Total pages in book: 105
Estimated words: 101662 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 508(@200wpm)___ 407(@250wpm)___ 339(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 101662 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 508(@200wpm)___ 407(@250wpm)___ 339(@300wpm)
“What about your friends from back then?” she asked as we walked over to the buffet for the afternoon. A Mexican food spread from a local restaurant was laid out in front of us, and the smells were enough to make my stomach rumble. Ava seemed less interested in the meal and more interested in asking me a million questions about my memory loss. “Or girlfriends. Did you have a girlfriend? Did you lose your friends?”
“A few people reached out, but it felt very hard to connect. I ghosted a lot of the people because I struggled with being what they expected me to be. Others ghosted me. I didn’t blame them. It was a very dark period.” I handed her a plate. “Why so many questions on this?”
“No reason,” she said, taking the plate. “I’ve just never met a rich person who forgot half their life.”
I laughed. “What makes you think I’m rich?”
She glanced around and waved her hands at everything. “Dude. You have an arcade room at your workplace, a whole room with candy, lunch catered every single day, a meditation room, and a Ping-Pong table. Only rich people do that.”
“Touché.”
“Plus,” she started, “I googled your net worth.”
“Those numbers are always extra extreme.”
“You built properties for A-list celebrities and royalty in England. I doubt the numbers are fluffed.”
Turns out Ava must’ve read my résumé.
She grabbed a few soft taco shells and began to fill them up with chicken and fajita peppers. “So, you didn’t have a girlfriend before you lost your memory?”
“Not that I know of. If I did, she never showed up,” I joked.
“But you didn’t have some kind of feeling in you…as if there was a person?”
I did. Often. I figured that was why I dated around so much and met up with so many different types of women. For a long time, I felt as if I was searching for something, but the older I grew, the more I realized the woman in my head only existed there. She was a figment of my imagination. I didn’t tell Ava all of that, though. It seemed too bizarre to mention to a fourteen-year-old.
“Sometimes, I get nudges,” I explained. “Hunches, I suppose.”
“Nudges and hunches?”
“Yes. As if something is familiar…but they don’t always lead anywhere.”
Ava frowned a little as she added toppings to the fajitas. “That kind of sounds like hell.”
“Language,” I scolded her.
“My mom said hell is a place, not a curse word. Anyway, I’m fourteen, Gabriel.”
“Oh, well, all right then.” Heck, I didn’t know what words fourteen-year-olds were allowed to say.
“Do you have a girlfriend now or are you single?” she asked as she continued to build her tacos.
“Single.”
“Do you like women?”
I smiled. “Love them. Quite a fan.”
“Do you want to get married someday? Have kids?”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Tick- tock, tick-tock,” she said, tapping the invisible watch on her wrist. “You’re kind of old to be single, and you’re not getting any younger.”
Once this kid’s shyness wore off, she didn’t pull her punches. “I’m only forty.”
“‘Only’ and ‘forty’ don’t belong in the same sentence. That’s like five hundred and four in dinosaur years.” She narrowed her eyes as she looked at me. “You have gray hairs in your beard.”
“Trust me, kid. Time flies faster than you think.”
“You’re just saying that because you blacked out and missed twenty-one years of time.”
“Again, touché.” I chuckled. Ava was a smart-ass and I appreciated it. “What about you, kid? Are you dating someone?”
“Gosh, no. Guys my age are just so…gross. That’s why I read my books. Fictional men will always do better by me than real boys. Men written by women are just better.”
I laughed. “I have absolutely no clue what that means.”
“It means the idea of boys is actually better than the reality of them.” She shrugged. “Plus, a lot of boys in the real world don’t like girls like me.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Girls like you?”
“You know.” She grew a bit somber as she looked down at herself. “Fat and ugly.”
My jaw dropped. I froze in my tracks as I held a spoon of crema in the air. “Who the fuck told you that lie?” I barked, feeling a newfound rage shoot through my body.
“Language,” Ava echoed.
“I’m forty years old. I can say ‘fuck.’ So again, who the fuck told you that lie?” I repeated, still beyond livid that this poor girl was told such bold-faced lies.
“Cory and James Harrison.”
“Who the fuck are Cory and James Harrison?!”
“Twin brothers from my school. They told me that on the last day of school. The whole school year, they’d moo behind me, too, and make pig noises and call me Porky Pig.”
“Where do they live?” I asked, dropping the spoon back into the container. “I’ll kick their fucking asses.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s a crime,” she said.
Then put me in prison.
Or at least let me beat up the assholes’ parents.