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  Never Forgotten Love

  A Story of Second Chances

  S.M. Stryker

  Entice by Booktrope

  Seattle WA 2015

  Copyright 2014, 2015 S.M. Stryker

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

  Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

  Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

  No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

  Inquiries about additional permissions should be directed to: [email protected]

  Cover Design by Laura Hidalgo

  Previously self-published as Never Forgotten Love: A Story of Second Chances, 2014

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.

  Print ISBN 978-1-62015-795-4

  EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-814-2

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015939396

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  Character Descriptions

  About the Author

  Recipes

  A Preview of Loving Redemption

  More Great Reads from Entice by Booktrope

  Dedication

  For Kurt, my loving husband. Thank you for your story.

  For all the children that have no other options but to reside in a place where they can’t escape the evil inside, the one place they should find their solace, a place where no child should be afraid, and with the people that are supposed to protect nurture and love them.

  This place should be their home.

  To my girls, thank you for your support and love.

  Chapter One

  “GOD DAMN IT, HOW STUPID are you Beckett? I sat you there to watch for the bus, not to let it go by,” I flinch as she comes over to where I am sitting and slaps my head and dumps me out of my chair. I’m four years old, and I’m now crying, and my bottom hurts where I landed on the hard wood floor. I should be used to it by now; it isn’t as if it doesn’t happen all the time. This is either going to make me an angry man or make me so soft everyone will see the target I have on my back. “You are four years old Beckett it’s time to start acting like it. Get off the damn floor. Now I have to take you to school, and I have better things to do. This better God damn, not happen again you little brat, and stop that God, damn crying or I’ll really give you something to cry about.” I jump back as she raises her hand as she said it. “Get to the car and wait there until I get there,” my mommy screams at me. I stand up from the cold hard wood floor wiping my now running nose on the sleeve of my shirt and my tear stained eyes with the other sleeve as I walk to the little one car garage that housed the shiny pearl essence white Cadillac mommy cherished so much. I open the door slowly and carefully so I don’t hit the door on anything; I slip into the back seat and buckle my seatbelt. It smells of leather, and the seats are cold on my sore bottom, I knew better not to get it dirty. I know I should change my shirt, now that there is snot on the sleeve, but I only get two shirts and two pairs of jeans to last me the whole year, mommy said to me, even if I grow out of them, so I have to wear the one I have on. Unlike my mommy who has her closet and almost my entire closet full of her clothes. Mommy is always concerned about how she looks. She is very pretty with her short bobbed white blonde hair and green eyes the color of the grass after a rain, and always dressed perfectly, but I guess I don’t see it very often because she is so ugly on the inside. I always hear the men that come home with her say how beautiful she is.

  I waited quietly, caressing the cold white leather seat unconsciously while I wait and wait and wait for my mommy to come. I didn’t know how long I waited, but it is long enough that I fall asleep. When my mommy finally gets to the car, she starts yelling at me all over again. As she drops me off in front of the school, she tells me that she wouldn’t be home until late at night and that, I am to stay in the house and fix a bowl of cereal for my dinner then go to bed.

  When the bus drops me off at my house after school, I walk to the garage door lifting the little panel for the garage door opener, pushing in the code that makes the door open for me to get into the house.

  I am a small boy, younger than most of the kids in my first-grade class, but my mommy didn’t want to have me underfoot for another year, or have to pay for daycare. She said it was well worth the money to put me in a private school that would start me in Kindergarten when I was almost four. Although I am smaller than the rest, I am smart. I learned to read in kindergarten last year. People tell me I am a cute little boy with my dark brown hair that would curl when it’s longer and midnight blue eyes, framed with dark long lashes. I am excited about the books I checked out from the library today, and I am excited about reading them in bed. I’m pulling them out of my backpack when I hear a light knock at the front door.

  I know I shouldn’t answer the door, but I look out the front window peering out at the front door to see who’s knocking. It’s Girl; she’s my neighbor and she is in my class, she’s very nice and doesn’t let the bigger kids pick on me; she can be scary when she sees that I am being picked on by the bigger kids.

  I haven’t lived in West Seattle very long, and my mommy will not allow me to go outside, she doesn’t want me to get dirty and track it into the house. I don’t know any of the kids that live in the area. Girl is my first friend. She came up to me during recess and asked me if I wanted to play with her. I thought she was a cute girl with her long strawberry blond hair, crystal blue eyes and best of all she’s very nice and she’s tough, she doesn’t put up with shit from anyone, she even scares a lot of the older and bigger kids too. Her eyes start to turn gray when she is really mad. I open the door inviting her inside to see what she wants. Girl walks inside the house, looking around as if appraising the inside; she hasn’t ever been inside before let alone played with me, well except at school. The house was clean and orderly, not decorated in any particular style, a green sofa and chair with a glass coffee table is the only furniture in the room. When you walk through the front door, you walk into the living area, which has plain cream walls and basic hardwoods on the floor. “Hi Beckett, my mom wants to know if you can eat dinner with us tonight,” she says in an excited voice.

