All of You by Christina Lee

Author:Christina Lee [Lee, Christina]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2013-09-16T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

My phone rang early Saturday morning. Too early. When I saw it was my brother, I immediately went into panic mode. The kid always slept late. “Adam, what’s wrong?”

“It’s Mom.” He sounded breathless. “She didn’t come home last night, which didn’t surprise me—you know, her usual Friday night at the bar. I just figured she went to someone’s place and got laid.”

Hearing my brother talk like that about my mother was normal, but it still bothered the shit out of me. Did other kids have these kinds of fucked-up conversations about their own parents?

“And?” It had to be something serious for Adam to call me this early.

“Anyway, she came home this morning and tried to hide in her room,” he said. “Avery, she’s one hot mess. She’s got a swollen lip and a black eye.”

“What the hell?” I sat up in bed. “Did she say what happened?”

Adam sighed. “I’m pretty sure I already know.”

“What, Adam?” I reached for my jeans on the floor and pulled them on. “Goddamn it, tell me.”

“I didn’t want to mention it to you before, but she’s been seeing Tim again.”

The blood drained from my face. “What?”

“She asked me not to tell you, and I figured it would go nowhere fast,” he said. “He hasn’t been over more than two or three times. But last night I heard her on the phone, so I knew she was meeting him.”

“That son of a bitch,” I said and smashed my fist into my mattress. “I’m hopping in the shower and driving down right now.”

“Mom will be pissed, but I didn’t know what else to do,” he huffed out. He sounded relieved. “I need you, sis.”

“You did the right thing.”

The hour drive home just made me more furious. Maybe now Mom would finally believe what a sick fuck Tim was and that he was prone to violence. I couldn’t stop my hands from gripping the damn steering wheel so hard that my fingers were beginning to swell from the pressure.

I almost wished I would have killed Tim when I had the chance. But I might be sitting in jail right now if I had. There were no witnesses, and my mom sure as hell didn’t believe me. Tim had been a cop at the time, and the force was a tight-knit group. The only reason Tim finally left my mom is because my ex-boyfriend Gavin’s father was the mayor and my threat against him worked.

But I knew Mom still blamed me to this day for running him off.

When I turned down Maple Drive, I felt that familiar tension in my stomach. I hadn’t been here in months, but just driving through my old neighborhood still had the power to make me feel like an outsider, like I no longer belonged. Hell, I was proud of that fact. But somehow, passing by the city hall and high school stadium reduced me to lost-teenager status again.

I pulled up the busted concrete driveway and parked next to Adam’s brown beater, still going strong after two years.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.