Total pages in book: 69
Estimated words: 68583 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 68583 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 343(@200wpm)___ 274(@250wpm)___ 229(@300wpm)
I scrubbed my hands over my face and tried to figure out what my next step should be.
“I’ll go…”
Webber stopped me before I could take two steps. “Let me ask you something, Copper.”
I turned my full attention to Webber.
My best friend. “What?”
“You’ve spoken nonstop about how much of a problem she is for you,” he said. “I know that you didn’t know about all this,” he said. “But if you are going to get pissed at her for not telling you, now’s the time to let me know. I’ll handle it if you’re going to be pissed.”
He was right.
Anger and I seemed to be best friends for a very long time.
I’d tried, and failed, to get it under control.
But it was just this seething mass that writhed inside of me, even when I was sleeping. I went to bed pissed. Woke up pissed. Breathed, slept and ate pissed.
There wasn’t a time that I wasn’t pissed as hell.
Webber was right.
I didn’t have it in me to take care of her.
“Go,” I said. “I’ll stay with the baby.”
“Text Apollo,” Webber suggested as he started walking through the door. “It’s time to find everything there is to know about her, including whose kid this is.”
I watched him walk out, then looked at the baby in the box.
Still fast asleep, though moving around, likely about to wake up at any second.
Seeing as I had no clue what I was doing when it came to a kid, I didn’t want it to wake up.
I walked to the lights and flicked them off above the bar where the baby was still atop and then sat down and waited for word.
Word that I got a half hour later.
Webber:
Got her. Taking her home with me.
Me:
Is she okay?
Webber:
She will be. I’m sending someone for the baby.
I scrubbed my hand over my face, thankful that at least something had gone right tonight.
Two
Leave the toxic relationship before it makes you a motivational speaker.
—Roosevelt to Baker
BAKER
Life was supposed to be perfect.
Only, it hadn’t been perfect in so long that I didn’t know what perfect might look like anymore.
I wished I could call my parents.
I wished I could call my brothers and sisters.
But I knew what they would say.
They’d call me stupid for taking Joey back.
They’d point out that I’d made my bed, and I needed to lie in it.
I loved my family.
I loved them so much that it hurt.
But sometimes they couldn’t see the bigger picture.
And that bigger picture was me struggling to find a balance between wanting my baby to have his father in his life, and me being happy.
I’d tried.
I’d given it every single ounce of effort a woman could give.
I was tired.
I was overwhelmed.
I was hanging on by a thread.
“Joey,” I said carefully. “Please, please, can you take him for a minute so I can go shower? I have to go to my doctor’s appointment today.”
When I was pushing Holt out, I’d suffered a grade four tear.
I’d torn from my clit to my asshole, and had so many issues since that it was a wonder I could poop like a normal person.
Luckily, most of that was healed in the months since I’d given birth to him.
But that didn’t mean that the road from then to now hadn’t been tough.
Made tougher by Joey not pulling his weight.
I often asked myself what the hell I was thinking when I gave him a second chance.
Truthfully, I should’ve listened to my gut and my family and not given in.
But he’d begged and pleaded, and I’d given in.
Mostly because all of our finances were now combined, since we were supposed to get married this fall. We shared bank accounts. We shared cars. We shared everything, because we’d been together for so damn long that we’d probably be considered common law married. I’d refer to him as my husband occasionally, but I had been rethinking this whole idea of getting married.
To make matters worse, along with the tear from hell, I also suffered from postpartum depression.
At least, I’d decided that was what it was.
My mental health could very well be because my fiancé was an asshole and treated me and his son like shit.
From the moment I moved back in with Holt, he’d turned into a different person.
Gone was the sweet guy that I’d thought I had before we’d broken it off about two days before I delivered the baby.
In his place was a man that I didn’t know.
Joey didn’t cheat anymore.
He never left the house to be able to cheat.
One would think that was a good thing, right?
Wrong.
Joey worked from home as a financial planner from nine in the morning to five in the evening.
Once he was done “working,” he immediately moved to gamer mode and started playing with his friends online.
He played in tournaments, and when he wasn’t playing in tournaments, he was ‘practicing.’ And when he wasn’t doing that, he was sleeping.