Whiskey Girl by Adriane Leigh

Author:Adriane Leigh [Leigh, Adriane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHTEEN

Fallon

“I cried myself to sleep for months,” she whispered, eyes trained on the lines of the freeway blurring out the windshield. “It was unreal. I didn’t think I had so many tears.”

I couldn’t even begin to form words, her story far more fucked-up than I’d thought.

“And then I wrote you a million letters. Three a day for the first few weeks.” She shook her head as if she was embarrassed by the silly girl she’d been.

“I wish like hell I’d gotten those letters.” My eyes met hers across the cab of my truck. “I woulda come for you. I wouldn’t have been able to help myself.” I gripped the wheel, so much regret flooding my body. “Your parents were gone for months, out on their boat, I heard later. Everyone wondered where you went. It was the talk of the town for so fucking long. And then whenever I walked into the corner store, the bar, my goddamn cousin’s auto shop, everyone in the room would hush, eyes following my every move as if I knew where you were. As if I’d done something to you.” I took a quiet breath. “They looked at me like they wondered if I’d killed you.”

She bundled herself up a little tighter in my heavy flannel jacket, sucking in a ragged breath before unbuckling her seat belt and sliding across the bench seat until our thighs were touching.

I breathed a little easier then, havin’ her close.

Like the slow burn of warm whiskey down the back of my throat, tingles left on my lips, and surrender in my tired muscles, touching Augusta Belle Branson had been the only crutch I’d needed to get through some of the hardest revelations of my life.

I’d constructed some sort of story in my head about what’d happened the day she left, but it hadn’t been anything like what’d really transpired.

I slung my arm around her shoulders, hugging her a little closer to me as we drove on toward Tupelo, leaving our pasts behind and confronting something new every mile along the way.

“Hell, Augusta Belle,” I breathed her sweet name from my lips, the sensation it left an intoxicating one. “There was a time I wondered if you were dead.” I shook my head, remembering so many sleepless nights, her on my mind. “Those letters woulda been a game changer.”

She snuggled into the crook of my arm, one of her little hands resting on the rough denim of my thigh. “I kept them for a long time. Years. I didn’t throw them away until I left college. I used to read them on the bad days, but at some point, it was all just too much. I couldn’t keep reliving it.”

I nodded slowly, for the first time wishing I hadn’t been so hard to find. If I woulda parked my ass in Nashville and kept on with the high-profile life, it woulda been easier for her to find me. But that life… I just couldn’t keep fakin’ it anymore.

“So what

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