Free Hooked #2 (The Hooked Romance Series - Book 2) by Claire Adams Page A

attractive
men in the world trying to ruin the dreams and the beautiful lives of American
women?
    The wine continued to almost pour itself, streaming
from the bottle like water. Boomer kept meowing at me, worried. I felt like I
was becoming a part of the couch in those moments, and I remembered Kevin, my
very first and last boyfriend—the pot smoker from Indiana. He had become a part
of the couch, a part of the pot world, because he had
felt he didn’t have a place in the regular world anymore. I hadn’t been able to
understand it.
    Every little thing he did had an element of “I don’t
care” to it. When we went to Mexican restaurants, he scarfed down burrito after
burrito without even saying a word to me. I patted his back, always, telling
him to slow down; but there was a hunger in him that could not be quelled by
anything in the world. He had dissatisfaction, and he knew it. So he sought to
replace that dissatisfaction with something else.
    Every time we had hung out at his apartment, he had
wanted only to sit and watch television. I had tried to engage him in anything,
like board games or sex. But he had wanted only to rest there, smoking casually
from a bowl, and watching whatever was on television.
    When he had told me he was dropping out, I had been
relieved. This was the perfect time to dump him, to replace my dissatisfaction
with our relationship with something else; with more dancing, perhaps, or more
studying. He had told me he had wanted to give up for a long time, and he
wanted me to tell him he was free.
    And so I told him. “Kevin. You’re allowed to do
whatever you want. You’re allowed to give up if you want. You shouldn’t; I
should add there’s so much the world has to offer you.” I had been so hopeful,
so sure of myself.
    But now, laying there, drinking my sixth glass of
wine, I was no longer so sure of myself. I understood that the world had nothing
to offer me. It didn’t want to offer me sex, at least without taking something
eternally important away from me. It didn’t want to offer me success. It didn’t
want to offer me love.
    Instead, it wanted me here—so much like
Kevin—engaging with television shows, with a depressive alcoholic substance,
and with as many Cheetos as I could find at the local convenience store.
    And this was how the loathing commenced the next
several days. I wondered; what I could have done wrong, how I could have
proceeded differently. But, beyond anything else, I simply wondered how I was
going to survive the following few days.

 
    The next day, I left the apartment only once. I took
a long, long walk out to the lake, not even bothering to walk through Wicker
Park to see what had been done to my beautiful corner.
    On the beach I stood in the sunlight, trying to feel
hope again. I listened as the lake swarmed up on the rock, then the sand. It
was brilliant, the way the sun lit the tops of each wave. But to me, it all felt
the same as it ever had been before. Usually, this sameness of nature is a
comfort for people. “We live, and we die—and the earth goes on.” That sort of
spiel.
    However, this time, I understood the sameness of the
waves as a sort of knowledge that nothing in this world would ever go well or
change for me.
    I watched as small children played along the
boardwalk, their parents rushing up behind them to capture them in their arms.
I watched as old men walked somberly down the boardwalk, making a strange juxtaposition
between the fresh-faced boys and girls running this way, then that on the
boards.
    I tried not to focus on the lovers, both young and
old. One lover of my life had given up on the world, had retreated to the
darkness of the living room. Another lover of my life had pushed headfirst into
everything the world could give him—even taking things that didn’t belong to
him.
    I didn’t know which was worse. I stood, uncertain,
as the waves crashed. Where was the world going to take me next?  
    Part 3
of Hooked comes out