Young Love Dies Hard: The Young Brothers, Book 1 Nikki Lane (books for students to read .TXT) 📖

“How can I?” I said. “You remind me every day.”

Someone knocked on the kitchen door. My heart skipped at the sound.

Kasey went to answer the door.

“Kasey, wait.” I set the knife down.

“Relax. It’s just Riley,” she said, opening the door.

Riley stood in the threshold and waved, seeming unsure what to do next.

“Come on in, Riley,” Aunt Meg said.

“This is my sister, Maeve,” Kasey said.

“Hi, Riley,” I said.

“Hi.”

Riley couldn’t have been more than sixty pounds sopping wet. Kasey’s asthma medication had caused her to gain some weight. I hadn’t really noticed it until now.

“Come on,” Kasey said. “Let’s go to my room.”

“Dinner will be ready soon,” Aunt Meg called as they stomped upstairs.

“Is it okay for Uncle Jim to be eating all this?” I asked.

Aunt Meg hovered near the stove where a few pots and pans bubbled and sizzled. “The man survived a heart attack and eating low cholesterol food for almost a year. I figured he’d earned a pork chop and a couple of slices of his favorite cake.”

“Who’s coming for supper?”

She set down a slotted spoon and wiped her hands against the folds of her apron. “Just us, and Riley. Why…is there someone you wanted to invite?”

I absentmindedly shook my head. “No.”

“I could call him for you, if you didn’t want to do it yourself. He doesn’t leave for his trip for another few days.”

“Aunt Meg,” I said, holding the knife against a glob of frosting. “Please.”

“I’m sorry, dear. I just hoped that you two could work things out.”

“There’s nothing to work out.”

“Don’t lose hope so easily.” She turned off the burners of the stove.

You need to have hope in order to lose it.

“Things are over between me and Jacob. I don’t even know what I was thinking. It would have never worked out.” I licked the bit of frosting from my fingertips and set the knife in the sink. Leaning against the edge of the counter, my mind drifted off to a few happy memories. Like Disney World. I’d probably never top that level of happiness for the rest of my life.

“Are you sure you’re okay?” Aunt Meg asked.

“Fine.” I feigned a smile. “Just fine.”

She handed me some plates for the table.

“So, where’s he going?” I asked, setting the table.

“Florida. When I had talked to Carol the other day, she’d mentioned he was visiting for just a couple days.”

I set the rest of the table in silence, and afterward, walked to the barn to call Uncle Jim for dinner. Before heading back to the house, I made a quick stop by the goats’ pen.

I spotted him right away. Granted, he was the only male out of the bunch. A little smaller than the rest of them, too. He trotted around the enclosure and then ran up the ramp to buck and kick.

“Come by to say hi to Billy?” Uncle Jim said behind me.

“Guess so.” I leaned against the wood fence with my folded arms hanging over the other side. “He got big.”

Uncle Jim hitched an arm over the fence. “Little ones tend to do that.”

I stole a glance his way and then focused back on Billy. He seemed happy to annoy the female goats by nudging them hard with his barely-there horns. “Guess it’s silly to think that he might have remembered me.”

“Not so silly to think that.” He matched my pose against the fence. “You’d be surprised what they remember. You helped bring him into this world, made sure he was okay. Gave him the bottle when he wouldn’t eat from his mama.”

“But I haven’t been back to take care of him. And besides, he was just a baby,” I said. “I don’t remember anything from when I was that small.”

“That’s a shame.”

I turned to look at him again. “Why do you say that?”

“Well…you might find this hard to believe, but it wasn’t always bad for you at home.”

I scoffed. “You’re right. That is hard to believe.”

Uncle Jim let out a short chuckle. “Your mother used to put you in a new dress every day. And every Sunday she’d take you to church, and we’d all go out for pancakes afterwards. You used to go crazy for chocolate chip pancakes.”

I tried to think hard and dig up the deeply buried memory in my head. An image popped up of me in a frilly Sunday dress with a mouth smeared with chocolate and syrup. But I didn’t know if it was a recollection of something that really happened or just an image my brain came up with to fill the void.

“That was before her and Doug got back together, of course,” Uncle Jim continued. “Your aunt and I tried to convince her you two were better off without him, but she wouldn’t listen. Said that her little girl deserved love from both parents.”

“Well, that didn’t turn out how she’d planned.”

“Life never does. But she tried. For a good while, she tried to make it work.”

Billy had wandered over to our side of the fence. He crept toward us, keeping his head low. I crouched down and reached my hand out through one of the slots. He took a few more steps, sniffed the tips of my fingers, and then coaxed my hand for a pet on the head.

“See that,” Uncle Jim said.

I smiled and rubbed the back of his ears. “I guess he does remember.”

“Just took a few minutes, that’s all.”

Billy had enough of the reunion and darted back to annoy the other goats.

Uncle Jim wrapped an arm around my shoulder as we headed back to the house. “Maybe someday, you’ll remember, too.”

Chapter Twenty-Six

It seemed like every asshole within a fifty-mile radius had come to the club that night. They were coming in waves throughout the night. The first group to make trouble was already drunk when they walked through the door. It didn’t take long for Donny and the other bouncer to kick them out.

It was unusually busy for a Thursday, and in just a few hours of working, I had already