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- Herausgeber: WS
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Serie: Bended Series
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
In small American towns, the cycle of poverty is the hardest chain to break, but Tristen is determined to break through. He just wasn't sure how or when. Tonight might be his 'when'.
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Bended Dream
Prequel to Bended Loyalty
Kat Caldwell
Contents
Copyright © 2024 by Kat Caldwell
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permission requests, contact Kat Caldwell at [email protected].
The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.
Book Cover by Kat Caldwell using Canva
First edition 2024
One
Tristen ran up the five stairs to the house he’d always called home. During his childhood, he had rarely noticed the paint peeling or the wooden railing rotting. His house wasn’t much different from the others on the street. But as he got older, something about the tiny matchbox house rubbed him the wrong way.
Could be that at nineteen, he was just finally waking into adulthood.
He shuddered. Being a kid in declining middle America was hard enough. Being a nineteen-year-old who had to start choosing like an adult living in a place with few prospects besides working construction, the fiberglass factory, or other odd jobs was daunting. He and his twin brother Talon had seen their mom, and several of her boyfriends, fight for every penny they ever gripped in their tired hands. Ivy, their mother, had also struggled against addictions ranging from alcohol to depression to pills.
At first, it was to numb the pain of her own childhood trauma that she never spoke of, but they all somehow knew she had. For the last two years, it was to numb the pain of losing her only daughter to an opioid overdose.
Tristen shook the thought of Aimee, his little sister, away. He preferred not dwelling on her or the hole she left behind. That way, he had nothing to numb. Now, more than ever, he was determined not to become like Ivy or Aimee’s dad, Luke. In just a few months, he hoped to be in the city, forging a path into the music industry.
He pulled open the screen door with the hinges screwed too tightly in, so that it slammed shut on your buttocks if you didn’t enter quickly enough.
“Talon!” he shouted from the front door.
Entryways were nonexistent in these homes in central Kentucky. His six-foot-two-inch frame filled the small square of brown tiles designated for keeping muddy or wet shoes. Behind the door was an overflowing coat rack, even though Ivy was always telling everyone to hang their coats in their own damn closet.
With Aimee’s coats gone, there was more room. Tristen wasn’t sure when they had been put away, but he noticed it a few days back.
It still felt like a gut punch, seeing his fourteen-year-old sister's stuff slowly disappear from the house, but he couldn’t say anything. He was just the brother. He had no say in how quickly her stuff left the house.
“Talon,” he repeated, kicking off his shoes and walking into the kitchen where his twin brother was usually guzzling half a gallon of milk and eating a load of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches after work.
But the kitchen was empty.
Tristen headed across the tiny living room to the other side of the small house, where the single bathroom and three small bedrooms were.
“Tristen?” a small voice said.
Tristen froze. For a second, he could have sworn it was Aimee, though he knew that was impossible.
“Tristen, you home? Could you get me some water?”
“Sure, Ivy.” He crept to his mom’s room and inhaled slowly before pushing the door open. “You still in bed?”
The bedroom was dark and stuffy, as though Ivy hadn’t left it in days. That could be true since Tristen had slept at the gym the night before, not wanting to come home after he’d drank too much. Luke would have been pissed at him for drinking so close to a match.
“Aren’t you feeling good?”
“Feel as good as I ever have,” Ivy said, her voice deep from sleep and years of smoking.
“Don’t you work in an hour?”
“Get me some water, Tristen. And don’t tell me what I gotta be doing. I been doing what I have to be doing since before you came along. I don’t need your handholding. You think you’re grown 'cause you’re nineteen. Well, I’m still eighteen years older than you and had twin baby boys by the time I was your age.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Tristen muttered, though not loudly enough for her to hear. He might be younger than her, but he and Talon were six inches taller and double her weight. So, there wasn’t much she could do these days except yell when she disapproved of something they did or said.
Tristen sauntered back from the kitchen with a tall glass of water. It was fifty-fifty if Ivy wanted ice or not. She’d let him know either way.
“Blech. Gross. Who serves someone lukewarm water? Put some ice in there or wait for the tap to run cold. Geez, Tristen, it’s like you don’t know how to do anything.”
Tristen left again and came back with the same glass, this time with three cubes of ice inside.
Ivy drank it down, grimacing when the ice cubes tumbled onto her lips. “Stupid ice,” she muttered.
Everything was against her since Aimee died. When Tristen tried to tell her to look at the good side, she only got mad.
Now he kept all his comments to himself as she muttered curses about the morning light and the ice not staying at the bottom of the glass.
Tristen lifted the shades in Ivy’s bedroom and turned to find himself face-to-face with a woman who didn’t resemble his mother. Her long hair was matted to the left, some strands almost in dreadlocks they were so tangled. Her typically beautiful face was drawn and haggard, her lips almost sagging. She looked worse than when she was coming off the opioids, but he recognized what it was: depression.
She’d had bouts of it when Aimee was diagnosed with bone cancer. There were days Ivy could barely do more than go to work and crawl back to bed. It felt like she spent entire years in that state, but knowing the dates of Aimee’s appointments and eventual surgery to remove the cancer from her knee, it couldn’t have been more than a few weeks, possibly months.
Still, he knew this look on Ivy and it wasn’t good.
