Burned by Tara Sivec
Prologue
JUST BECAUSE I’M telling you this story doesn’t mean we made it out alive at the end. I could be telling you this from the great beyond or some equally crazy shit. Regardless of how it ends, I’m going back to the beginning, back to where it all started.
This isn’t your typical love story.
Okay, maybe it is. Boy meets girl, they fall in love and live happily ever after. The things is, my happily ever after didn’t go as planned.
Thank God for second chances.
It all happened in the blink of an eye and, for me, nothing had ever felt more right. Maybe you’ll think it happened too fast, that falling in love again doesn’t happen like this.
I’m here to tell you it absolutely does.
It happens when you least expect it, when you realize that a part of your heart and soul always remained in the hands of another.
It happens when your past collides with your present and shapes your future.
We found our way back to one another, so it was easy to fool ourselves into believing that time was on our side.
Time to get to know one another again.
Time to fall in love.
Time to grow old together.
The thing about time is, it moves achingly slow when you’re doing something you hate and it flies faster than the speed of light when you’re doing something you love. Time is a fickle bitch.
I wish I could tell you that this story has a happy ending, but I don’t know the answer to that right now. So much has happened so quickly that it all kind of feels like a dream. Maybe it is. Maybe I dreamed every single second of it—the good and the bad.
God, I hope it wasn’t a dream. There’s nothing I’ve ever wanted more than forever with him.
I pray we make it out alive in the end, but even if we don’t…
Those seventeen days…
Those last seventeen breaths…
Hell, even those seventeen miserable years…
I wouldn’t change any of it for the world if the endgame is him.
Everything happens for a reason, but sometimes you don’t know what that reason is until it’s too late.
Please don’t let it be too late.