Sounds of Silence: A Contemporary Romance Read online

  Sounds of Silence

  Candace Wondrak

  © 2020 Candace Wondrak

  All Rights Reserved.

  Book cover by Victoria Schaefer at Eve’s Garden of Eden – A Cover Group

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  Chapter One – Bree

  Chapter Two – Mason

  Chapter Three – Bree

  Chapter Four – Calum

  Chapter Five – Bree

  Chapter Six – Mason

  Chapter Seven – Bree

  Chapter Eight – Calum

  Chapter Nine – Bree

  Chapter Ten – Mason

  Chapter Eleven – Calum

  Chapter Twelve – Bree

  Chapter Thirteen – Mason

  Chapter Fourteen – Bree

  Chapter Fifteen – Calum

  Chapter Sixteen – Bree

  Chapter Seventeen – Mason

  Chapter Eighteen – Bree

  Chapter Nineteen – Bree

  Chapter Twenty – Mason

  Chapter Twenty-One – Calum

  Chapter One – Bree

  It’s funny how everyone thinks you’re okay as long as you’re smiling. Grin and bear it, they say, not knowing and not caring whatever it was you were feeling inside. People might say they care, but their actions and their words always proved differently. I’d come to learn that in my life.

  Only twenty years old, and yet I felt so much older. Mentally, physically, you name it. Just drained, watching the world pass me by, waiting for my life to really start while wondering: is this it? Is this what my life will be like?

  And then, the even bigger question: what’s the big deal?

  People always make such a big fuss about life. It’s this precious thing that means so much more than anything else—it’s why we have funerals when our loved ones pass, because we’re sad they’re gone. To me, though, life didn’t seem worth celebrating. It wasn’t fun. It just…was.

  Life was something that was unavoidable, something I was forced to get through just because my parents got together and decided they wanted a kid right then and there. Susan and Andrew Stone. They were good enough parents, I supposed. They fed me, bought me clothes when I needed new ones, kept a steady roof over my head while never beating me or abusing me. A lot of kids had it worse growing up, I knew.

  No, the strange thing was I didn’t have a bad life. I had a family who said they loved me, and up until a few years ago, I had a few friends, too. Now they were off in college, having gone to specialized schools for their majors while I floundered about in the local community college, not knowing what I wanted to major in still. But hey, at least the local college was a hell of a lot cheaper, right?

  I guess, deep down, I was hoping for a sign, something to either tell me what to major in, what to drown the rest of my life in…or hoping for something to just end it. I mean, if I was dead, I wouldn’t have to worry about what I was going to do with the rest of my life.

  Depressing, but true. If you stick around, you’ll find that a lot of the thoughts that come into my head could fit under the subject of depressing.

  I laid in bed for what felt like forever, wide awake as I stared at the ceiling. The alarm clock hadn’t rung on my phone yet, so it wasn’t time to get up. Not yet. I realized a while ago that if I was up before my dad, he asked too many questions.

  Feeling all right? How’s school? Make any new friends?

  The answers to those questions remained the same, as they always did, which was why I hated it when he asked me. No, fine, and definitely not.

  So I instead took to laying in bed for as long as I possibly could before I had to get up, get dressed, and go. I’d spaced out my classes enough during the day at the college to have to spend all day there; there was no point in driving home between them, because in less than thirty minutes, I’d have to turn around and drive back. No point in wasting gas. I usually spent my time between classes either sitting in the library, working on homework, or waiting for time to pass in any of the lounges in the campus buildings.

  I knew some people my age loved college. Some enjoyed going to the parties, hooking up with strangers, getting plastered and forgetting to write their papers until the day before they were due, but that wasn’t me. I didn’t go to parties, never hooked up—still a virgin, not that it mattered—and I never touched any alcohol in my life, unless you counted the wine they served you at your First Communion. Not sure that counted.

  What did I love? I’ll get back to you on that.

  When my phone began to buzz under my pillow, I reached under it and pulled it off the charger, swiping the icon on its flat screen aside. Getting out of bed was a chore, but when you were already wide awake, it was made a lot easier. I hardly ever got sleep anyways. Always interrupted, fitful. Couldn’t remember the last time I got enough solid sleep to have a dream.

  Since it was early fall, the weather outside was growing a bit cooler. Not cold exactly, but getting there. Soon enough the world would be encased in snow and ice, and I’d be white-knuckling it to the college in all sorts of weather in my old, beat-up car. My parents’ old vehicle, which they’d given me when they bought a new Jeep. I was thankful, because not everyone was given a car with no strings attached, but I also knew why they gave it to me.

  They wanted me to make friends. To go out, to live what they thought was a normal life for a young adult in the twenty-first century. Eh, they had Michelle for that—my younger sister by two years. Eighteen and anything but innocent; this semester might be her first in college, but she had stepped foot on college campuses a lot earlier than now. She was doing some online school, but in a year or so, she’d be moving out and going to a college that was a few hours away. When that happened…I had no idea what I’d do. She took my parents’ attention off me, so once she was gone, Mom and Dad would have nothing better to do than worry about me.

