by Tia Siren
His voice grew louder, more menacing and he put his controller aside. A bad sign.
“I just thought that—”
“You thought wrong,” he growled. “Who the hell do you think you are, coming in here and bothering me all the time? You know what happened. You know what I’ve been through, how hard…”
My brother’s outburst lit a match in my heart and, like gunpowder, I exploded.
“You have it hard?” I demanded, leaping to my feet. “I work twelve-hour freaking shifts to put food on the table, pay the rent and my tuition, while all you do is laze around doing nothing!”
My verbal assault was useless. It broke upon him like a stiff breeze on a stone wall. Bill bent, picked up his video game controller, and resumed playing his game.
“Then leave,” he grunted, simply and irrevocably.
It was this, of all things, that made me break into tears. I tried to hold them back so he wouldn’t see me cry, but I couldn’t do it. Eventually, he paused his game again and turned toward me.
“Look,” Bill said, his voice as hard and cold as stone, “no one’s keeping you here. You can go around feeling sorry for yourself, like I’m making you work so hard, but I’m not. You don’t like it? Then get the hell out of here.”
He didn’t yell. He intoned as if each word were a hammer blow upon nails that sank into my heart. Unable to contain myself, I fled to my room and dissolved into tears on my bed. My day had been so long—a twelve-hour shift long—and then I had to come home to this.
As I cried, I remembered my brother how he used to be. Smart. Confident. Strong. Unstoppable. With his whole future lined up ahead of him. Then, that fateful night happened.
For a moment, I wondered if we would have been better off had the cops shot him that night instead of just arresting him. My parents would have been devastated, of course, but considering that they died in a car crash two years later, they wouldn’t have suffered long anyways. As for me, I would be crying my eyes out right now, that was for sure.
However, things were as they were and, for the past five years, I had kept the promise I made to my mother’s grave and looked after Bill.
But now, it was killing me.
Half-ashamed and half-defiant, I pulled out my phone from my pocket and gazed at the little picture of Jesse Valen on the screen until I fell asleep. He was a man central to the whole mess my life had become and still, even though that tiny picture, his smile made me feel warm inside.
He was also a man who, for a little while anyway, just might come back into our lives.
*****
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About Me
Other than my insatiable desire for chocolate, reading and writing steamy romances is my most guilty pleasure.
I write about tough and sexy Bad Boys who, underneath that armor of muscles and tattoos (and sometimes suits), are more sensitive and wounded than they'd like to admit.
I'm happily married to a really good guy, but, every now and again, I crave the forbidden excitement of falling for one of the bad boys in my stories.
There really is a bad girl in me too!
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