Things Remembered (Accidentally On Purpose Companion Novel #3) by L.D. Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

sorry. Please wake up. I’m sorry. I’m sorry…
    Then I am in someone’s arms, my ear pressed against a chest. I can’t hear his heartbeat over the sounds of my own sobs, but I can feel the steady rise and fall of his chest, and I can smell him. That smell. That clean, soft, and masculine smell.
    “It will be okay,” Grant Alexander murmurs in my ear.
    “Yes, it will be okay,” Sharice’s voice says from somewhere behind me.
    But they both lied, because nothing was ever okay ever again.
     

     
    Truth or Fiction: I hated my mother’s passiveness.
    Truth. Only my dreams showed me how much I actually hated it.
    Truth or Fiction: I had a violent psychopathic fugue and attacked my mother.
    Truth. I was sixteen when it happened.
    Truth or Fiction: I enjoyed beating my mother.
    Fiction. I can’t tell you that I did enjoy beating my mother. I don’t remember it much because I was high.
    Truth or Fiction: Taylor witnessed me beating my mother.
    Fiction, mostly. Taylor had not been born when I had that VPF, but she had witnessed me pushing my mother around when she was very young.
    Truth or Fiction: My father died in front of me.
    Truth. My father did die. I was the one who sent him to an early grave.
    As the sun began to lighten the sky beyond my bedroom windows, I sat up in bed and tried to shake off the adrenaline, fear, and devastation I felt. My brain began the quick work of sorting through what was fact and what was fiction and what was unknown. I busied myself with my daily morning routines when all I wanted to really do was to pick up that damn phone and make the call, or, at least, sit down and fold paper until I created another stupid flower or another stupid star.
    I made myself keep moving because I was in control. I was in complete control as long as I stayed on schedule. As long as I followed my routines, I was in control.
    Truth or Fiction: My control was true. My control was real.
    Fiction: My control was an illusion.
     

Chapter Six
     
    My nightmare clung to me like a sticky residue. I couldn’t shake it.
    I’d been having the reoccurring dream for years. Elements of it changed all the time, but Grant and Sharice had never had a place in it before. Another truth about my dream was that I’d spent the days and weeks after my father’s death in a psychiatric ward without visitors or contact with the outside world. Grant wasn’t my boyfriend at that time—he hadn’t even moved back to the state at that point—but Sharice had been there for me when I’d come out of the hospital.
    Sharice…
    I thought that I had forgotten the sound of her voice and the musicality of her laughter, but it had been buried in my mind like so many other things, but somehow, the dream uncovered that precious memory. Hours after dreaming of her, I could hear her in my head clearly.
    I wondered if Grant remembered how his sister had sounded, or if like me, he mostly just remembered how she looked when she was dead.
    I was only a little surprised to find him standing in front of the coffee shop again. Perhaps it was time for me to find a new route to work.
    “Good morning, Mayson,” he said as I approached. He offered me a cup and a bag as he’d done the morning before.
    I didn’t take them.
    “What do you want, Grant?” I asked with mild exasperation.
    “I told you yesterday. I want to talk.”
    “We have nothing to—”
    “We have everything to talk about, Mayson.”
    “I don’t want to speak to you.” My works escaped through gritted teeth.
    He looked at me for a long time, his dark eyes searching mine. I didn’t know what he was looking for, but I had the eerie feeling that he was able to see the parts of me that I kept hidden, not just from everyone else, but even from myself.
    I broke eye contact first, because even if it was just my imagination, I didn’t like the idea of him seeing those hidden parts of me.
    “If you didn’t want to talk to me, you would have kept on walking,” he said, closing the