Shattered by Sylvie Fox

Author:Sylvie Fox [Fox, Sylvie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-944179-26-7
Publisher: Penner Publishing

Chapter 13

Adonis

He’d pressed the nuclear button.

It would be only moments before an explosion came.

Any moment now.

They’d long abandoned normal dating rituals. Coffee on the first date. Dinner and a movie on the second. Sex on the third and fourth. Trading secrets on the fifth. At least that was what was in the doctors’ waiting room magazines he’d occasionally thumbed through on dating and mating.

Watching a sex tape and admission of manslaughter somehow weren’t in the normal course.

Gemma knocked back her sherry as though she were in a parched desert and it was the only liquid available. After she swallowed, she asked the inevitable. “You killed someone?”

“Not on purpose.”

He wondered just how much Gemma had had to drink that afternoon, because her walk from the desk to the bed was unsteady. She sank down on the bed as if it was a lover’s embrace. Her sigh said she was unsure how to proceed. It was as if she was unsure of whether she wanted to know the details, the truth, any of it. She admired the ceiling beams a long time before she spoke.

“When was this?”

“About a dozen years now,” he said, mentally counting on his fingers, realizing that it was more than a decade. Emily would have been in her thirties had she lived.

“Thank God,” she said laying fluttering hands on her chest. “How old was she? You said you were something bad that happened. What was that?”

“I have a sister. Zoe. Zoe Andreis.”

Gemma’s brow furrowed deeply. “The comic strip artist? It’s called…Wanderlust?”

“One and the same,” he said, both surprised and not that she’d heard of his sister. She was probably kind of famous in her own way.

“So you have a sister,” Gemma prompted.

“Who’s not speaking to me.”

“Giovanni would say something like ‘you’re beating around the bush.’”

“Who’s Giovanni?” He needed a field guide to her entourage.

Gemma turned pink in deep contrast with her hair. “Someone I talk to. Lives close by. He’s got a wife.”

He spun around in the chair to fully face Gemma. Once and for all face the past that he tried like hell to put behind him. He knew if he started this story, he wouldn’t be able to stop. It had to be done in one fell swoop, like he was at the podium during an AA meeting. So he took a fortifying breath and plunged in. Images of the past filled his mind as though twelve years ago was only twelve minutes ago.

“Can you walk in those shoes?” he had asked his little sister, Zoe, and her friend Emily Little. The shoes in question were as pointy as a witch’s hat everywhere: at their tip, at their heel. Despite their nodding, he gave them five minutes before they cried mercy, ten tops.

“Do it all the time in the city. If we can walk in New York, it shouldn’t be a problem where everyone drives,” Emily said laughing and doing a little dance in the witch shoes.

When he’d said his goodbyes to Zoe on her way

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