  I picked a baggy sweatshirt, along with a pair of torn jeans. I slid my Vans on, a simple black pair, and stopped before the mirror resting on my dresser. I didn’t wash my hair yesterday, so it was a bit greasy. I hated showering, honestly, just like I hated making the bed. It’s why I hardly ever did it. There was no point.

  I did, however, decide to grab a beanie hat off the floor and pull it over my head, hiding the worst of the grease. Having thin hair was a drag, definitely. I could thank my dad for that. Luckily, with bright pink hair, everyone always noticed the color and not the grease. Unless those people were my parents, in which case they always brought it up.

  When’s the last time you showered? None of your goddamn business, okay?

  My backpack, my old, worn bag from high school, sat near the door to my bedroom, and I picked it up silently, leaving my room. The moment I stepped into the hall, my nose picked up the scent of bacon. It smelled good, of course, but that wasn’t going to make me stop and want to have it with my dad, who was surely the cook downstairs.

  Michelle’s door was still closed across from me in the hall, and I wondered what time she got in last night. She’d been dating this kid from our high school for over a year now; she and Kyle were still somehow in the honeymoon phase, where
they wanted to spend every waking moment together.

  Good for them, I guessed. I’d never known what that felt like, and I doubted I ever would.

  Heaving a silent sigh, I headed down the stairs. Indeed, I was right: my dad stood before the stove, a plate of fresh bacon beside him. He’d just cracked two eggs over the pan, cooking them in the way we all liked in this family—over easy, the best kind for dipping. Sunnyside up wasn’t cooked nearly enough for my taste.

  “Morning, Bree,” my dad chimed in, tossing a smile over his shoulder. Mom was still upstairs; I’d heard her in the shower as I came down. “Want eggs before you go?” He worked at a local dentist’s office; today he didn’t have to go in until the afternoon. His thinning brown hair gave way to a shiny scalp up top, though his facial hair showed no signs of thinning. My dad looked like literally every other dad in America, nothing super impressive or imposing about him.

  I liked him, as much as you could ever really like your parent. I liked Mom too, I guess. They were both decent people. I felt bad they wound up with me as a daughter. No one deserved me.

  “No,” I said, heading straight for the door. “Thanks.”

  I grabbed the keys off the rack near the door. With my hand on the knob, I was about to walk out, but my dad called out, “Have a good day at class. Make some friends.” A desperate plea from a father to his daughter. Make some friends. Like it was just that easy, like I could snap my fingers and have a whole horde of friends appear at my back.

  Maybe if I’d gone to the colleges my old friends from high school had gone to, but honestly…I didn’t see the point. Getting all that student loan debt when a local college was just as good, at least for the more generic classes.

  Granted, I was going into my third year at the local college, whereas most students only spent two years at places like that, but still. My case was clearly not the norm.

  I gave him a smile—a fake smile that made my heart hurt inside, but a smile nonetheless my dad believed—and then I walked out. It was truly amazing what a smile could do. A reassurance that I would try my best to make friends…and, of course, fail spectacularly because I didn’t care enough to try. Why make friends when they’d just disappear down the road anyway? Mom and Dad didn’t have friends. They had me and Michelle, and their jobs. That was literally it.

  The smile instantly fell off my face as I headed to my car. Was I that good at giving fake smiles? I supposed I did have a few years of practice now. I had no clue when the smiles morphed from being real to being forced, but it was sometime in high school. I knew the change wasn’t overnight, but sometimes I tried to look back and pinpoint the exact day I realized everything was pointless in the end.

  Obviously, I couldn’t find the day.

  Mom and Dad said I would get over it. It was just me being a mopey teenager. Maybe they were right. Maybe, in a few years, I’d look back on how I acted now and laugh—genuinely laugh at my antics and my thoughts.

  Or maybe not. I was twenty, after all, no longer technically a teenager. Since my parents had shrugged my feelings off so easily, I decided to stop showing them to anybody. Why bother when no one cared?

  I tossed my bag onto the passenger seat, heaving a sigh that was not so quiet this time. When I was alone, I didn’t have the energy to be fake. I started her up and began the half-hour drive through town to the community college that sat one city over.

  It was a nice enough place, I supposed, though I still had no idea why college students in America had to take stupid courses like chemistry and biology when we literally had a full year of each in high school. Just another way for the universities to get money, I guess. Must be nice to be able to dictate how young adults should spend their time and their money.

  Money they didn’t even technically have. Loans were a predatory thing, but so was everything in life.

  I’d taken most of the generic stuff already; I was now getting into some higher-level stuff. A lot of sociology, psychology, even a bit of criminology. I found that stuff interesting; I didn’t know why. Some kids might not look forward to their classes, but I did. What better way to take up the time than to sit and learn about how society treated deviance from the norm?

