Rein In (Willow Bay Stables #3)(8)

You forget what life is like for everyone else.

I’m twenty-five.

I have no bank account. I have no vehicle. I have no friends. I have no real home.

My life is not normal by any of the defined standards.

I’m a freak.

What I have is a job provided to me through court-sanctioned parole and someone else’s roof above my head. They say most people go to jail because they are a danger to society or they need to be taught a lesson, and the average person would think those years spent in a parallel universe are hard. Some might even call it hell. What they don’t know is that the real hell begins when you get out.

Guilt twitched in my bones. Anxiety rattled in my flesh.

Sundays belonged to me. They were my day off, but I could never seem to sit still. This would be the second Sunday in a row I found myself wandering the grounds.

Glitch, the only other parolee who lived in The Shed along with me for the last two weeks, was shuttling two men toward me across the parking lot.

One was an in-shape black guy who looked to be maybe early thirties. The other was a rough-cut, trailer-park looking kid who I put at about the same age as Glitch.

“Crow,” Glitch hollered at me.

I nodded and quit the forward momentum of my boots. They were the only thing from my original life that I still wore every day. I’d rummaged through the boxes of clothes Grant had left out and found a few shirts and a second pair of jeans that fit. The shirts weren’t so bad once I took a pair of scissors to them, and the jeans stayed up without a belt, which worked for me.

“This here is Fun Bobby.” Glitch pointed to the black guy in a tight blue shirt.

The man reached out his hand, and I shook it.

“And this is—” Glitch started to introduce the trailer park boy but he cut him off.

“Name’s Dirt.” He half-smiled, and I noticed two of his teeth were missing.

He didn’t reach for my hand, so I didn’t offer mine.

“These are the final two parolees for the summer,” Glitch said with a grin.

He was about as harmless as a house cat, though I once read somewhere that the average house cat would devour you whole if you died before anyone ever found the body.

There wasn’t a lot to read in the prison library sometimes.

From what I’d been told, Glitch had held up a liquor store a few years back with his little brother, and it wasn’t the first time, either. The judge had made an example out of them both. Far as I knew, his brother was still locked up.

“What kind of name is Glitch anyway?” Fun Bobby smirked.

“They call me that on account of me bein’ a f*ck-up.” Glitch shrugged. “Couldn’t even rob a liquor store without gettin’ caught.”

“You’re the glitch in a plan,” Fun Bobby finished for him.

Glitch shrugged again. “Somethin’ like that.”

Turns out, Fun Bobby had been locked up on distribution charges. He clocked the cop who arrested him and got an extra two years added on to his sentence for assaulting a police officer.

Dirt was a resident in the pen since his early teens on multiple accounts of grand theft auto. He hit someone crossing the street in the last car he boosted, got attempted manslaughter added to his jacket.

Turns out I hadn’t been wrong after all; Glitch was the housecat in this bullshit band of misfits.

“What’s his story?” Dirt looked at me, his Edmonton Oilers jersey looked like it was busting at the seams. He was a big guy.

Glitch had taken to answering for me over the last two weeks. “Crow don’t talk much...”

He was interrupted by the sound of a convertible pulling into the space next to us. The speakers were blaring some kind of racket that made my brain feel like I was going to have a seizure.

Some guy folded out from behind the wheel, and Dirt nearly choked on his chew at the sight of him.

He looked like an * with his pink sweater folded over his shoulders and one of those Polo shirts that looked like it belonged to a rowing club. When he rounded the hood of the car, Fun Bobby’s upper lip curled in disgust. I fought back a grin. This ass hat was wearing loafers.

“Morning, baby girl,” Glitch hollered over the sound of the car stereo.

I let my eyes follow his and land on her blonde hair in the passenger seat. It was light, almost white in the sun, and so long that it fell well past her shoulders.

The loafer guy held open her door and long legs stretched into my line of vision. She wore those cut-off jean shorts, the kind a girl in a country song would wear, but hers were more tasteful, covering the round curves of her ass completely but not hiding them either.

Stretched over her chest was the token white volunteer shirt. She was here to work.

When she stood in front of him, she slung a backpack over her shoulder and waved in our direction.

If you’d ever seen an angel after a bad dream, it felt like that in the air when she smiled.

He pulled her into his chest by her upper arm and dove into her mouth.

My chest rumbled, and Glitch widened his eyes in my direction.

I hadn’t seen or felt a woman since I was a teenager, and it almost hurt my heart to look at her. She was the picture of all the years that I gave away. She was a breathing memory of everything I missed out on.

Stuffing my hands in my pockets, I let loafers live his dream against her lips.