It was something I’d always wanted to do, and an option that had never really been open to me. It was expected that I’d go to school, expected that I’d complete college—hell, my trust fund depended on my majoring in something. I wasn’t even sure if my parents cared what I got my bachelors in. They just wanted me to come out with a college education—and so, my path had been set.
Until Grandaddy Ramsden had knocked me a curveball.
Glee filled me, and it settled inside for as long as it took me to head over toward the garage.
The estate was big, and there were three different houses on it. Where we lived, where Maria’s brother stayed when he wasn’t in school, and then the main house where her folks holed up. They were doomsdayers, and had the entire place kitted out with safe rooms and shit.
Though I had my home comforts and I was comfortable in our part of the property, it still gave me the creeps to wander around the common areas, knowing how many cameras were trained on me, but hell, I knew if there was a zombie apocalypse, I’d be safe.
Until Thea wasn’t, and then I might as well just get eaten.
No way was I going to live in a world where she wasn’t in it.
And that was why, a few minutes later, my heart sank when I read the rejection letter from Stanford.
Where I knew she was heading.
Where I knew her future lay.
A shaky breath escaped me, and I accepted that, for the next few years, our futures were going to take us on entirely different life courses.
Even as my brain registered it, even as I got it, I loathed it.
We’d be on two separate coasts, and I had a feeling that was why she’d picked Stanford in the first place—to get away from me.
But things were different now.
We were talking.
We weren’t having an affair, even if it felt nuts to me to think that what I had with Thea would be considered adultery. In my mind, what I had going down with Maria was totally that.
Every day and every night, even though her touch reviled me, I felt like I was a cheating scumbag.
I was Thea’s.
She was mine.
And we couldn’t be together.
Not until my fucker of a brother got his ass out of jail.
Eleven hundred and ninety-eight days.
Yeah, I had a countdown reminder on my phone for his parole board meeting.
I checked it every day.
Down to the minute and the hour. Hell, down to the second.
The minute he was out, Catholic or not, I was getting a divorce.
I didn’t give a shit if I had to beg, steal, or borrow—I’d be making sure that I was no longer tied to Maria the instant I could.
But, as I stared at the letters in my hand, one offering me a new life path, the other taking a choice from me, I wasn’t sure what to do.
Thea was my future. Maybe at eighteen, I shouldn’t know that. Maybe I should be questioning everything, doubting it all. I should be wanting to go to college, just to fuck anything in a skirt. I knew, before Thea, that was what I’d have done.
I’d have gone to school, done the shit I needed to do to access my trust fund, and then I’d have lived my life however the fuck I wanted.
Boning chicks here and there, doing whatever the fuck I wanted once I was out from under my family’s roof. Instead, I was out of that roof and into the pit of doom that was this place.
Thea had, somehow, turned my life around. She was a catalyst, and not always in the best way. That didn’t take away from the fact that I loved her, that I wanted her, but as shitty as it had been before her, things were definitely worse now.
For all that, she was my bright spark amid the gloom, the light that could guide me through the fog, and suddenly, I was now facing a future where she wasn’t there to be that for me anymore.
And the truth was, without her, I didn’t know how to handle the Stygian darkness heading my way.
THEA
“You should have told me, goddammit.”
I heard Adam’s voice, heard it and felt something inside me shiver in response.
God, I loved his deep rumble.
The thick Boston accent didn’t even offend me anymore. I’d been here long enough to get used to it, but even though my