At what point does enough become enough, though? When do I break free of the chains holding me down? When do I break the cycle for my daughter? When does Marisa Noelle Timmons get to see love in action? How can I teach her what love is when I don’t even know myself?
I haven’t learned a lot in my short life, but I do know I have never seen real love exist in any relationship around me, and it sure as shit isn’t what you read about in books. I haven’t lived what anyone would consider a normal life, but I damn sure know love isn’t about a debt, either. A real marriage, a real relationship—if one could ever exist—isn’t about owing your partner a damn thing.
I look down at my sleeping, precious baby girl, and my heart swells. I may not know the love of a man for a woman, but I damn sure know that nothing—and I mean abso-fucking-lutely nothing—tops the depths of emotion a mother feels for her child.
My world is warped. My life is shit. I’d managed to get not one thing right in my meager existence until I had this little girl. Every breath she takes is a breath of new life into me.
Monte can check and balance himself until the sun falls from the sky as long as I have my baby girl.
I want out.
But I want her more.
There is no way I can leave until I know I get to do it with her. There is no way I can escape until I find a way to make it free and clear with her. She is my very life, my very being, my entire world.
One day, I’m going to find a way to have something better for us both. I just haven’t figured it out quite yet.
“Sleep well, my sleeping beauty. Momma’s gonna make it right for both of us,” I whisper to the quiet room around me. “We don’t need Prince Charming, baby girl. Somehow, some way, little princess, I will make it happen.”
Chapter 3
Morrison
After changing my clothes, I step out of the airport bathroom. I am someone different here. I am a high roller. I’m what those jocks and preps from high school wanted to become.
For a brief moment, I think of Annie and wonder if she found a man she could make over right out of high school. Annie’s tell was the glimmer in her brown eyes when she saw her little socialite friends checking me out. I made her look even better. Apparently to her it was cool to date down. But I had no intention of being anybody’s down.
Here, nobody would use me that way. I made the man whose reflection I look at in the mirror today. My sister-in-law Livi calls me Slick, and by God, she isn’t lying.
As usual, I throw a twenty in the airport slots. I walked off the plane with two grand, and that money will get me through a month, if not more.
The first pull is a loss. The next twenty goes in, and with the next pull, I get my cash back. My third pull, I lose.
A man like me isn’t superstitious; a man like me is calculating. This loss doesn’t mean I lose. It tells me where to start.
This is a ritual I do every damn time. If I lose, I start off away from the Strip, where the limits and the rules are lower. When I win, I hit the Strip first, where there are more rules, tighter slots, and higher limits.
Is there a method to my madness? I’ve switched shit up more than twenty times and learned that this way sets the tone for my game. “My game”—you heard that right. Most people play a game, but not me. The game is mine. I run the game.
I walk out into the dry desert air. My pores immediately shrivel up, my face flushes, and I breathe deep, feeling like I’m suffocating. I’m not suffocating, though. The burn is my welcome back. Game time. I hail a cab and settle in.
“3111 Bel Air Drive,” I tell the cabbie as I climb into the air-conditioned vehicle.
It’s dusk, a time of day when there is just something about the lights in Vegas that sets off a surge of energy in my body. I feel alive, like I have a purpose bigger than the skyscrapers and casinos, brighter than the lights on the Strip. I am bolder in Vegas, and I like bold.
When the cab drops me off in front of my condo, I feel a grin spread across my face. No, it isn’t a mansion. It isn’t even a single-family home. The building I now own a piece of has a gate and twenty-four-hour surveillance. I own fifteen hundred square feet of something.
It has two bedrooms, three baths, a state-of-the-art kitchen, and a living room that houses not just a big-screen, but a huge-screen TV and a Bose surround sound system. I also have a garage, and it is the first place I go to, in order to make sure my Porsche is sitting pretty and unharmed inside.
As the garage door lifts and I look at her, I feel pride swell inside my chest, because everything I own is paid for. I don’t owe anyone shit.
Tomorrow, she and I will cruise the streets and find some nice, tanned Vegas ass to celebrate with, to give me a proper welcome back to the bright lights and big city.