Lust and Lies (The Jamie Reynolds Chronicles #1) Read Free

doctor?”
    “No, but if I still feel like this in the morning, I’ll go then.”
    “Daddy, you need to take better care of yourself. If not for me, then for your future grandkids, and lord knows, I ain’t having any kids, so you have to be around for Jenifer and Jayla to have kids.”
    There I was, trying to make light out of every dark situation, I really hated that about myself. “Daddy, please promise me that you’ll go to the doctor first thing in the morning to get yourself checked out.”
     
    “I guess that promise was a little too late, because that night my cousin came home from work and went down to her basement to check on my dad and found him passed out on the floor. We think he fell down the stairs. That was the scariest day of my life. I felt so helpless not being able to be at my dad’s side. My dad spent months in the hospital, and the doctor really couldn’t help him. We all pretty much were watching my dad die by the minute. He lost so much weight and couldn’t even feed himself; they even had his hands and legs in restraints because he would fight the nurses because he wanted to leave the hospital. It was so hard to watch.”
    Jonathan and I spoke for hours on our drive. I told him all about my father, his condition and about my life inside and out. For the first time in almost seven years, I opened up to someone. I had so much emotion and anger built up from both my father, my mother, my past failed relationships, and just spoke the truth about the real Jamie Reynolds.
     
    My father and mother split up about ten years ago, I think. My mother had a lot of pride as they pretended to stay together for “the kids,” off and on, which was the worst, because they really weren’t fooling anyone, and my siblings and I always had questions as my parents split up and came back together. My mother first split from my dad when I was ten years old and my oldest sister was twelve. I didn’t understand why, but my mother packed up my sister and me, and we moved out of our home on Bergen Street and moved into an apartment on East Eighteenth Street in Flatbush. We even went to a new school.
    Actually, going to another school wasn’t anything new to us. You would think I was a military kid; I went to a new school seems like every year since the third grade. Never understood why we went to so many new schools, but you get used to it after a while. This was the story of my life. Never knowing what to expect or why, but I just dealt with it. Now that I’m an adult, I wished when I was younger I had tried harder to understand things instead of accepting them.
    After my mother got back with my father after being separated for like a year, we again moved back in with my dad and went to another new school. Not to mention my mother was pregnant with my younger sister, Jayla. She was born when I was twelve years old. Less than a year after she was born, my mother and my two siblings moved out of New York to Florida without my father. Once again, not understanding what was going on because I was a kid, I just went with the flow. I wasn’t happy moving out of New York, but my parents promised us a better life.
    I did find it kind of weird that my father didn’t live with us, but my parents often spoke on the phone and he visited often. We continued to do family vacations, celebrations, and were together as one big happy family on almost every holiday. It wasn’t like they were divorced like some of my other friends’ parents, so I just figured Florida was a safer place to live than New York, and since my grandmother lived in Florida, it was cool. Even though my grandmother hated me. Hate was a strong word, but that was the only word I could think of when it came to my grandmother. Even my mother knew she treated me differently than the rest and never knew why, so I never cared to understand after a while.
    I often heard people say they stayed together for the kids, and I was proof it does more harm than good. I