyone else treated me like a pariah. Like I was what Dad was, Crew was, Poe. Like I was trash.”
It was all making sense to me now.
All of it.
And the only worse pain I’d felt when it came to Knox was breaking up with him.
Even so, knowing this about him killed.
“I did everything to prove I wasn’t that. I was the quarterback of the football team that led them to a state championship. That didn’t matter. I had a summer job at Lowe’s, working full-time, and the only member of my family I was ever seen with was Gypsy. That didn’t matter. It did a number on my head,” he went on. “Mom leaving. No one inviting me to their sleepovers. Eventually having to walk to practices myself, until I could drive. Being voted most likely to get incarcerated my senior year, which was supposed to be a joke category, but those assholes believed it, even if I did not one thing for them to think that shit about me.”