Those people only said that because they weren’t around when the nightmares hit. When I finally understood that my parents weren’t perfect like I had thought when I was little. Worse yet, that they weren’t the heroes in my life but flawed, almost caricature representations of who I had made them out to be.
I had long known the truth about my family.
We didn’t bounce back as well as my parents’ friends seemed to think, and my parents never fought, not because they got along so well but because they didn’t care enough to fight.
They weren’t two people who fell in love and got married.
They were two people who married each other because each had a goal and knew it would only be accomplished with their union—my mom for her status, and my dad for his inheritance from my grandparents for having married the girl they approved of.
Perhaps they loved each other in their own way, but they weren’tin lovewith each other, and that just seemed so…
Wasted.
All these wasted years, spending your time with someone who didn’t make your heart flutter simply because they were looking at you.
I didn’t want that.
Call me naïve, but I wanted to love the person I marry, no matter his social status.
And it was with the realization that I didn’t want to be like my mom in this way—or any way—plus the fact that she had turned into a helicopter parent since the cliff incident that I found it hard to maintain closeness with her.
The person I thought she was as a child was slowly but surely being stripped with each year that I got older, and what was left was a woman I didn’t understand very well.
I grabbed my bag from the passenger seat and climbed out of my car, looking over at the bustling coffee shop filled with college students. Some were in a group, laughing and enjoying each other’s company, and something about that sight caused a slight sting to form in the center of my heart.
I could put on a front all I wanted, but even I couldn’t lie to myself about how much I wanted a friend to call my own.
I rubbed away the small ache in my chest and walked through the doors, getting in the back of a very long line to the front.
My eyes roamed about the small cafe, coming to a stop when I found a boy in the corner, surrounded by a group of people, yet seeming so distant from everyone. He might as well be an outsider.
Not that any of his friends seemed to notice, or perhaps they didn’t care. They just wanted to be seen hanging out with him.
I didn’t know him personally, but even I knew who he was.
It helped that my roommate seemed to be obsessed with him, along with most of the female population—and even male—on this campus.
Kai Madden was hard to ignore.
It would be enough to say his good looks were what got him noticed. But that was not why he was so well known on campus.
Kai Madden was the heir to the infamous King’s Men MC here in Sacramento.
His father, Dominic Madden, was the president, and his name had been linked to multiple crimes in the city, mainly relating to drugs and arms trafficking, though there was never any evidence held against him. In fact, the members of the MC were pretty good at avoiding the law.
The King’s Men MC had been a thorn in my dad’s side for most of his time in the judge’s chair.
I didn’t know why Dad hated the MC so much, but I knew better than to ever say anything nice about them in our house.
I couldn’t even if I wanted to.
I didn’t know much about it, only what Dad would sometimes say when things at work became tense, and he had a little too much to drink.
But everything that I have come to know about the heir to the MC came from the gossip around campus, mostly from girls who had “claimed” to have gotten him for the night.
And if what they were saying was even half true, then Kai was considered nothing short but a God in bed.
The rest came from my obsessive roommates—especially Angelica, who, uncharacteristically, had proclaimed they were meant to be, one drunken night in the apartment. Not that I blamed her.