Bad Boy Blues - Jessica Lemmon Page 0,1
I don’t deck Mack Browning on the clock again, I’ll be working, so you’ll see me around.”
“You did right by June, and Lila, sounds like. What an asshole,” Evan said. Brady appreciated the support. He wasn’t the only one in town who’d wanted to bloody Mack’s lip.
Evergreen Cove might be a lux, wealthy, touristy lake town, but they were small enough to gossip. He nodded his goodbye as Evan ambled off.
Brady climbed in his truck to go home to his girl, Lila. He’d scratch her favorite spot behind her ears, eat dinner, and grab some time at the gym later tonight. He was glad to have his routine back and, even though it’d been a long time since he’d had a girl to go home to, he was looking forward to that part the most.
Elliott McKinley navigated the nighttime road blanketed by pines on either side. Every once in a while, the gap would give her a vantage of the ink-black lake, the cloudy night, and the barely there moon lighting its surface. She’d been on the road for hours and was dead tired, but her destination was nigh.
Since she’d spent all those hours alone, and the radio station had looped every song into a veritable ear worm, she’d had a lot of time to think. Her looping thought at the moment? A timeline.
Six years, two months, four days.
Over and over, she thought about that. Six years. Six YEARS. That was how much of her life she’d sacrificed to her narcissistic ex-boyfriend. Not narcissistic as a metaphor. He was a literal narcissist. She’d justified Neil’s behavior at first. Sure, he’d seemed a touch infatuated with himself, but he’d also just landed partner at the most successful law firm in Northern Michigan. Yes, he was critical of her and intolerant of receiving criticism, but no one liked being judged. As each year rolled into the next, however, she’d noticed she missed working, missed being a part of a social network that wasn’t Neil’s. She’d missed having her own identity, which had been somehow lost behind his.
With spring, came rebirth. She’d left Neil and moved her few belongings to an empty part of her parents’ garage. She’d then moved into the guest bedroom of her parents’ gargantuan house in a gorgeous neighborhood north of Chicago.
But two months was way too long to live with her parents, much as she loved them, so she was embarking on an adventure. An independent one, though she didn’t feel independent yet. The borrowed BMW and the vacation house in Evergreen Cove were training wheels on a bike that was rickety from underuse. But her parents had insisted she lean on them. When Elliott’s therapist had agreed it’d be a good transition, she’d packed up the car and left.
Elliott’s father hadn’t been happy about her making the drive from Chicago to northern Ohio alone, but she’d needed the reminder that she could do things on her own. It was her mother who’d insisted that Elliott could handle the trip solo, and Elli had needed that vote of confidence more than her next breath.
The BMW’s trunk and backseat were stuffed with clothes, a cooler of food, plenty of beach reads in the form of physical paperback books, and an ancient laptop. The now-outdated computer had been ignored since Neil had outfitted their home with streamlined, cloud-based computers, tablets, and phones. He’d kept an eye on her that way, so those sleek, expensive electronics held zero lure now. As long as her clunkier version could connect to Wi-Fi, she’d be fine.
The map on the car’s display announced she was twelve minutes from the beach house. A thrum of excitement raced through her. Almost there. Almost home. A temporary home, but it counted.
“Six years,” she grumbled aloud, because no matter how much she felt like celebrating, six years was a horribly long time to have one’s head buried in the sand.
She yawned behind her hand before cranking the air conditioning down to keep herself awake. She’d had a late start, and traffic leaving Chicago had been a bitch. Plus, she’d stopped for a leisurely dinner for no other reason than she could. A dinner alone, ordering whatever she wanted and without Neil’s input. She’d actually heard his voice in her head as she ordered french fries to go with her steak. He’d criticized her for, among other things, eating unhealthy. Her therapist assured her this was normal, and that it’d take a while for that critical voice to be silenced.
Elli