Love Him Free (On the Market #1) - E.M. Lindsey Page 0,4
of his sight for even a second, they’d be taken from him. Then he remembered Ema was sitting just an arm’s reach away when her life ended—and he knew then it didn’t matter what he did or where he sat. Or if he kept to his own bed.
Nothing was permanent.
“I’ll be okay. Do you want a story?”
“The rabbits,” Levi told him with a sleepy yawn.
He took his brother’s hand and walked him to the room next to his. Levi’s bed was covered in 101 Dalmatians toys with matching pillowcases, and he tugged his Pongo close as he burrowed into the covers like a small nest. Simon selected Watership Down and fought back a sort of anguished laugh at how morbid and sweet his brother was, all wrapped up in bright, wondering eyes and wild curls.
He sometimes wondered—more than he wondered about himself—what Levi would be like when he grew up. He was so much like their Bubbe—free spirted and without fear. He rushed head-first into anything, and he had tiny burn marks all over his arms that he didn’t care about because they were the marks of his early baking triumphs that he’d been accomplishing at Bubbe’s knee since he was old enough to walk. Levi was still so young, but already Simon could tell this was where he thrived.
The last thing in the world Simon wanted was to be stuck here—in this little apartment, sweating in that kitchen, toiling his life away.
Bubbe said it was his legacy though, and every time she said it, it felt like someone pressing a pillow to his face. But he’d do it, if she needed him to. He’d do it if it meant that Levi got to race head-first into the wildness of real life and freed himself from the chains of this small town.
He cleared his throat and started to read, and six sentences in, Levi was breathing even and deep. Simon was pretty sure they’d never get through the book. Levi could never keep his eyes open when Simon read to him, but it was worth it. He set the book back on the shelf and leaned in to kiss his brother’s forehead. Levi murmured and turned over, and Simon wondered what it would be like to sleep without the heaviness of life pressing in on him.
He was just eighteen when his letter of acceptance came in. He almost hadn’t applied out of state, terrified of the cost because Bubbe wasn’t exactly raking in millions with her small bakery. But when he’d hesitated, she took him by the cheeks and kissed him on the nose and let her eyes convince him as much as her words.
“Do something that makes you happy, Simon. It’s not forever. It’s just for a little while.”
He understood she mistook his fear to leave this place for fear of being alone. That wasn’t it—not at all. Levi was heading into middle school and he was wild and had grown from curious to a little mean, and Simon wasn’t sure he had the strength to leave him. All the same, he craved silence. He craved a space where all the corners were filled with himself, and not the echoes of dead parents, and a struggling grandmother, and brother who was just growing more sullen by the day.
In the end, he turned in four applications, and the one acceptance letter took him almost a thousand miles to the West Coast—a journalism program with a vague idea of working with words, something he’d been good at as long as he wasn’t speaking out loud. Bubbe couldn’t afford to take time off for the campus tour, but she presented him with a set of car keys and his first tuition check, and a warm kiss the day he set out to leave her.
On the first stretch of empty miles, he cried, but by the time he made it through Arizona, it felt like the entire world was ahead of him. If he’d known that it was all going to crash down in three years, he might have stopped to appreciate more. Or hell, he might have just stayed home and not tried to seek freedom at all.
But it was what it was—and that was something he was coming to learn with a ferocity that consumed him. No matter what he did, what bargains he made, God had plans for him. Even if there was no God at all.
Chapter Two
Sitting in the dark, Rocco stared at the faint glow of his laptop