WHISKEY — the good (read: expensive) stuff, the kind she'd stolen from her father's liquor cabinet freshman year and tried to down like water (not the first and certainly not the last of her shameful endeavors). She'd plucked one bottle, then two, from the shelf and prowled up to the counter, green eyes gleaming with contentment and anticipation. The clerk had asked for I.D. in true skeptical fashion (she'd always had a bit of a baby face), and the little brunette had smugly supplied it, lips turned up in an easy smirk.Â
It didn't have the same thrill now that she was legal, but after years of sustaining herself on the scraps of others, Holly Turner had learned to take what she could get (and return the next night for more). Then, as if she'd just recalled a hunger momentarily forgotten — one that never truly left her — she'd added a pack of powdered doughnuts and sugar cookies to her loot and flashed the employee an achingly sweet smile, which he'd returned with all of the enthusiasm of a man making little more than minimum wage. She might've envied him once.Â
But now, squinting in the sunlight that reflected off of the water, she did no such thing. Instead, she relished in the way the sun warmed her skin and tried to memorize the way the ground felt underfoot — solid, stable, like the life her parents had ripped from her thieving fingers. God only knew how long it'd be before she felt either of those sensations, though if she (and the others, she begrudgingly noted) had anything to do with it, it wouldn't be. Nearly smiling at the thought, she busted open the plastic packaging and popped a doughnut into her mouth.
