“Jamie?” She put her finger under my chin, and titled my head up so I had to look at her. “That was so damn sweet, corny, but sweet nonetheless,” she said, smiling her sexy little smile.

“Yeah? I thought it sucked big time,” I admitted.

“It didn’t suck, but maybe you could just go with the line, ’hey, want to be exclusive with me?’ or something along those lines,” she said, grinning at me wickedly.

Holy shit, she’s going to say yes! I could feel my insides doing a little happy dance and I wanted to shout a celebration and rip my shirt off, and run around swinging it above my head, singing the national anthem. Ok Jamie, calm down she hasn’t said yes yet.

“Ellie?” I grinned, trying to contain my excitement.

“Yes Jamie?” she asked, pulling back from me slightly, pretending she didn’t know what I was going to ask. A beautiful smile was tugging at the corners of her mouth and her eyes were amused.

“Want to be exclusive with me?” I asked hopefully.

She grinned, “Hell yeah I do,” she said, as she crashed her lips to mine.

Chapter 12

Everything about my life right now was awesome. I had moved into my new place on the Monday, and Ellie had come over in her little denim booty shorts and a t-shirt that she’d tied up in the back exposing her flat stomach, and we painted the walls. That day was a lot of fun and I think we ended up with more paint on us than on the walls. I was actually having the time of my life. Not that it was hard to top anything that had ever happened in my life before, but my little girlfriend just made my life a whole lot more interesting. My job was going great, Connor and I had become quite close, it was nice to have someone who I could actually call a ‘friend’, I’d never really had that before in my life.

My girlfriend was beautiful, smart, kind and caring, and not to mention thoughtful. I’d never had anyone treat me the way that she treated me all the time. It was just little things that she did for me, like sneaking out of the bed early in the morning when she stayed over, so that she could make me a sandwich to take to work with me that day. Or that she would just randomly buy me my favourite candy, or rent movies that I said I wanted to watch, or she’d show up with a car magazine or an article she’d clipped from a newspaper, just because she saw it and thought I’d like it.

Ellie was a lot of fun to be around, and I’m not just talking about sex. We didn’t even need to do anything physical to make me smile. Just watching TV, talking, holding hands whilst sitting on the sofa, was enough to put me in a great mood. Everything was incredible and I felt like the luckiest guy in the world, because an incredible girl like Ellie Pearce, gave a waster like me a chance.

The month passed in a blur of laughing, flirting and talking about everything - well, everything apart from my past, I kept that well away from her. I couldn’t lose her now, not after knowing what it would be like with her, I needed to keep my past as far away from Ellie as possible, because I couldn’t take the risk of her not wanting to be with me if she knew the real me. I couldn’t risk losing that look that she has for me all the time, the soft tender look. I needed that look, I loved that look, that one look from her made my life worth living.

Unfortunately, just like every other time in someone’s life when things are looking rosy and bright, something had to come along and ruin it. Just as things were looking up for me and I thought that I might have a chance at a happy life. Just as I started to believe that, maybe, somewhere up there someone had decided to give me a break…….karma had to come and pull the rug out from under my feet and knock me on my ass again.

I woke up on Sunday morning to my cell phone ringing loudly next to my head. I winced and tried to grab it quickly, before it woke up the beautiful girl that was using my stomach like a pillow as she snored lightly.

I opened the phone and blinked a couple of times, trying to clear the sleepy fog that had settled over me. “Hello?” I croaked into the phone, subtly putting one hand over Ellie’s ear so that she wouldn’t wake up. Lucky for me she was a really deep sleeper and I’d worn her out last night so she was probably sleeping like the dead right now.

I was greeted by Ray’s voice. “Hey, Kid.”

“Hey. What’s up, Ray?” I asked, yawning and trying to move so I could get out of the bed, but Ellie had other ideas about that. She groaned in her sleep, throwing her other arm over my chest, her hand slapping the side of my face by accident. I laughed quietly to myself; she was such a freaking menace when she was unconscious. She talked in her sleep sometimes too, it was too cute, we’d had whole conversations about baking cookies and rollerblading, but she never had any recollection of it at all in the morning.

“Look, Kid, I’ll get straight to the point because there’s no use in beating around the bush with this.

You should be told, so I’m just gonna lay it out there. So…. I’ll just spit it out….and…..”

I laughed, shaking my head, “Say it then, you’re beating around the bush right now!”

I heard a heavy sigh on the line before he spoke. “Your mom’s in a bad way. I bumped into her just now at the store and she’s banged up, her arm is broken and her face is pretty bruised. I asked her what happened and she just shrugged it off and tried to tell me she fell down the stairs.”

I gulped, my fist clenching at the thought of her being hurt and what that could possibly mean. Fell down the stairs, my ass. That was the oldest excuse in the damn book, as if Ray would fall for that one! I felt my body tense up. I didn’t get on with my mother at all, in fact, the last time she saw me she told me that I had ruined her life and she wished I was dead, but I still didn’t want anyone hurting her. She was still my mother at the end of the day.