AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Six months later, I was breathing free air again.
CHAPTER 1
I want to be a nice person, but everyone is just so dumb.
-Kobe’s secret thoughts
KOBE
8 years earlier
I watched as the woman struggled to breathe.
Her teeth were gritted in pain, and I saw the moment that she’d decided to give up.
Tomorrow, I was surrendering to the police, where I would then be sentenced to jail for the next few years. But right then, I was able to help.
She was bent over a park bench, clutching her belly as if it was about to rip itself away from her.
“Can I help you?” I asked the woman.
She looked up, and I felt the breath leave my body.
God, she was pretty.
Her eyes were a melty, liquidy, soul-stealing brown.
I’d never seen the likes of the color before.
In the harsh brightness of the overhead streetlight, I felt like I’d taken a good look at my life and been found lacking.
Holy hell, was she gorgeous. Even crying and red, she was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
“Y-yes,” she breathed. “I think I’m having this baby. Right now. I can’t make it to the hospital.”
My stomach dropped down to the ground, seemingly without warning.
“Um,” I hesitated. “I could drive you.”
Of course, I’d just taken my car to an auto shop to be housed with a good friend of mine.
At one point in time, we’d been in the military together. He was on his way out when I was on my way in. We’d bonded over the uncertainty of our lives to come, and that was how I’d found myself in the middle of nowhere, otherwise known as Kilgore, Texas.
Why was she in the middle of nowhere?
Like, quite literally, the only thing in this entire area of Texas was a park bench. The nearest damn town was over thirty minutes away because my friend liked to make sure he could see around his property for miles. Meaning there was nothing but rolling hills for as far as the eyes could see.
Everything but this one stupid bench.
Was this a bus stop?
I’d been walking for a while.
Originally, I was supposed to catch a ride from my friend back to town. Then, from there, I had a bus ticket back home that would drop me off at the courthouse just in time to be processed. However, something big had come up that had not just him but his entire family bugging out of the compound at the same time. Racing toward something that I would never figure out.
I’d meant to figure out a ride, but hell. I really needed the walk to clear my head.
That’s when I found her.
