Excerpt
I’m a
lonely man. I choose to be this way. I had true love with her. It didn’t matter
how old we were, or how young; once you have it, you never let it go. You spend
a lifetime together. And I pissed it away. Underlining painful memories have
inflicted punishment on my tattered soul for years. Besides Rori and Muriel,
those two things are the only constant impressions that have kept me going. If
I didn’t feel the need to live with a constant dagger shoved through my heart,
I would have let myself whittle away years ago. It’s distressing, to say the
least, that the pain I’ve caused is the only thing I’ve let rule my life. I’m
living in hell every day, repeatedly burning from the inside out since day one.
I will never forget the first time I was rejected in New York, how badly I
wanted to call her and beg her to forgive me. I couldn’t do it, and I knew it.
I jumped in the shower instead, rinsed off the dirt and grime, then pressed my
forehead to the yellow tiles. Hot water beat down my back. I vowed not to cry,
even though my heart ached and my lungs felt like they were working overtime to
help me breathe. I caved and fell to the shower floor, my fist pounding and
beating the wall in front of me until I became numb to the shooting pain
filtering from my hands all the way to my shoulders, twining up around my neck
until I choked from the lump lodged in my throat. Nausea bubbled up, and I
vomited the contents from earlier in the day. The rancid smell left me dry
heaving and an oversized human slumped over in the small confinement that the
pain from missing her had left me in. When the water ran cold, I lay there
shivering, wishing for nothing but her. Once I composed myself, I crawled back
up and cleaned and towel-dried off, only to climb into an empty, cold bed, tired
and defeated, scared to close my eyes, because when I did, all I saw was her.
Several nights I repeated the same thing until the real life nightmares struck
me hard, leaving me in this worst shape of my life. For years, I’ve been honest
with myself over and over again, saying I deserve every chip and break my heart
feels when her birthday or Christmas come around. It’s like this infinite cloud
that hangs dormant over my head: dark and gloomy, cold and wet. It will never
go away. Now that I’ve seen her, and even though I’m walking back down The
Strip with no idea where I’m going, the memories that were once happy become so
unpleasant I could easily bleed my life dry. Desperation pools around me. Panic
sets in. What if she’s gone and I never see her again?
The Drifter by Kathy Coopmans is a heartfelt romance you
are going to want to one-click!
Releasing July 11th.
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