“It’s okay,” I whisper, giving her an encouraging smile. “I can get revenge when you’re an old lady and I put you in a nursing home.”
She sucks in a sharp gasp. “You wouldn’t do your sweet momma wrong like that.”
“Just you wait and see.”
She shakes her head and goes to step around me when she stops and looks back at me. “What are you doing here? I didn’t have you scheduled to work. You need to catch up on your studies so you can get into a good college.”
“I know, I just had a shitty day at school and thought that I could use something to keep my mind off it.”
Mom shakes her head. “Absolutely not. You’re not using work as an escape. Why don’t you head up to the library and pick something to read? That should take your mind off whatever awful things happened at school. You love reading and you’ve hardly read anything since moving here.”
I press my lips into a tight line and meet her eyes. “That’s not actually a bad idea.”
“Good, now get out of here and go and relax, but don’t take your eye off the time. You always tend to get lost in those books of yours and next thing you know, you’ve missed dinner and it’s after three in the morning.”
I laugh, knowing just how right she is. It’s a sickness really.
Mom disappears and I’m left to make my way up to the library. I find the elevator and within moments, I’m stepping through to my favorite room in the house. I’m still baffled by how amazing this is. What normal people have a fully stocked library in their home? It’s insane.
I quickly begin my search, desperately trying to ignore the memories of Colton devouring my pussy like a fucking king on these very shelves. It doesn’t take long before I’m getting lost in the titles and covers, scanning over the blurbs and picking out a whole freaking pile that I wish I could somehow read in one night.
I narrow down my search and am just about to settle on Jaymin Eve’s latest release when the elevator pings and the doors slide open. I freeze on the spot as Casey steps through to the library and the second she lifts her eyes from the ground, she stops and we stare at each other like deer caught in headlights.
“Umm …” I say awkwardly. “I was uhh, just leaving.”
“Oh, umm … you don’t have to leave on my account. I’m just going to grab a book and go read in my room.”
“Okay, sure,” I say, still unable to move from my spot. “You don’t mind that I’m reading your books?”
Her eyes flitter across the room as though she’s trying to look busy as she searches for her book but it’s pretty damn clear that she’s just trying to avoid making awkward eye contact with me. “I mean, are you going to bend the pages or write notes in the margins?”
I suck in a horrified breath. “No.”
“So, how do you mark your page?”
“What are you talking about?”
“If you had to put the book down to go and pee or something like that, what do you do?”
My brows furrow, trying to figure out where the hell she’s going with this. “I put a bookmark in and then go pee.”
Casey shrugs her shoulders. “Then I don’t mind, as long as you put it back exactly where you got it from, I don’t care. It took me forever to organize all of these books.”
“I can imagine,” I say, noting how not only are they arranged by genre, but each of those genres is also organized into alphabetical order. “You’ve got a pretty good system. It was really easy to find what I was looking for.”
“Oh, yeah?” she questions, spying the book in my hand. “Who are you reading?”
I hold up the book to show her the cover. “Jaymin Eve,” I say. “She’s freaking amazing. Have you read her?”
Casey’s face lights up like Christmas morning. “Hell yeah! Of course, I have. Jaymin is incredible. I love her work. I fell in love with her back in the ‘Hive Trilogy’ days. That series rocked my world. Have you read Amo Jones or J Bree? I was going to start ‘Hannaford Prep’ today.”
“No way. I finished that series just before I came to Bellevue springs. It’s so fucking dark and twisted.”
“That’s what I’ve heard,” she says as her eyes widen. “Come and check this out. If you love that shit, you’ll love this.”
I find myself following her deeper into the library and somehow we spend the next hour going over all the books that we’ve fallen in love with and with each new title I list, she instantly adds it to her Amazon cart and hits buy. I gape at her, wishing I had that power with my credit card … oh, wait. I don’t even have a fucking credit card.