An Unexpected Love by Amber Riel (dar e dil novel online reading .TXT) 📕

          “No…. Just can’t wait for tonight.”

          “Yea, me neither.”

          “Hey, let’s three way, Melinda.”

          “Okay.”

          “I’ll call her.”

          “Alright.”

          Brandon sat on his living room couch.  He had the TV on, but he wasn’t watching it.  He was too busy trying to think of a way to earn money to help out his brother and sister-in-law.  He told them that he was going to help his brother with paying the hospital bills for his niece.  It was killing him knowing that he was laid off.  He didn’t want to tell his brother.  He knew that his brother would understand, but it still made him feel terrible.  “What am I going to do?” he asked himself.

          Someone knocked on the door.

          Brandon looked up and forced himself to get off of the couch.  He made his way to the door and opened it.  Zeke walked into the house with two bottles of O’Doul’s.  He figured that non-alcoholic beer was the best choice for drinking when he didn’t feel like actually drinking the alcoholic stuff.  “I’m sorry to hear about what happened, man.”  He handed a bottle to Brandon.  “I wish there was something that I could do to help, but I’m probably not going to have a job much longer either with the way things are going.”

          “Thanks.”  Brandon closed the door.

          “So, did you tell Chris yet?”

          “No…. I can’t…. I promised him and Jessica that I was going to help pay the bills for whenever Laura had to go back to the hospital…. I feel terrible.”

          “Chris will understand.”

          “I know.”

          The two men walked into the living room.  Brandon sat on the recliner, while Zeke sat on the couch.

          Cassie was talking to Melinda and Jennie on the phone.  “Tonight is the last night that we’re actually going to see everyone in our class,” Cassie pointed out.

          “I know,” Melinda agreed.

          “We’re still going to hang out though,” Jennie jumped in.

          They talked for about an hour.  The conversation had jumped from the graduation to books and so on and so on.  They could never stick to just one subject.

          “Oh.  Can you two hold on for a second?  Someone else is calling.”  Melinda asked.

          “Okay,” Cassie and Jennie agreed.  While Cassie and Jennie waited for Melinda to get back on the line, they just talked.  They kind of figured who had called Melinda.

          “It’s probably Lloyd.”

          “Yea, and she’s going to want to talk to him instead of us,” Jennie joked.

          Melinda came back on the phone a few minutes later.  “Hey, I’ll see you two tonight…. Lloyd’s on the other line.”

          “Of course,” Cassie and Jennie joked, laughing.

          Melinda hung up with them.

          “Well, we’ll see her tonight.”  Cassie continued laughing.

          “Yea.  Right now, she wants to talk to her boyfriend.”

          “Yep.”

          Brandon and Zeke just watched TV.  Brandon was feeling the stress of the day growing heavier.  He doubted that he’d get any sleep before he found a new job or something he could do to keep money coming into his house.

          “Man, you need to get out of this house and find a girlfriend,” Zeke told Brandon.

          “Uh-no.”

          “Why not?”

          “Well, no girl is going to want to date a guy who just lost his job.”

          “Then, I’ll bring you to go get applications and then we’ll go pick up chicks.”

          Brandon looked at Zeke.  He wasn’t worried about finding a girlfriend at the moment.  He really just wanted to get a job so he could make money and then eventually meet a nice girl who he would settle down with.

          “Okay.  Then we’ll just be bored, but you really need to get a girlfriend, and let some girls know that I’m single.”

          “What about that girl that you were telling me about last Friday?”

          “Well, she decided to go back to her ex-husband.”

          “She went back to her ex-husband?”

          “Yea…. She would rather date a family man.”

          “Ok-ay?” Brandon was confused.

          Cassie was waiting for her name to be called.  Melinda and Jennie had already walked across the stage and got their diplomas.  Cassie was excited and nervous.  She couldn’t believe how this was going to end her high school life and begin her life in college and her own life was going to start.  There were more names called, but Cassie stood in line, waiting.  The nervousness was going, along with her excitement.  She couldn’t hear who was being called until she heard her name.

          “Cassie Smith….”

          Cassie took a deep breath and smiled.  “This is it,” she whispered to herself.  She walked onto the stage and shook hands with a few members the faulty and the principal.  While she shook hands with the principal, she was handed her diploma and someone had taken her picture.  When she was finished, she walked off of the stage.

          Brandon walked into the kitchen to get something to eat.  Zeke was in the living room, watching Boxing.  Buck was also in the living room and he was sitting on the floor, his tail was curled around the left side of his body.

