Bared Souls - Ellie Wade
PROLOGUE
Alma
From the very start, he told me that he’d destroy me. He warned me that he’d rip my heart out. He might not want to, but it would happen. And I believed him.
I knew he wasn’t lying, and yet I loved him anyway.
There are many types of love. The raw, deep, soul-crushing love is rare. I craved it, that connection. I wanted him and all that entailed.
Despite everything that happened, even now, I wouldn’t change any of it.
For a love to have the capacity to destroy you, it has to be extraordinarily powerful—and that kind of love is impossible to walk away from.
Regardless of the consequences.
He loved me fiercely, and I loved him back.
ONE
Alma
“This is you.” Amos nods toward the tan metal door.
At first glance, the color seems drab and depressing, but I shake that negativity from my head because this is college. I’m finally starting my life. Everything about the next four years is going to be epic. Drab door be damned.
I position the box I’m holding on my hip, securing it with one arm. My free hand extends out to my side toward my best friend. He repeats the motions with the box in his grasp and takes my pinkie in his.
“This is it.” He grins, our pinkies entwined between us—our eternal sign of our best-friend status.
I’ve been waiting for this day for years, ever since Amos told me about the magical place called college so many years ago. The first eighteen years of my existence were … interesting. My parents brought a huge set of challenges to the mix.
I, Almalee Hannelda Weber, named by my wannabe-hippie parents, was raised by immature humans with a love for illicit substances. My parents had been mere babies during Woodstock and not yet in middle school when the whole peace-and-love era fizzled out in the early 1970s. Yet there aren’t two people who would look more comfortable driving around in a lime-green Volkswagen bus with bright flowers painted all over it than Alman and Lee-Ann Weber.
My dad, Alman, was a first-generation American with parents who had immigrated here from Germany in the 1960s. My mom, Lee-Ann, was a first-generation American as well. Her parents had come here from Venezuela around the same time.
They combined their first names to get mine, and my middle name is the combination of both of my grandmothers’ names—Hannah and Esmerelda.
Utter geniuses, my parents.
They love me, in their own way—though I’ve been reminded many times that I was an oops baby—but they love their free lifestyle more.
My father’s priorities can be summarized by his two tattoos. The largest across his chest are the symbols for peace, love, and marijuana. Then, he has a band of ivy and daisies around his arm with my mother’s name scattered throughout the design.
Lee-Ann’s philosophy on motherhood can be summed up in her favorite anecdote that she brings up anytime she’s reliving the story of my birth, and that is, “The first thing I told those doctors was that they’d better tie my tubes the second after they pulled that baby out, so I’d never risk having another.” She labels her emergency C-section as a gift because it allowed her to get the tubal ligation for less money since the doctors were already in there.
It is what it is, and I love my parents. They love me the best they can even if I did practically raise myself. I’m just so grateful that the sweetest little boy lived next door from me, growing up. Without Amos, I’m not sure where I’d be.
I’d probably be living on a naked commune. I’m not exaggerating when I say that my parents have taken me to enough naked camps in my life to scar me for life. One wouldn’t think that such a thing existed, especially with children in attendance, but I’m here to tell you that they do. Truthfully, I would never walk in my parents’ shoes. I was born, wanting to be what they weren’t and to do everything with my life that they hadn’t. I saw early on that I wanted more. It wasn’t something that had been taught to me. I just knew inherently that I needed more in my life.
I’ve worked hard to get here. Neither parent attended a teacher conference or asked me if I did my homework even once throughout my schooling, and I still graduated with perfect grades. Amos and I were co-valedictorians of our graduating class. Years of hard work got me a full-ride scholarship to EMU, Eastern