  “I can’t leave my house,” I say sadly. “My mommy isn’t here and she told me this morning when I got home I was to stay in the house.”

  “You mean you are here all by yourself? No one is home with you?” she asks aghast.

  “Yeah, she’s gone a lot at night, so I am here by myself most nights. She doesn’t come home until after I am asleep,” I tell her as if it’s not a big deal, because it isn’t, I can’t remember how old I was when she started leav
ing me at home. “It will be better now because I can get books at school and read them in my bed.”

  “What about dinner?” she asks curiously.

  “I usually have cereal,” again stating like it’s nothing unusual.

  “Well, ok, maybe we can play together this weekend,” Girl, says as she turns to open the door to walk back to her house.

  Once Girl closes the door, I walk into the kitchen climb up on the footstool to grab a bowl out of the cabinet. Placing the bowl on the countertop, I scoot the stool to the cabinet beside the refrigerator, climbing onto the countertop, standing on my tiptoes to grab the box of Cheerios from the top of the refrigerator. I jump down to the floor; I pumped my fists in the air “yes!” This is the first time I’ve ever jumped from that height.

  I finished my cereal, putting my bowl and spoon in the dishwasher, I wasn’t about to make the mistake of leaving it in the sink again. I didn’t want to be woken up in the middle of the night by being yelled at for being a lazy ass.

  This is a typical night for me, well at least since we had moved to West Seattle. I had been scared at first when she left me at night, in a new house that makes new sounds I wasn’t used to, but I got used to it, in fact I like it better, I don’t have to worry about being yelled at or hit.

  I don’t know my Daddy; my parents were divorced when I was almost two. That was long enough ago that I didn’t remember him, all I know of my father is what my mommy calls him when she doesn’t receive money from him, and those were words I can’t repeat unless I wanted my mouth to be washed out with soap.

  As my first year in West Seattle went by, my friendship with Harlow girl grew, and I found myself leaning on her for comfort when my mother went on a yelling rampage. I don’t know why my mother is always yelling at me, I try to be a good boy, I work hard in school getting good grades and do what she tells me to do around the house, but she is never satisfied.

  Maybe she is just lonely, she’s always bringing different men home, but I figured out that when she does and they drink the special liquid that is in the pretty glass jars that I’m not allowed to touch; if she drinks too much of it I want to be somewhere else other than at home. I know that I won’t get much sleep those nights because she will inevitably get into a fight with whoever is at the house. There will be yelling, hitting and kicking, you’d think it’s WWE wrestling on TV with all the blood sometimes, and if I am lucky, I’m not pulled into one of her fights.

  For Christmas, I received a jar of peanut butter from my mom for my school lunches and a set of walkie-talkies from my grandparents. I would have asked Santa for walkie-talkies if I would have been able to see him. I wonder how he knew. The first thing I did, beside hug and kiss my poppy and mema telling them thank you, was to run over and give one to Harlow girl, I knew that whenever things got bad in my house I could talk to her and she would always make things better for me.

  Chapter Two

  AS THE YEARS PAST, Harlow, and I spend more and more time together. After knowing that she didn’t have to care for me if I were at Harlow’s house, she let me stay as long as I wanted. Harlow and I are inseparable; we always seem to be in the same classes. Every day we walk to and from school together. When we get home, we are always with each other doing homework or Harlow’s new interest, making cupcakes. She is good at it too, she started out using some of her mother’s recipes, and then she started modifying them to experiment, who would have thought a maple bacon cupcake would be good, or peanut butter and jelly. She has a natural talent. She always has a notepad with her. She writes down all of the changes that she makes to them; her parents and I are her guinea pigs. Once she was satisfied with the way, the recipe turns out she would save it in her cookbook. Her house always smelled so good, and I am always glad to be her personal slave and to help her when she needed it. I loved it, because I loved being with her.

  Through the years, Harlow’s parents became my second parents, I wouldn’t ever tell my mother that, or she would put an end to me going over there. Harlow’s mom always invited me to stay for dinner, knowing that my mother is never home. Harlow’s mom is so nice, and she is pretty inside and out. She is shorter than my mother, not by much maybe an inch or so my mother is about five foot seven. Unlike my mother, Mrs. Bennett has light brown hair and blue eyes, and she is a little larger than my mother is. When Mrs. Bennett hugs me, she is all soft. Not that I have ever hugged my mother, but I have seen her bone sticking out when she wears some of her real tight clothes when she is meeting a man. Mr. Bennett is very nice too. He is what I want to be when I am a man. He is loving and caring and I don’t ever think I have heard him raise his voice. He is tall; maybe six foot one I think is what Harlow said, with brown hair and spooky gray eyes and he has long dark eyelashes that make his eyes standout. I really wish they were my parents; they really love Harlow, and she doesn’t have any brothers or sisters.

