*FREE WITH PAID BONUS CHAPTER*After being dumped by her boyfriend, Elodie Shepherd resigns herself to loving her older brother's best friend from afar, just like she always has, even though he only sees her as his best friend's immature kid sister.
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My fingers were raw and numb by the time the class was finished, but there was still a festering, lingering pain and unbidden manic energy coursing through my body, a live wire current that couldn't be cured by a single martial arts self defense class.
No, this kind of energy, rampant and racing and terrible in all its madness was something that could only be cured by the death defying adrenaline pain that seared itself up my body at thousands of feet in the air, with the wind blowing my hair through its lethal clutches and begging me to be an inch away from my own death.
I begged for a release unlike the sexual, craved the taunt of the risk and the reward of surviving, if I did indeed live through it.
"Are you okay? You seem...distant tonight."
I'd almost forgot I had brought Phoebe along with me to the studio.
"I'm fine. I don't know. Maybe I'm not, but I will be. I just need to hit something, repeatedly."
"Uh...didn't we just do that, like, for thirty minutes?"
I faked out a huff of laughter, rolling my shoulders to try and ease the tension there, but it kept creeping up when I wasn't looking, like a parasitic leech stealing all my light and happiness and drowning me in its depths.
"Come on, let's go grab something to eat."
I was about to reply as my phone began ringing.
It was an unknown number, but local.
"Hello?" I answered, trepidation leaking through my skin.
"Ellie? My sweet baby. Oh, tell me, how are you?"
My mother's voice reached my ears through the phone, and I couldn't breathe.
How long had it been since there had been actual warmth in her tone, actual love for me and her family shining on her face? How long, since she had decided to choose an abusive husband over her own daughter and son?
"Elodie? It's me, honey, it's your mama."
I couldn't get enough breath down my lungs, couldn't contract my chest enough to get it to stop pushing on my goddamned heart that was breaking, still breaking like it was ever whole in the first place.
"You have the wrong number," I replied in as gruff a voice I could manage, even though I'd answered in my normal tone, but I didn't give a shit. Not one single shit.
Not as she laughed over the other end of the phone and I was transported back to a place in time where she used to laugh freely, used to play with me outside on the swings and push me back and forth as I screamed for her to push me higher.
I was back in a time when we'd play wrestle on the floor and she'd attack me with tickles and kisses until I was half suffocated with the power of my own laughter, until there were streams of happiness and joy trickling out of the sides of my eyes, only a few years before those tears of joy became tears of pain and anguish and betrayal.