          “Hey, man.  I’m going to go ahead and go,” Zeke told Brandon as he stood up.

          “Alright.”

          Zeke left.

          Cassie, Jennie, and Melinda had met up outside of the building.  It was chaotic from the graduating students, their families, the teachers, and staff who were exciting so they stayed close to the building so that they wouldn’t get lost in the crowd.  A guy who was now eighteen, walked up to the three friends.  He was tall with light brown hair and light brown eyes.  He placed his arm around Melinda.  “Congrats, you three,” he told them.

          “Thanks, Lloyd,” all three of the girls replied.

          “No problem.”

          Brandon thought about what he was going to do to get money.  He walked up stairs and into his room.  He sat on the bed and looked at the ceiling.  “What am I going to do?” he asked himself. 

          Cassie woke up and sat upright on her small twin size bed.  She looked around her room.  She waited for a couple of minutes before actually getting out of bed.  When she finally worked her off of the bed, she walked out of the room.  She slowly worked her way to the kitchen table and found a note from her mother.  She picked up the note.  “Cassie,” she read to herself, “your father is at work, I’m visiting with your granny, and your brothers are at school.  I need you to go to the bank to pick up some money.”  She had to laugh at the obvious points observation her mother had written.  She knew where everyone else was so it was pointless for her mother to have written it down.  It was the last day of school for her brothers and of course she didn’t have to read the note to know that her father was at work.

          Brandon was going through the dresser, trying to find a shirt to where, when he came across a small, black, hand gun.  He picked it up and examined the small weapon.  He was confused on how it had gotten there.  He hadn’t remembered ever buying the gun.  “Where did you come from?” he asked, still examining it.

          Cassie walked into the bank, smiling.  She was glad that she had known some of the people who worked there because she was shy when it came to talking to people who she didn’t know.  It wasn’t that she was rude, it was just that she had a hard time getting the courage to actually talk to others.

          A forty-five year old man with short grey hair and blue eyes walked past Cassie.  He wore a friendly smile on his face and was dressed in a nice black suit out fit to show his professional attitude.  “Hello, Cassie,” he spoke keeping his friendly smile.

          “Hello, Mr. Walker.”  She returned the smile.

          “Micheal,” one of the female bankers had replied, “can you take this over there for me?”  She held out a few small bank rolls but didn’t make it obvious to the customers what she was holding so that no one would get any funny ideas.

          “Of course,” the man replied as he took the bank rolls, keeping them hidden as well.

          Brandon stood in the ally next to the bank.  He couldn’t believe what he had decided to do.  He placed a black mask on his face.  There was a long oval hole for his eyes.  “I can’t believe that I’m going to do this,” he told himself.  He checked the gun to make sure there weren’t any bullets.  He hadn’t realized that there was one small silver bullet hiding from him.

          Cassie and Micheal were the only two in the bank when they had noticed a man wearing a black mask heading into the building.

          “Cassie, come back here.”

          “Okay.”  Cassie walked behind the desk and ducked down.

          “Just in case,” Micheal whispered to her, “your parents would kill me if something happened to you.”

          Brandon had walked into the bank and walked over to the man.  He held the gun up.  His heart raced with fear. Robbing banks wasn’t something he would normally do but under the circumstances it seemed like the only good idea at the time.  “Put the money in the bag….”

          “What bag?” the banker asked, noticing that Brandon was empty handed.

          Brandon knew he had forgotten something.  “Well, do you have a bag I could use for the money?” Clearly, he wasn’t cut out for the crime.

          “No…. And if I did, I wouldn’t give it to you.”

          Brandon held the gun up to the man.  He held it up the man’s forehead just to scare the man.

          Cassie looked up to see that Micheal was face to face with a gun.  She covered her mouth to keep from screaming.  She didn’t want the mask man to find her but her heart pounded in fear for Micheal.  She had wished that she could help him but she was defenseless.

          Micheal took a deep breath.  He felt fear creep into his heart and wasn’t ready for death yet.  “Okay.  Oh, here’s a bag.”  He motioned for Cassie to hand him a bag from under the desk.  He took the bag which Cassie had laid in his hand and placed it on the table.  He slowly started placing money into the bag.

          “Hurry up, old man.”  Brandon started panicking but tried to keep calm as he rushed the man to work faster.  He couldn’t believe that he was actually acting so tough even though he felt fear inside.  “Hurry up.”

          Micheal tried to place the money into the bag as fast as he could but he hated to be rushed.

          While Brandon waited for Micheal to hurry up, his finger slipped and pulled the