Page 1 of All of My Life

Prologue

I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t both loved and hated her.

I couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t crossed my mind daily.

I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t been fixated on every-fucking-thing about her.

With my fingers clawing at my hands-a nervous habit that I had developed years ago-I couldn’t remember a time when I hadn’t spent a night envisioning a million ways to both cherish and kill her. Some nights, I couldn’t breathe with the thought of never seeing her again. Other nights, I couldn’t breathe with the weight of her existence.

However, I could remember the exact dates when she had been out sick from school-all of them. I could remember each class that she had missed, each assembly when she hadn’t been in attendance, each winter, spring, and summer break that I hadn’t seen her around town. I could remember every absence of her from my life; the times when I’d been sure that I’d go crazy from not seeing her.

A therapist would call me obsessed, and maybe I was.

A romantic would call me in love, and I was definitely that.

A realist would call me delusional, and that was also a possibility.

Still, whatever the diagnosis, it didn’t change the fact that nothing existed for me outside a girl that wanted nothing to do with me. In thirteen years, we’d only spoken to each other a handful of times, and they hadn’t been sweet encounters. If I had a nemesis, then she was it.

Yet, I still didn’t know why.

Nevertheless, what I did know? I knew that I had only three months to make her mine or let her go completely, and I knew myself well enough to know that I couldn’t let her go; I’d been trying for thirteen fucking years. I’d been trying to shake the hold that she had on me, and the bitch of it was that she didn’t even know that she held everything that I’d ever wanted in the palm of her hand.

The hands of time were quickly ticking away, and I could feel myself wrestling with that reality more and more each day. Time was relative, and when I’d once believed that I had all the time in the world to make her come around, that wasn’t true anymore. Three months wasn’t shit, and each morning that my eyes opened, I felt the weight of another day passing on my chest.

Tick, tick, tick…

My chest tightened as I watched her walking down the sidewalk, none the wiser that I was observing her like I’d had for too many years to count. She was dressed in our school uniform, her backpack and purse hooked over her left shoulder, her dark hair up, piled high upon her head. Her back was straight, her head was held high, but she had eyes for no one. She had not one friend at this school, and that’d been by design. She spoke to no one, and no one spoke to her unless they had to.

My fingers started clawing at my hands harder, and it was a good thing that I always kept my nails short. Otherwise, my hands would always be shredded to shit and bleeding; that’s what she did to me. Even without trying, she made me feel feral, hostile.

Tick, tick, tick…

I watched her until she disappeared into the building. Like most rich schools, Carver High was all encompassed, and the only sunlight that we saw was during lunch time. Right in the middle of the school was our food court, an outdoor privilege that most kids took advantage of. Nowadays, there were legitimate arguments against enclosed schools, but until some senator’s kid got caught in a school shooting, our politicians weren’t going to do shit about the epidemic.

At any rate, a fellow student snapping wasn’t my biggest concern in life right now. While that might sound callous and cruel, it was the truth. Staring at the front doors of the school, if I had a fear in life, it was never seeing her again after we graduated in three months. Madness was a real affliction of the mind, and I was barely escaping it as it was. Never seeing her again would definitely tip the scales, and there’s no telling what I’d do then.

Reaching for the door handle, I finally opened the door, getting out of my car, ready to finally do something about this crazy need for her. She wasn’t like other girls, so this wasn’t going to be easy. Even if she were, she hated me. Yeah, I hadn’t done anything to endear her to me, but whose fault was that? It sure as fuck wasn’t mine. I wasn’t the one that had sent us down this path all those years ago.

Nevertheless, everything was different now. Everything had changed last Thursday, and I’d been waiting a long fucking time for that day. The object of my obsession was finally eighteen now, and the rules all changed once you became a legal adult.

Chapter 1

Chasin~

My family owned the city of Carver, Connecticut, and they’d always had. My family had originally settled in Loman, one town over, but my great-great-great-great-great grandfather had believed himself too important to share space and air with the common folk. So, Elton Carver had moved ‘out to the country’, and over the years, his business savvy mind and unsavory monetary connections had created the town of Carver. A century later, the town had gone from a little settlement of a few thousand to the city that it was now. In fact, Carver would be much bigger if not for property lines.

At any rate, there were three Carver sons: my father, Randall Carver, and his two brothers, Eli and Derek Carver. My father was CEO and sole owner of Carver Industries, which basically owned everything in the city of Carver. While the city had a mayor, everyone knew that my father ran the town. He might as well be a Mafia Don with the way that no one did anything without passing it by him first. My father also got off on the power, as he should; it also looked good on him.

My uncles had their own personal endeavors, though neither as successful as my father. While my father had stuck with the family business, Uncle Eli had decided to move to Las Vegas and live his life unapologetically. Honestly, it was a race to see whether or not he would end up six feet under before his inheritance ran out. Uncle Derek had chosen to play the stock market and live on easy street, but rumor had it that he wasn’t as financially savvy as he believed himself to be. I could see both of them crawling back to my father in a few years. Unfortunately for them, my father only made time for people or things that had a guaranteed return on his investment.

Now, while my father worked twenty hours a day, my mother spent her time blowing his money and making sure that she remained First Lady of Carver, Connecticut. She thrived on being the most important woman in the city, and she let everyone know it. While my father was a workaholic and a dick most of the time, my mother was worse. She was insufferable and cringeworthy with how influential she wished that she was. Though important in the city of Carver, she was hardly a Rockefeller or Vanderbilt. Yeah, my father had enough money to run with the big dogs, but our last name wasn’t as prestigious a pedigree as those guys.

As the only son of Randall and Earnest Carver, I was considered the Prince of Carver City. I was a big fish in a fairly decent-sized pond, and my future was limitless once I graduated from high school. Thanks to my parents’ wealth and my last name, I had a mile head start over lot of other eighteen-year-olds. Without the burden of having to pay for college myself, I could concentrate on my studies, double up on majors, and do whatever I had to do in order to take over for my father when the time came. With no other children in the picture, I was his only legacy, so he tiptoed around each other lot, not wanting to piss off the other to the point of no return. I needed his money to secure my future, and he needed me to take over Carver Industries to secure his legacy.

Being the cunning bastard that my father was, when my uncles had run off to live their own lives, he had convinced my grandfather to relinquish their inheritances early with the condition that they forfeit all rights to Carver Industries, and that included any children that they might have. My uncles had been desperate enough for their money that they had agreed to the conditions without hesitation. So, Carver Industries was safe from anyone that wasn’t me.

To date, Uncle Eli had no children, and I wasn’t sure that he ever would. If he did end up having any kids, it’d be an Uncle Derek situation; accidentally knocking up some gold-digger. Uncle Derek had a set of twins with some chick that had interned for him years ago. They were both fifteen, and as far as I knew, he wrote a check every month, but that was about it. However, that seemed on point with his character. Being the youngest, he’d been allowed to become self-centered. Uncle Eli was the middle son, and everyone knew that middle children always had a plethora of issues.

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