Free Teach Me To Live (Teach Me - Book One) by Alannah Carbonneau Page A

fought because of me.
    My voice was so quiet when I spoke. If I didn’t know better, I’d think I sounded ashamed. I wasn’t ashamed. At least, I wasn’t ashamed of Austin. “His name is Austin.”
    “And what is his last name?”
    “I don’t know.”
    She sighed. “You were out all day with a boy whom you don’t even know his last name? Madison Avery, we’ve raised you to be smarter than this.”
    “We’ve only just met,” I defended myself hotly. “He’s a very nice man, Mom.”
    “Oh, because you know just how nice this man is in spite of only just meeting him.” She paused, her eyes narrowing on mine. “Did you say man? Madison, how old is he?”
    “He can’t be that much older than me,” I replied honestly. I didn’t actually know Austin’s age.
    I didn’t know much about Austin at all, apart from the fact that he had blue eyes, a killer grin, tatted skin, and lived twenty-ish minutes South of town. Oh, and he was a mind blowing kisser. But I doubted that information would do anything to lessen the tension between Mom and me.
    “Madison?” Mom snapped my name into the silence and I shook thoughts of Austin from my mind.
    “What?”
    “What were you doing with him?”
    “Hanging out,” I shrugged.
    “Where?”
    “Mom,” I sighed. “It’s none of your business. I’m almost nineteen and like I said earlier, I’m done living my life beneath you and Dad.” Her lips parted, but I continued. These words were words that I needed to say. I was suffocating, and after a day of breathing, I couldn’t fathom the idea of allowing myself to continue drowning beneath the weight of their misguided concern. “I’m done being questioned when I decide to spend an afternoon with a man. I’m done being told which career I’ll be committing my life to, and if you can’t handle me being my own person, then I suppose I’ll be looking for somewhere else to live.” I sighed at the misting tears in her eyes. “I love you and Dad—so much. But I can’t breathe, Mom. I need to breathe. ”
    A single tear slipped from between her lids to fall from her lashes onto her cheek. She swiped it quickly away with a shaking hand before pulling in a deep breath. “If that’s really how you feel.”
    “It is.”
    “Then I suppose there’s nothing to be done, but watch you fall, and hopefully pick yourself back up.”
    “Falling and getting up are all a part of living life, Mom. If I have to fall to experience, then I welcome the fall.”
    “It’s not the fall that worries me, Madison.” She moved to the door of my little space. When she looked back at me, her eyes were haunted and hurting. “It’s the landing.”
    I didn’t say anything more, and neither did she, as she walked from the pool house, quietly closing the door behind her.
    I didn’t know how to make my parent’s see that I couldn’t continue living life the way that I was living it. I loved them with the entirety of my heart. They were my parent’s, but something had to give. I just couldn’t keep walking through life on the path I had been traveling.
    I turned out the lights in the main rooms of the pool house before I moved slowly to the bedroom. I flicked on the bedside lamp and flopped onto my bed on my stomach. I opened my journal and I began to write about my day. About Austin, the blue-eyed, tatted creature, who would devastate my heart in what was surely no time at all.

     
    I could not stop thinking of Madison.
    It was late. The clock above the pantry in the kitchen read 11:05 pm. That was three minutes faster than the cell phone towers and satellite dishes that dictated the glowing numbers on my phone. I had her phone number programmed into my phone now. It was taking everything inside of me not to act like a sixteen-year-old boy after a first date at the movies and text her.
    After dropping her off outside the coffee shop where she’d left her car to ride with me, I went straight home. Kaiden was here now, and