  You know, I used to enjoy a lot of things. I drew, I jammed out to music, I dabbled in writing. I even played hours upon hours of videogames. But there came a time when I just couldn’t do it. Any of it. One day I sat down at my desk in my room, a blank page of paper before me, and the last thing I wanted to do was draw. No songs caught my attention, and writing was…it was shit. Why bother writing when everything I typed up sounded like it was written by a fifth-grader?

  I even lost interest in videogames. A horror, truly, but the truth all the same. No amount of stealthy assassinations in Assassin’s Creed could get me out of any funk, nor could any romance in Dragon Age. I literally could not force myself to sit down in front of a TV screen and play any of the games I knew like the back of my hand.

  When I arrived at the college, I brought my car to the parking lot at the edge of campus. A big, wide lot already full of other vehicles, I found an end space, backing her in before turning her off. My eyes glanced upward, at the blue sky above.

  A pretty blue. If only a pretty color could make me feel happy.

  I sat in my car for a while, waiting until I absolutely had to leave to make it to class on time. I slung my bag over my shoulder and headed out.

  The one thing I hated on campus was how busy the sidewalks were in between classes. Like, so many people, either focusing on their phones or jamming out to whatever music was in their AirPods. Some of them were in groups of friends, walking together, talking and laughing. I kept my hands on the straps of my bag, my fingers toying with the fraying edges of it.

  This was just another day for me. Yet another day to get through, another day I couldn’t wait for it to end.

  At least, that’s what I thought.

  Today was actually the day that everything would start to change.

  Chapter Two – Mason

  Getting out of bed in the morning was tough. Super tough. I was not a morning person, which was why I always carried a huge travel mug full of coffee to class. I drank that shit like it was the fountain of eternal youth, the fountain of life. It kept me sane, mostly because I hated myself for scheduling such an early class.

  Silly me of last semester thought the earlier I was done with classes would mean the earlier I could go home. Had a part-time job at a local grocery store, you know. Not super proud of it, but I’d had it since I was fifteen, which was…six years ago? Damn, I was getting old.

  Yeah, twenty-one and still at the local community college. I knew it was a little weird, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. There was no point in choosing a major when I flitted from thing to thing every week. One day I thought being a therapist would be cool, but then the next week I realized I didn’t want to listen to people all day. Then I thought, maybe I could be a doctor—Mom always said I was smart.

  But then I’d have to get my hands dirty on a daily basis, see other people’s blood. Yeah, did not want that.

  The thing about growing up, I guess, was that you always shot for the stars, reached for the sky even though the majority of us would never get there. That wasn’t me putting anyone down; it was the truth. No one grew up wanting to be a janitor or a custodian. Everyone wanted to be the doctor or the teacher or the astronaut.

  Then we grew up, and our childish dreams seemed just that: childish.

  I wasn’t the only one who didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and that made me feel a little better. If I was the only one fumbling around, clueless in this big, wide world, I’d feel pretty stupid. Luckily, most everyone I talked to on campus felt the same, even if most were a few years younger than me.

  Today was a Monday, and Mondays were especially hard for me. Something about them always seemed more difficult than any other day of the week, probably because it was the day after Sund
ay, the last day of the weekend. Getting back into the groove was hard, what could I say?

  Unfortunately, me needing coffee made me stand in the kitchen at home and wait for it to brew. Then I got caught in some road construction, and then I couldn’t find a damned parking spot in the lot. I had to find a spot on the street and try to dig out a few quarters to pay the meter.

  Yeah. Mondays were so not my favorite day of the week.

  By the time everything was good, I realized I was going to be late to class.

  Great. Just great. Professors really loved it when you strolled in five minutes late.

  That was sarcasm, because they most definitely hated it. They stopped talking to glare at you as you tried to stroll in quietly and not make a fuss, thereby making a bigger fuss than they would’ve if they would’ve just kept on lecturing.

  I got it, their time was valuable, but sometimes life happened. Sometimes you couldn’t be on time to save your life.

  The only saving grace about me being late to this particular class was that the room wasn’t full. When I snuck in, I was able to get my ass in a seat in the back before the teacher heard the door close.

  Not where I normally sat; on every other good day, I sat more towards the middle front—they say you’re better able to pay attention the closer to the front you are, but I’d heard that sometimes in the very front, you’re subjected to some saliva if the professors are spitters. Yeah, nasty.

  I ended up sitting beside a girl in a beanie with raging pink hair that made my eyes hurt to look at. So pink. So fucking pink I had to take a huge sip of coffee and blink a few times to try to wake my ass up. I’d seen her before in passing, but I’d never spoken to her. She was always quiet, withdrawn. When the professor called on her to answer any questions, she always mumbled the responses.

  As I got out my laptop to take notes on, I leaned over to her chair and whispered, “Did I miss anything?”