Almost Ordinary (The Song Wreckers Book 2) by Crystal Firsdon Page A

driving down to the prison tonight and killing him. I know people who work there. I could slip in, get it done, could cover it up.”
    “I wouldn’t stop you.” I wanted Adam dead. He deserved it and I hated that my tax dollars were going to feed and clothe him. I didn’t care if that made me a bad person.
    He shook his head, still frustrated. “I can’t do anything that might jeopardize you or the boys. If something went wrong and I was taken away from you . . .”
    His absence from our lives would be intolerable. We didn’t have to say it.
    I placed my hand on the back of his head and pushed it toward mine to meet him halfway for a kiss. Our lips grazed each other’s in a sweet kiss despite the bitter words he just spoke, and we stayed forehead to forehead.
    I felt his muscles relax. We looked one final time at each other. Eyes to eyes, no tension, just softness. I smiled the tiniest bit, then him. Words weren’t necessary. We loved each other, had gone through a lot to be here, and were bonded to one another forever.
    Sometimes I wished I could freeze time when Caleb looked at me like that. But life waited for both of us, so off we went to deal with it.
    I was a bad mother. Horrible.
    The stress of everything—Adam, Cooper, the tension that my caring for Cooper caused with Caleb—finally got to me. I needed to drink.
    Grown-up drinks. Alcohol. Liquid relaxers.
    So I weaned the twins. It wasn’t too hard on them. They would already take a bottle from everyone else, so I outright refused to give them a boob. A lot of crying occurred, mostly by me, then they relented and drank from a bottle while I held them. Bam, nursing ceased. They weren’t happy for the first few minutes, then must’ve realized that being fed was being fed. They were still cuddled and loved. They just weren’t physically attached to me anymore. I missed it, and had more than one internal argument with myself about resuming it.
    Especially when intense pain in my boobs brought me to my knees sometimes. Caleb couldn’t go near my boobs for a while so he suffered too.
    Holy shit. I weaned my kids to be able to drink. Ugh.
    I’d been using a lot of the hours Franny was over to take care of Cooper. I gave up referring to it as visiting him, or simply checking up on him. I made sure he had food in the house. I prepared some of his meals. I arranged for Merry Maids to clean his loft twice a week. I checked his medicine bottles and counted the pills so I knew if he’d taken them. I forced him to take walks outside, weather permitting. He hated them, which caused me perverse pleasure.
    Two weeks I cared for him. Here’s what I’ve learned about Cooper in that time: he ate what you placed in front of him. Everything I knew about him—his moods generally switched between serious and grumpy, he knew his way around a dance floor, and he hated surprises, I already knew. I never pried information from him when I visited. I should’ve. I wanted to, but I’d lose my nerve. My goal was to prod pieces of his life from him. Then I’d find some way to turn the conversation into the things I needed to know. Did he have any medical issues in his family, what was his nationality, things like that. And if it so happened he let slip what was so awful about me that he couldn’t bear to man up and take responsibility, then great. Though I never expected the answer to that one.
    Instead, our daily conversations—if you could call them that—were practical. I told him to do things. I asked him if he did what I told him to do. He answered. I never nagged. However, I took a lot of deep, frustrated breaths that made him shoot me annoyed looks.
    I reported to Caleb every time I went to Cooper’s, and everything I did while there. He never asked me to stop, probably because my frustration with Cooper was obvious. And, I knew I needed to curb my cursing with kids in the house, but Cooper really was an asshat! Seriously, his head was shoved so far up his butt I