  I used to work so hard in school to make my mother proud, but nothing I did was ever good enough for her, she always found fault with everything I did. However, when Harlow’s parents started to take an interest in me, I worked to make them proud, and I loved it. For once, I began to feel like what I assumed most kids felt about their parents. Not to say they didn’t have expectations of me, they did but they weren’t unreasonable. After a while, I stopped telling my mother anything. I was finally happy. I had Harlow and her family, what else would I need.

  Mr. Bennett, Harlow’s father, showed me how to repair and fix things. He said I had a knack for putting things together. Maybe because I loved putting puzzles together. He would teach me how to take things apart and put them back together, things a father would maybe teach a son I suppose. When appliances would break, he would let me take them apart to see if I could make them work again.

  He showed me how to work on his house too. Harlow’s house is an older one-story house; I think they call it a craftsman style. It has a real nice front deck with a swing that Harlow and I sit on a lot. Mr. Bennett has remodeled a lot of the house, and he has shown me how to do some of it. When you walk into their home, you walk into the living area. It has hardwood floors that I helped him refinish them, and they are beautiful and shiny. We made a cool mantle for the stone fireplace in the corner. We took a big twelve inches by six inches by ten feet long piece of wood and we took a torch to and burned it, once it had cooled we took a metal brush to it and brushed all the burned areas then the hard part, we put a thick wax on it and rubbed it in and rubbed the extra off, it made it kind of shiny. It was a lot of hard work, but I didn’t mind. I like learning how to do things with my hands and it looked amazing once we installed it. I slept well that night.

  The kitchen was through an open hall with an arched opening to the left of the house. Mr. Bennett put new cabinets in and had a pretty granite countertop installed. The kitchen was big and open with a bar area. I would sit and talk to Harlow sometimes, staying out of her way while she was baking. All the bedrooms were to the right of the house down a hallway that also housed a bathroom he remodeled. It was in the bathroom that he showed me how to tile. It was hard work by it looked great when it was finished.

  One day he brought home a computer. “Beckett, I found this computer at work it was just laying around, but it hasn’t worked for a while and I thought you would like to see if you could fix it, and if you get it running, you can have it.”

  “Really? You would let me have it?” I looked up at him in awe. No one has ever given me something like this before.

  “Sure, it’s been collecting dust at work, so of course you can have it.” He places his hand on my shoulder giving me a pat. I read and studied, bringing home books from the library on computer repair. Mr. Bennett took me to the computer store to buy a few things that I thought I would need to get it running after I diagnosed the problem. He made the excuse that he needed a new monitor for his home computer.

  I worked night after night until I was finally ready to see if I had fixed it. That evening Harlow’s parents brought o
ut a big box and told me to open it. Inside was the flat screen monitor that Mr. Bennett had bought along with a keyboard and mouse. My mouth dropped open; I looked at both of them as Harlow walks up to me with a big smile on her face as she bumps my shoulder.

  “Well, don’t just stand there son, how else are you going to see if you fixed it if you don’t have everything you need to make it usable.”

  “I don’t know what to say, but, thank you so much, wow!” I am so excited. I hook up all the cords and plug it in. My stomach has butterflies. Harlow and her parents are standing around waiting to see. This is a big deal to me; I have worked on many small appliances, but this, this was a computer. I pushed the button to turn on the monitor, and then did the same with the computer. I hear the fan turning and the little pings and tings a computer makes as it is warming up, and within a few seconds the screen flashed and the monitor lights up. My heart was racing. As the screen comes up, Harlow and her parents were clapping and congratulating me.

  “I knew if anyone could fix this, you could son,” Mr. Bennett said, smacking me on the shoulder. I can’t believe it. I did it; I fixed it, this is so cool. This is what I like to do; I now know what I want to do when I grow up. There isn’t a better feeling than to fix something that someone is going to throw away.

  “You know Beckett, for a very young man of twelve, I have witnessed you do some amazing things with your hands. If you keep this up, by the time you get to college you’ll be more advanced than the other kids there, and you will be able to fly through.

  “Thank you, Mr. Bennett, I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this without your help. Thank you for always being there for me.”

  Mr. Bennett leaned down, wrapped his arms around me, and squeezed. “Son all I did is put the tools in front of you, you did the rest. I am proud of you son,” he said as he kissed the top of my head. I felt a sensation that I had never felt before, my body felt warm, but I also had goose bumps, I felt my eyes starting to burn as tears started to fill my eyes. I had never been treated like this; it was foreign to me. My heart was racing, and I could hear my heart beating in my ears. He was proud of me; no one has ever said that to me, and though they weren’t my blood family, they were more of a family than what I had.