Release Me (New Haven Series #3)

by J.L. Seegars

She doesn’t know. Not really. Because she’s not standing in the dark, desolate representation of my need, of my despair. She doesn’t know the first night I slept in here, I did so without knowing that the door wasn’t fully latched because no one told me the series of secret movements necessary to secure it. She doesn’t know there’s mold in the bathroom that refuses to come out no matter how many times I bleach it. She doesn’t know I walk home every night and expect to find Beau waiting inside my room, allowed in by the greedy owner who would happily sell me out if someone offered him enough cash. Desiree doesn’t know, she can’t, but somehow she does, and I find peace in the sadness of our shared understanding. When we met, she told me she’d been desperate before and that the place she worked had changed everything. I thought my change would come in the form of a minimum wage job, but today I’ve accepted that it won’t. And that knowledge, that acceptance is enough to make me reconsider everything. I swallow, and the question working its way up my throat might as well be a sledgehammer in my hand because I’m about to use it to knock all the boundaries I’ve drawn around my new life down. “How much?”