Total pages in book: 24
Estimated words: 22495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 112(@200wpm)___ 90(@250wpm)___ 75(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 22495 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 112(@200wpm)___ 90(@250wpm)___ 75(@300wpm)
Oh, if only they could keep pretending like this. With his body covering hers, and his breathing rough against her neck, and her fingers digging into his back as he started to move. With her whispering his name against his throat, barely, like it was a secret even from herself.
Oh, please.
Let this last.
Please.
Troy made love to his wife like tomorrow might never come. Kissed every inch he could reach. Claimed every part of her body he could claim. Her gasps. Her shivers. The way her back arched off the bed when his mouth found the spot below her navel. He wanted the night to last forever because a part of him was terrified when he woke up...she would be gone.
And she was.
He told himself that was normal. That she still needed to go to work. But he didn’t really believe it until he walked back to the master’s...and he saw one gold star sticker on his bathroom mirror.
Chapter Five
LAINA MANAGED TO KEEP it together for the first three periods.
She read the morning story without her voice cracking. She helped Lotty glue macaroni to a paper plate without bursting into tears over the glue stick. She tied four shoelaces and mediated a dispute over the red crayon, which was the same red crayon that caused a dispute every single day, because five-year-olds had very strong feelings about the color red, and Laina Blackett Barrymore was a professional who could absolutely handle a crayon dispute even when her personal life was in shambles.
She kept it together through all of that.
But by the time the lunch bell rang and the classroom emptied out, Laina was alone at her desk with twenty finger-painted self-portraits drying on the windowsill and the faint smell of Elmer's glue in the air, and that was when she got the call from Aunt Trisha.
And the fact that Troy's aunt already knew...
I heard from Troy.
Even now, she was still like a brick around her husband's neck, but he was just too honorable to say it to her face.
Even now, he could only speak the truth to his relatives but never to her, the woman who never had what it took to become his wife.
Laina had thought last night was perfect, but now...
Now she knew it was just a mistake, and that she...she still wasn't good enough for him. Not now. Not ever.
Oh no.
She pressed her palms flat against the desk and squeezed her eyes shut, but the memories came anyway. His hands on her waist. His mouth on her throat. The sound he made when she whispered his name, and the way her body had arched into his like it had forgotten they were supposed to be over.
Stop it.
But her body didn't listen. Her body hadn't listened since the day she met him, and it certainly wasn't going to start now, when it could still feel the press of his fingers on her hips and the ghost of his mouth below her ear.
She had let him. That was the part that made her feel terrified and foolish at the same time. She had let him hold her and touch her and kiss her, and she had told herself it was real. That the burned dinner and the way he looked at her and the way he said her name meant something.
But Aunt Trisha's call had made everything clear.
It wasn't real. It was guilt. It was responsibility. It was Troy being the good man he had always been, too honorable to tell his wife to her face that last night had been a mistake.
Nothing has changed. Nothing.
He still couldn't speak the truth to her. He still went to his aunt instead. And if Aunt Trisha knew about last night, then she also knew what Laina had been too blind to see.
That she wasn't enough. That she had never been enough.
So when she got back home, she would tell him. She would find a way to make it clear to both of them that their marriage had to end.
Yes.
Exactly.
She spent the rest of the afternoon going over the words in her head, arranging them carefully, practicing them the way she practiced everything. By the time Marlon pulled up to the school, she had rehearsed her speech fourteen times and was fairly confident she could deliver it without crying.
She was wrong about that. But she didn't know it yet.
TROY COULDN'T REMEMBER being this nervous in his entire life.
Not during rookie year, when he had stepped onto professional ice for the first time and the arena had been so loud he couldn't hear his own heartbeat. Not when the Waymakers won their first championship, or when he won his first MVP award, or when he had walked into a courthouse with a girl he'd known for three weeks and said I do while she beamed at him in a white sundress and sneakers.