Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 73021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73021 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 365(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Dayton Anthony was one of the arresting officers, and he was the one who called me. I’d helped him more than once in high school with a Literature paper he had to write. I asked him to keep me updated on her, but that was all I did. Hoping that some time behind bars would end the drug use.
Unfortunately, she was released after thirty days, and the calls started up. The third one I answered because she was my mother.
It took her going from unnaturally sweet, to bitching about my not getting her out of jail, to sweet again several times for me to realize she was messed up on something. The violent outbursts continued until I ended the call. She immediately started calling me back.
I blocked her, and I kept her blocked for over a year. A few months ago, I unblocked her number since there had been no calls from the Madison police station. Her first call came a few weeks later. I sent it to voicemail.
She had asked for money.
Instead of blocking her again, I just began sending her to voicemail, along with all the unknown numbers that called my phone. Sometimes, she left a message. Other times, she didn’t, but I always deleted them without listening. She was a negative in my life that I chose to keep out.
I’d give her credit for one thing though. I could write one hell of a messed-up childhood in my books. Drawing emotion from readers through the struggle the heroine had survived was all thanks to the life I’d lived, growing up. Just like Melinda, Jellie’s mom, had given me inspiration for the positive female influences in my writing. They said to write what you knew, and my first three books had been just that. Well, almost. I had no knowledge of the spicy scenes that I wrote.
Arden was my first sexual partner, and he had been nothing like the men in my books. He was boring, worried about his self-gratification solely, then acted as if he’d given me a gift that I should worship at his altar for when it was over. He’d even gloated over the sex scenes I’d written, like he was the one who had given me the inspiration. I often wondered if he was actually in the bed with us when we had sex since nothing I wrote resembled our sex life.
That was all thanks to the hours of porn I’d watched, researching, making mental notes, as well as writing ideas down. I never got turned on by the live-action sex. The women weren’t very good actresses, and their fake enthusiasm was obvious. But if I ignored that and focused on the things they did, the things the guy said, and added my own imagination to it, I could come up with good material.
The phone began to ring again. Swinging my eyes from my computer screen to the phone, I glared at it. She was insistent today. This had been her sixth call in an hour. Reaching over, I silenced it and went back to the words on my screen. I was at forty-two thousand, and I was stuck. I’d tried deleting a couple of chapters and taking the storyline in another direction, but that hadn’t helped.
My first three books had come pouring out of me. I’d stayed up all hours of the night, my fingers flying over the keyboard, excited and lost in the story I was telling. This time, that was not happening. I’d blame it on the stuff with Arden before his disappearance last week and then his vanishing act, but that wasn’t it. Sure, I thought about him, wondered what he’d been doing that could cause him to flee like that, but it wasn’t as often as one would think. The majority of the time, I was working through ideas for my storyline or smiling down at my phone while texting with Ransom.
Since his visit here, he had been chattier than he’d ever been. He texted me daily now—or he had since our lunch together. The young girl with a crush wanted to think that this meant something. That he wanted to talk to me. That he liked me as more than his texting pen pal.
The adult who knew better was trying to talk reason into the young girl and keep her levelheaded. Ransom wasn’t into me that way. He wanted friendship, and since we had rocked the boat, or ripped off the blindfold, or whatever you wanted to call it by seeing each other in person once again, he’d felt more connected. Maybe? Heck, I didn’t know. I was naive with men. The first real relationship I’d had was with Arden, and it was a train wreck waiting to happen. I’d just not realized it.
My phone screen lit up again, and I sighed, cutting my eyes at it, expecting another call from my persistent mother. But Ransom’s name came across the screen, along with his text alert, and the jolt of dopamine in my system that just his name released in me was probably bad, but it couldn’t be helped.