BAD Beginnings Read Online Free

temporary. Tell me how to keep you that way.”
    How to keep him this way? All sorts of ideas came to mind. Whoa, had she really said that? God, he wanted to answer. He wanted to give her a smartass retort like keep me up all night on those Egyptian cotton sheets back at the house. Or maybe just beer and hot tub suits me, how about you? She wasn’t the type to say those things to, so he kept his tongue tied securely in his mouth. Still, he cocked an eyebrow and lifted his lip slightly.
    Ironically, she had talked nonstop for the past three hours and now was silent. He assumed grasping for a clever response. Without any, she simply stopped following and Baden slipped his hands in his pockets and whistled as he strode along the pavement.
    For the first time since he’d entered the twilight zone of Logan Indiris’ life, he was free to leave. He should be elated. Or maybe relieved? Why was he dismayed to disappear back into his normal life and stop pretending? He glanced at the time on the bank across the street and realized that his normal life was once again--jobless. Nothing good about that.
    His boss had warned him on the first day that absence, or tardiness without notice, was considered a cause for termination. Parking cars was all he’d done since his release from J. L. Jefferson Correctional Facility, a job his dad had arranged through an acquaintance. He had tried to find something without his father’s assistance but failed. It was the only place that hadn’t done a background check on him, mainly because his father had vouched. The entire world had turned on Baden and he’d been tried and convicted for someone else’s crime. And lost his girlfriend in the process. Not to mention that every time someone so much as sneezed, he got hauled in for questioning. So what did it matter to let the old man down? Again.
    He rubbed a hand over the tattoo he’d burned into his left shoulder. It had been the first. Gemma--or Gem, as she apparently preferred--only noticed the changeling. Of course, it was the most dramatic. It was also the least significant.
    When he’d been accused of his first crime, he was certain he’d be released. There wasn’t any evidence and he’d never been to the store the police said he’d robbed. It would have been impossible to believe he had any involvement. Until they found an eye witness that pointed him out in a lineup and a cop that confirmed it. He was stunned. Complete strangers had chosen him. Why would they do that?
    The Truth Shan’t Set You Free
    It was embedded on his skin in red, white, and blue like a banner. It had become a part of him when the realization that certain people’s words mattered more than the average guy. For some reason, they were more average. A cop, a business owner--they were the everyday guy on the street that people listened to--not a seventeen-year-old kid from a low income family that lived outside of town and kept to himself. They looked at him and wondered if he would rob them. He wasn’t the one that made it to the Ivy League schools or the corner office. People judged his potential to become those things and said, no way.
    That had been an epiphany. He was the no-way guy, not the everyday guy. The realization forced him to accept that certain doctrines would never be his.
    The sun glinted off the floor-to-ceiling glass of the ten-story building beside him. He squinted at the reflection in it. Three people waited for the light to turn and allow them to bustle forward to their busy day. A woman in a black business suit with a cell glued to her ear, a man in a tie and white dress shirt presumably headed to a meeting, and another man in a suit watched the woman. They all had a life that he would never see—one that didn’t depend on the whim of others.
    Oh shit.
    He shook his head and laughed. The reflection laughed too--when he recognized the man in the white shirt—was himself.
    You could be this guy. You could be the everyday guy. How would that