Free Risk (Gentry Boys #2) by Cora Brent

freedom.  I was on my own.  I had everything I needed and I would keep working until I was able to climb higher.  But tonight, as I remembered the way Cord and Saylor had looked together, so sweet and loving, I felt a little lonely. 
    Stephanie wasn’t home.  That wasn’t a surprise.  She was rarely home.  My roommate was so furtive and tight-lipped that sometimes I wondered if she was in the mob. 
    Dolly ran to greet me and I picked her up, kissing her between the ears.  “I know. You’re always happy to see me.” 
    I set her down and went to toss my purse in my bedroom.   I was hoping there was ice cream left in the freezer.  I planned to eat it sloppily and wipe my mouth with the back of my hand as I lounged on the futon to watch the most depraved reality television show I could find. 
    Don’t do it.  Don’t do it. 
    But I did it.  I did it anyway.  I picked up Creed’s shirt and breathed through the fabric.  The act made me feel so wanton and pathetic I had to sit down.  Was this the direction I would always go, no matter how desperately I tried to turn myself into something better? 
    “You want it, girl.  Shit you’re the type who was born to it.”
    It wasn’t Creed’s voice I heard in my head.  It had an Alabama backwater drawl and the memory of it made me feel slightly sick. 
    I was aware my fingers were twisting the shirt fabric as my jaw locked.  He hadn’t been the first man to put his hands all over me but he was the first one who managed to crack the barrier and get everything he was after. 
    When Laura Lee found out her latest man had been screwing her daughter she lost what little mind she had left.  At age thirty six she looked ten years older.  The closer the four of us grew to womanhood the more she would watch us with incredulous misery. I didn’t know if my sisters suspected what I’d already figured out; our mother wasn’t longing for the babies we’d been.  She was grieving for the youth we’d cost her. 
    I’ll never know how things would have gone if I’d stayed.  Maybe Laura Lee would have gotten over her wrath and I could have finished high school.  There was no man to fight over, not anymore.  He had taken off without a second glance like so many men before him.  But there were still the things my mother and I said to each other. 
    “Filthy fuckin’ whore.”
    “Goddamn crazy bitch.”
    There was still the sting of her hand on my cheek and the welts on my back from the hairbrush she’d beat me with.  There was something else too; something she had never known about and would never know about. 
    I didn’t even consider Laura Lee as one of the worst of my many losses.  I could live without her.  But it still stung to be without my sisters. 
    Dolly seemed to sense my miserable mood.  She rubbed against my legs and let out a little whine of commiseration. 
    I didn’t let myself think about it.  I just pulled out my phone and called a number. 
    “Hi,” said my sister Augusta.  She sounded breathless, as if she’d been in a rush to get somewhere quiet so she could answer her phone.  I took that as a good sign. 
    “Hey, Aggie.”  My voice kind of died right there. For all those girlhood years, I’d taken for granted the easy way we talked to each other in a kind of secret language that came from navigating life together.  Anger happened sometimes and was expected but it never lasted.  It was a bump to be stepped over. 
    If I’d known on a dark night four years ago that by leaving I would cut the invisible strings tying us all together I might not have been able to do it. 
    My sister sighed from far away.  She’d made good so far.  Now a sophomore at Oklahoma State, she was studying veterinary medicine.  I heard the steady drumbeat of rain coming from her end of the line and tried to picture the state of Oklahoma.  I’d driven through it once and remembered a lot of flat land beneath an endless sky.
    “So how are