Page 75 of Make Me Crazy (Loco, Texas 2)

“Then do you want to know a secret,” He asked, smiling brightly.

She turned her head to the side and said unenthusiastically, “Sure.”

His eyes gleamed. “I wrote a novel.”

She lifted her head and her eyebrow. “You?”

He looked affronted. “Hey, I’ll have you know I am pretty kick ass at English and Writing. Got A’s every term except for that one I had mono.”

“Okay, so what kind of book is it?”

He blushed as he muttered, “Romance.”

She started laughing, she couldn’t help it. “Really? What’s it called?”

He was blushing so hard his skin matched his hair. “Kiss Me Again. It’s about a girl who has loved her best friend forever, and he’s never seen her like that. Then, just when she starts seeing someone else, he realizes he loves her.”

She lost her laughter and tried to tamper the sadness the description brought her. “That’s great. So are you going to have it published?”

“I sent it off a few weeks ago to several publishers, just waiting to hear back.”

“That is amazing. I am so proud of you.” Rand stood up. “Well this calls for a drink. Want a beer?”

Red followed her into the kitchen and took the beer she offered. She popped her beer and held it up to his. “Here is to my best friend Alfred Reginald Calhoun, becoming a best-selling author and changing the world, one throbbing member at a time.”

Red laughed and they drank. Red held his beer up and said, “And here’s to you and Jake. May he stop being a fucking idiot and come crawling back to beg forgiveness. Without an ass whoopin’.”

Rand took a drink of her beer, trying to hide her wince. She missed the idiot, so much it was killing her not to find him and beg him to come back. She wasn’t going to do it though. Whatever else she might have believed in the past, she knew that she wasn’t going to settle for less than the love Earl and her mother had, and she definitely wasn’t going to subject herself to a one sided love.

“You want to watch Serenity?” She wasn’t really in the mood for company, but left alone, she might cave and call Jake.

“Hell yeah, I love that movie.”

Rand followed Red into the living room to watch the movie, but it didn’t feel right without Jake’s arms around her.

“I raised you better than this!”

Jake woke up bleary eyed with a pounding head from too much whisky the night before, only to find the shouting Harrington wasn’t a nightmare but his own sweet mother.

“Jesus, Mom-

Smack! His mother had hit him full

in the face with a pillow so hard it stung.

“First of all, you do not take the Lord’s name in vain, and second, can you explain why you are in your old apartment that I thought you gave up instead of at home with your wife?”

The last thing Jake wanted to talk about at-Christ, 6:30 in the fucking morning- was Rand. “We just had a fight, it will be fine. And the apartment hadn’t been rented yet.”

He started to lay back down, but she hit him again. “Oh no, you get your ass out of this bed and into that shower, young man. What you need is a little perspective and a whole lot of God’s grace.”

Jake looked his mother square in the eye and snapped, “The only thing I’m doing this morning is sleeping and there isn’t a damn thing anyone is going to say to change that.”

Turning his back on her was his first mistake. He had barely closed his eyes before he was doused with a bucket of ice water, and when he flew out of bed, coughing and spluttering, he wiped the water from his face and shouted, “Get the hell out, Mom!”

Instead of listening, his short, kind-hearted mother sent him the same terrifying expression that had made him race to do her bidding as a kid. Now, he just found it mildly irritating.

“Jacob Michael, I want you to remember something. I brought you into this world, I can take you out, and there is a special place in hell for boys who don’t respect their mothers.”

---