Total pages in book: 153
Estimated words: 148704 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 744(@200wpm)___ 595(@250wpm)___ 496(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 148704 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 744(@200wpm)___ 595(@250wpm)___ 496(@300wpm)
“How long you been awake, baby?” he rasps.
“Not long.”
His lips press to my neck, and he rolls me, so I’m facing him, his eyes half-closed and heavy, a weight within them I can’t even begin to comprehend.
If my soul is heavy, his must be suffocating.
Before I realize it’s happening, my eyes cloud over and Crew’s face softens, sorrow slipping over him, though he tries to hide it.
“We gonna talk now, Sweets?” he murmurs.
I nod, swallowing beyond the lump in my throat.
Crew’s hand pushes into my hair, moving it from my face, and I catch it in both of mine before it can drop to the mattress. I kiss his knuckles one by one, pressure falling on my chest as his lungs expand with a deep inhale.
“I love you, you know,” he tells me. “Some might say too much. I’d do anything for you. Always.”
“I know.” I scoot closer, our foreheads nearly touching. I don’t know where to start, so I go with the question that keeps popping into my mind. “Where did you go when you left school?”
He threads his fingers with mine. “I was broke when I was kicked out of school, had about five hundred bucks to my name that I’d saved from working at the car wash downtown, no car ’cause Memphis had already totaled it. I got a small storage unit for my shit, slept in it the first few nights, but the manager was tipped off by someone and made me leave. Turned out those thugs were watching me around the clock. I had no privacy, and if I did something they didn’t like, they let me know.”
The way he says it with a light sharpness and crease of his brows has me thinking they didn’t use their voices.
“I started staying at some charge-by-the-hour hotel; it was disgusting but cheap. Every time I’d find work, they’d fuck it up and get me fired. Force me to leave mid shift for a quick alley fight or drive us a few counties over to another crew’s stomping grounds, put me in the ring with dudes three times my size, and I couldn’t say no.” He considers something a moment, tracing my lips with his eyes before meeting mine. “I was hospitalized once. Just for a few days, but all it did was leave me with another bill, and then the school decided I had to pay them back for the damages. That was another bill I couldn’t pay. The main dude found out and paid off both as a show of ‘good faith,’ as he called it. Psycho motherfucker,” he mumbles the last part.
My heart aches, literally, the pain sharp and constant.
All this time, I was heartbroken, assuming he didn’t need me anymore, that he never cared the way I was so sure he had, that I was so easy to leave, being both my brother and his best friend, my foster brother, the boy next door could simply forget me when I didn’t wake a day without thoughts of them. None of it was true.
He not only needed me, he loved me, and with that love came the largest act of selflessness I’ve ever heard of.
Crew gave years of his life away for me. To keep me safe.
His silent pledge of love and loyalty.
“When did it get better?” I ask.
“When I met Willie.” A small smile forms on his lips and he tugs his hand free, wrapping it around me and tugging me closer, sitting up slightly, so his back is pressed against the headboard, my body slightly cradled in his. “A year of shitty hotels and no money, they finally trusted me not to run and let me get a real job. I went to the bar, met Will, and I don’t know. He understood me, without me having to share shit, and convinced the manager at the time to give me a job. Then he gave me a room. I still had the Mazda Memph crashed to pay off, so I took a few fights to help with that for fun, but with some guys I met at the bar, not the gang who made me. I was good at it and enjoyed it, so being able to choose to fight instead of being forced felt good.
“Eventually, the debts were all paid, and my life was mine again. I saved enough to get my apartment, worked up the nerve to call my brother and ask him to come here. I needed to rebuild all I broke, so I started with Drew, and then I worked my ass into the ground, both at the bar and a fight or two here and there, just trying to find a way to look myself in the mirror and not hate what I saw. Will and Layla helped with that too.”