Crashing Into You
You Rock Me
My Best Friend’s Girl
Then There Was You
Must Love Curves
Preview You Rock Me
Glenna Maynard writing as Allie Faye
He’ll rock more than her heart.
My only goal as soon as I graduate is leaving this small town and everyone in it behind but then he happens. Kai Cooper is broody and mysterious. He’s everything I said I didn’t want. A bad boy musician on the road to stardom. A complication I never saw coming. He’s got secrets that not only rock my heart, they shatter my world, leaving me to pick up the pieces.
Suffocation is the process of asphyxiation.
Asphyxia, derived from the Greek language, meaning without a heartbeat.
Being loved is just like being suffocated.
This is the Suffocation of Katie.
Chapter 1
Slender, cold fingers pluck one of my earbuds out. “Straight home after school.”
“Yes, mother,” I groan, not bothering to look at her. She kisses the top of my head, and I shrink away from her touch. It’s not that I don’t love my mother. I do. There are just some things that alter your perception of people. Once you know their dirty truth, there is no going back with them. I carry my mother’s guilt—her sins are with me every day…I suppose that makes me a hypocrite, considering I have guilt and sins of my own.
She sticks my bud back in my ear, and I continue to slurp the last of the milk circling the bottom of my cereal bowl. I shiver as I get the last drop. The past year has been rough. The heating in our old house isn’t that great. I taped a trash bag over my bedroom window to try to keep some of the draft away.
We can’t afford my getting sick again. Two years ago, I came down with pneumonia and spent a very dull week in the hospital. My mom, she missed a lot of work, so she could sit at my bedside and paint my toenails pink. I hate pink. I think she did it trying to get a rise out of me, but I begged her to go home. Honestly, I think she was there because my doctor was young and hot. And well…my mother, she n
ever passes up a chance to flirt with a good-looking man, especially one who has money.
No one knows what my home life is like. I lie to everyone. I tell my friends that my mother is only a waitress at the local diner. The lie is much easier than the truth. My mother doesn’t only work the normal nine to five at the diner…she turns tricks on the side. My mother is a glorified prostitute. Classy, right? I hate it.
My mom didn’t grow up dreaming of being a hooker. She said that men were going to take that piece of her regardless. She might as well be paid for it.
She says to me, ‘Katie, I do everything I do, because that’s how much I love you.’
Have you ever had someone love you so much that you feel like you can’t come up for air? That is how much my mother loves me, although I’m the product of rape. Her love is suffocating—being loved is just like being suffocated.
My mother has never told me who my father was or is. I can’t imagine how hard it was for her to make the choice to raise me, but she did. I love her for loving me that much, but some days it is so overwhelming.
Our home is far from fancy, we live on the rougher side of the train tracks. Most of our furniture is hand me downs from friends. I babysit on the weekends for cash to get what I need for school, but it barely covers my supplies. We really can’t afford the rent here, even with government assistance, but mom has a deal worked out with the landlord, or as I call him, the slumlord. What kind of deal do they have? I don’t want to know.
My mother lights up her cigarette, adding to the already stale smell of smoke and liquor. I hate going to school smelling like a bar.
I place my bowl in the sink and slip my hoodie on over my t-shirt. Then I grab my black faded messenger bag I scored at the missionary for free last week after tucking my iPhone inside. I feel naked whenever I forget it. The only reason I have my phone is because it’s Penny’s old one. I just have to pay my bill. I do one of those prepay monthly deals. I would never be able to afford it otherwise.
I’m not big into church, but I love gospel music and singing with the choir. I started going to church because when my mom gets angry with me she calls me an abomination, and I wanted God to know that I’m not something bore from hate. I try so hard to be a good person. It may be weird to some but church is where I go on evenings I know my mom has a ‘date’. I am always afraid one of her clients will think they can have me as well. It’s safer if I’m not home.
Our neighbors probably think that my mother is a drug dealer with all the men who come and go throughout the week. But then again, the old woman next door can hardly hear or see, so she probably doesn’t even notice.
I wave at Mrs. Jennings as I shut the front gate to our yard.