Bullet Read Free

blink.  “Valerie, I’ve never been more serious in my life.”
    I guessed I would soon find out just how serious he was.
     

 
     
    Chapter Two
    Past
     
    THE STORY OF Ethan and me is a long one.  We met when we were both eighteen, much too young to make decisions about love or marriage.  It was hard enough deciding about college.
    As a teenager, I guess I was what you might consider cute .  I had shoulder-length brown hair, sparkly blue-green eyes, slightly overweight (I’m talking ten pounds—just enough to give me cushion, you know?).  I was also what my mother had called a social butterfly —I found it easy to make new friends, and I wasn’t shy.
    I’d decided to attend college at…well, maybe I shouldn’t say.  I was moving from my hometown of Winchester, Colorado, to one of the smaller universities located in a small, sleepy college town far away from home.  If you’ve ever visited Colorado schools like Adams State, Fort Lewis, or Western State, then you know the kind of town and the kind of college I’m talking about.  But…well, this story has needed to be written for a while, and I’m changing some of the names and the places to protect the innocent…and the guilty too.  And, bottom line, I suppose it doesn’t really matter where I went to college, only that I did, and that’s where Ethan and I met.  The town where I went to college really wasn’t much different from Winchester, but it was my first time living away from home, over two hundred miles away.  I was homesick at first but soon got swept up in the pace of college life.
    I lived in the dorms and got stuck with a roommate who thought she was God’s gift to teenage boys.  Charlotte Edwards’s only gift to men was her free favors.  And, lucky me, I got to experience them all.  I was a young, naïve virgin, raised in a strict Christian atmosphere, sheltered from a lot of real life, so Charlotte was hard for me to take at first.
    I was sure she was trouble the minute I moved in.  Above her bed hung a poster of a close-to-nude man, something that—at the time—had made me blush.  The guy was clean shaven but with a little bit of stubble, dark brown bedroom eyes, huge muscles, no shirt on, his jeans unzipped, his hand snaking down into his underwear, suggesting that he was all hot and bothered for whatever woman walked into his gaze.  Yeah, that poster made me uncomfortable…even if I had to admit later that the guy was hot as hell.
    Worse, though, was her blatant advertising of who she was and what she wanted, now that she was out from under her parents’ roof.  On the desk lay a compact of birth control pills.  And she danced around the room in a lacy red teddy with some kind of mood music on her boom box, some R&B tune I hadn’t heard before.
    I was grateful that my mother, father, and brother were waiting outside in the truck for me.  They’d sent me inside to find the resident advisor, affectionately known as our RA, who in turn gave me a map of campus and a key to my room.  I wanted to locate the room first and then get my family so we could start hauling in all my things.
    I hid my initial horror and became the always polite girl I tended to be.  “Hi.  I’m your roommate, Valerie Quinn.”
    “Hi.  I’m Charlotte Edwards.  Where you from?”
    “Winchester.  What about you?”              
    She gave me a funny look and tossed her long black hair behind her shoulder.  “Where the fuck is that?”
    Well, that was rude.  “Do you know where Colorado Springs is?”
    “ Duh.”
    “Winchester’s about an hour away, to the west.”  I still wanted to play nice.  “Where are you from?”
    “Denver.”
    “So why’d you decide to come here to college?”  I knew there were already some good schools in and around Denver, so I was curious why she wanted to go so far away from home.  Maybe she’d earned a scholarship or something.
    But, in a matter-of-fact voice, she said, “Change of