Hot And Cold – Tegan Phillips

She pulls me back to face her, not letting me get in the car. “I’m not strong enough to go through this again,” I tell her after a moment. The admission is quiet but the words feel like knives against my throat. “What do you mean?” Lyndsey slips both of her hands into mine, standing only a foot away, trying to catch my eye while I do my best to look away.

“When my parents died, I came home from college, I had to be here but everyone was crumbling.” I still refuse to meet her eye but I can feel her gaze against my skin. “No one should have to bury their child, but Pops fell so far into his grief that he couldn’t help us with ours. Celia cried for days barely understanding what was happening and Eden all but stopped talking. Alice helped where she could but softness doesn’t come easy to her, she wanted to rage, to break things and yell at the universe so I had to be the raft.

I had to hold everyone together while hiding the cracks in my own heart. I don’t think I can be the rock again, Lyndsey. It nearly killed me.” “Then I’ll be the rock.” Then my eyes meet hers. We lock intensely. There is no way she means what I think she does. “What?” “Your sisters will need you but when the load gets heavy, give it to me.

I’ll be right here, Aiden.” One of her hands comes up to cradle my jaw, her soft skin rubs against my stubble. “This marriage has done me a favour too, Aiden. We’re going to be free to go about our lives as we were meant to soon enough. And no matter how stubborn I might seem, I’m not stubborn or evil enough to turn my back just because I have what I want. I can joke all day long, but if you need a soft place to land, I can be that.

You’re my husband after all.” “I can’t ask that of you.” My voice is a whisper in the summer breeze. “Well, I’m not giving you a choice,” she tells me, stepping even closer still, until we are nearly chest to chest. I know I shouldn’t but I can’t help but drop my forehead against hers.

Up close her green eyes have specks of brown that I can’t see from further away and it’s hypnotising.

Bees. That’s all I can hear when I come into consciousness. Bees buzzing around inside my head. Who let all these bees into my goddamn hotel room? That is the only explanation for the ringing in my ears. There is always a moment before you wake up when everything in life is right and just.

That lasts for a second before the reality of life sinks in. Sometimes it comes in waves and sometimes it’s a tsunami of memories thrashing against you. This morning is the former, a slow, soft trickle slowly bringing me back to the now. Sunlight flitters in through the blinds and I take the moment to bask in the feeling of its rays warming my face.

As I lie here with my eyes closed, I feel like I’m sunning on a beach. Soft sand under my warm skin and a hangover from all the sunset-coloured cocktails I drank lounging on a cabana instead of shots on the Vegas strip. Coming to Vegas to celebrate the end of the Seattle Spears hockey team’s season was supposed to be a fun weekend with my best friend and boss Ellis, her fiancé and his teammates; but I might have taken fun a little far.

I’m not the type of person who parties all night long, not any more anyway. Back in my early twenties drinking more nights a week than not was the norm in the circles I ran. I thought I had found people who were going to be by my side forever, people who understood me and the struggle I had growing up.

I was wrong. Not only did those friends not understand, they didn’t care. Looking back it’s not surprising that a bunch of party-central twenty- year-olds didn’t actually care about me or my problems, they cared about which bar to go to next. That’s not to say I stopped drinking altogether: I didn’t have a problem with drinking; I had problems I was trying to hide from with alcohol.

Last night I drank, and drank and drank some more. Ellis left the kids with Liam’s parents, Tracy and Alek, and she wanted to let loose. I’m the master at getting loose. I just wanted her to enjoy her first time in a different state to her two beautiful kids. Plus I wanted to get my ex out of my head.

For weeks Kayla has been texting me begging to have me back and no matter how much I ask her to stop, she just keeps going.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: b0a6457b367a2868
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 1,920,341 bytes (1.831 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 233
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 459.51 minutes
• Total Words: 91,902
• Total Characters: 468,263
• Average Words per Page: 394.43
• Average Characters per Page: 2009.71

Most Frequent Words

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