Page 50 of Keep You Close

I’d never been taught to look for red flags in people.

Maybe, had my early years been different, I would have seen the signs before it was too late.

As it was, though, my life revolved around my school with just a few kids in my grade, events in the town, and helping my parents care for my grandparents as they started to decline.

If we’d stayed in that town, maybe I would have ended up with Jimmy or Calvin, the boys from school I’d always had a crush on, who maybe would have grown to like me too.

The thing was, my father suddenly had a heart attack while working in the fields on a local farm one day.

He’d died before the ambulance could even arrive.

It became clear directly afterward that my mother had not been privy to our family’s personal finances. Which meant that, while we were grieving and trying to plan a memorial, we learned that the house was in foreclosure.

And we had thirty days to get out.

We’d been lucky enough that the town had gotten together to pay for my father’s burial.

But with nowhere in town to work, let alone stay, we’d needed to sell just about everything we owned, pack the car, and head into a bigger city, where my mother could find work.

I’d been fifteen at the time, naive as the day was long, suddenly transplanted in a place where I didn’t know anyone, where it seemed nobody wanted to know me.

Whereas I’d been reasonably pretty in my very small town, I was all but invisible in this new area.

And because I’d known everyone in town since I was a little girl, I’d never struggled to find ways to engage others.

In the city, though, I found that because I couldn’t find ways to approach and engage others, no one bothered to do so with me.

Slowly but surely, I became more and more introverted and lonely, so sure of my own inadequacy that the second someone finally seemed to actually see me, I’d been desperate for that attention.

At the time, I’d been a few weeks shy of my seventeenth birthday and working as a barista around the corner from our shoebox apartment because my mother was struggling just to keep the lights on and a roof over our heads with her three jobs, and I wanted to save up to buy myself a car.

It was the beginning of summer, and I was hyper-aware of the fact that I’d put on a solid twenty pounds of stress weight, which was stretching my work uniform to the max, and further reinforcing my belief in my lack of worth.

In other words, I was prime for the picking by a man with bad intentions and a silver tongue.

Then on a random day, there he was.

Waltzing into the coffee place, a plain kind of handsome. Nothing about him really stood out to me, someone accustomed to seeing the entire beauty spectrum day in and day out. He’d been average height, if maybe a bit on the shorter side for a man, with brown hair that flopped over his forehead, and brown eyes.

He’d been dressed in a button-up that was a little too loose, and a pair of slacks that were too long.

He’d ordered his drip coffee with milk. And I’d been ready to completely forget all about him like I would with any random non-regular.

Until he leaned over the counter as he waited for me to make his drink, and shot me a smile while telling me how pretty he thought I was.

As insecure as I was, as unaccustomed to compliments as I’d been, I’d eaten that up with a spoon, blushing, giggling, thanking him.

When I passed his coffee across the counter, his hand accidentally-on-purpose closed over mine on the cup as he asked me which days I would be working.

“Then I guess I know where I’ll be on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoons,” he’d said.

I’d brushed it off.

Plenty of men flirted with my coworkers.

But that Saturday, there he was again.

With more compliments and smiles, asking me about myself.

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