Dust Eva Everson (story reading txt) 📖

the night they’d really gotten to know each other. Even five years later, the memory of Kyle walking into her apartment, slipping into her bed, and loving her as if she were the most beautiful woman in the world made her feel warm. Fuzzy.

She loved him. She loved him. Kyle Lewis had given her something she’d never thought she’d have—security. Security within family. Within love. And laughter. Lots of laughter. Everything she thought had been meant for everyone but her. The only thing missing was Michelle, but Kyle had managed to convince her that to take Michelle away from Westley after she’d been with him so long wouldn’t have been best for her daughter, her baby who had turned seventeen last November. A junior in high school now. Beautiful and smart and talking about pre-med after graduation. Emory University, she thought. Which would put her in the Atlanta area. Perhaps Michelle would move in with them then. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants? They’d have all the time in the world. Every day. Every night. And she could talk to her daughter whenever she wanted.

Not that she couldn’t now. They talked all the time. They emailed, a somewhat new thing Cindie didn’t 100 percent understand but enjoyed. They also spent as many of the holidays together as the courts allowed.

Having their son—hers and Kyle’s—helped ease the pain a little—not that one child could ever replace another. The only thing that worried her, truly worried her, was how much Karson looked like Patterson. “Spitting image” as the old saying went. There were times when she wondered if Kyle would see it, too. But then she reminded herself that her husband had only taken one class with Professor Thacker. He hadn’t seen the man as often—or in the same way—as she had. He didn’t know the line of his face the way she did. The square of his jaw. The line of his brow. The way it rose when he laughed; the way it furrowed when he grew angry.

Cindie sniffed hard as she crawled from one lane of 285 to the next, anticipating her exit. She bristled, bringing her index finger and thumb up to play with the oversized earrings pulling at her lobe. Even after six years, that one inkling of the night she told Patterson about her pregnancy unnerved her. He’d called her the next morning—thankfully while Kyle was in the shower. She answered, heard his voice, and immediately hung up. He called again. She picked up the handset, set it back in its cradle, then took the phone off the hook, grateful that the bedroom’s extension wasn’t cordless. When Kyle emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a cloud of steam and spied the handset on the bedside table, she convinced him she didn’t want their first real morning together to be interrupted by a phone call. Especially since they’d both decided to “call in sick.”

But Patterson had been persistent. Persistent as she was stubborn. By the time he finally caught up to her, a week had passed. A week of being with Kyle every night. A week of learning, in seven short days, what real love felt like. No. Adoration was what it was. And it was nothing like she’d experienced in all the years she’d been with the professor or the one night with Westley.

Patterson had called her name as she stepped out of the car, startling her. But she’d prepared herself. She’d rehearsed exactly what she would say and how she would deliver the words. “Stop right there,” she told him, then searched her workplace parking lot for any sign of his car. Finding it at the end of a long line of automobiles, she returned her attention to him.

“Look,” he replied, his voice pleading. “I know I said some things—”

“I said stop.”

He jerked. She flinched. Then, righting herself, she took in a deep breath and, having exhaled fully, recited her lines. “Patterson, I want you to go back to your car, and then I want you to get in it and drive away. To the college. Or home. Wherever it is you need to be, it’s not here.” Other cars pulled in and circled in search of their assigned spots. Cindie knew them all. If necessary, she’d ask one of them to call the police.

If necessary.

“Cindie.”

“No.” She raised her hand. He looked at it, then back to her face. Her eyes. “I do not want to have to keep going over this. I’m taking care of …” She looked down. Back up. “Of all this.”

“Does that mean—”

“It means I’m taking care of it. And then I’m taking care of me.” Her eyes found his again and held. She was ready now. Ready for the next rehearsed line, whether she felt it or not. “No more victimization, Patterson. I’m done playing that role.”

“You?” he asked, nearly laughing. “A victim?”

It was then she caught a whiff of his cologne, one she knew well. Eternity by Calvin Klein. The irony struck while simultaneously turning her stomach, sending a litany of questions upward. How had she gotten here? What roads, what paths had led her from days of carefree abandon, running freely in her mother and father’s home with her sisters and brother to the mess of living without her father? Of being solely raised by Lettie Mae? To that of a grown woman, pregnant for the second time by two different men, both who refused to marry her?

Bile rose from the pit of her belly. Maybe it was the baby. Or maybe this was Patterson sickness. Or sick-and-tired-of-being-used sickness. Whatever it was, she knew then what she wished she’d known years before—that Patterson Thacker was no different, really, than her father. Or her mother. Or Westley. Another user was all he’d been, and she’d been gullible enough—or desperate enough or stupid enough—to allow it. While Kyle … in spite of the fact that she’d tricked him into her bed, Kyle truly wanted her. Loved her. Treated her