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Fearless by Allana Kephart
Release Date: September 24th 2019
Pages: 259
Genres: Contemporary, New Adult, Romance
Priv·i·lege: having special rights, or immunities. Societal and social advantage.
For Riley McLeon, ignorance is bliss. As the daughter of a single cop with a history of shooting first and asking questions later, she’s grown up sheltered. He taught her everything she knows about life, love, guns, and the world as he sees it. And all he ever asked from her was a promise: she would never date a man of color.
Ra·cist: a person who shows or feels discrimination, prejudice, or antagonism against people of other races, or who believes that one’s own race is superior.
Lincoln Sanders knows all too well about the skin deep judgments people make. He knows what it is to lose everything, to be haunted by the impossible. He knows pain. He knows hate. And he definitely knows trouble when he sees it.
Chance: to take a risk. A possibility of something happening.
Silence comes easily when the whole world is against you, and being together is an act of bravery neither Lincoln or Riley think they're capable of. Loving each other feels like coming back to life, but you can’t move forward if you’re living in the past.
When you unlearn everything you've ever known, you can become fearless.
For Riley McLeon, ignorance is bliss. As the daughter of a single cop with a history of shooting first and asking questions later, she’s grown up sheltered. He taught her everything she knows about life, love, guns, and the world as he sees it. And all he ever asked from her was a promise: she would never date a man of color.
Ra·cist: a person who shows or feels discrimination, prejudice, or antagonism against people of other races, or who believes that one’s own race is superior.
Lincoln Sanders knows all too well about the skin deep judgments people make. He knows what it is to lose everything, to be haunted by the impossible. He knows pain. He knows hate. And he definitely knows trouble when he sees it.
Chance: to take a risk. A possibility of something happening.
Silence comes easily when the whole world is against you, and being together is an act of bravery neither Lincoln or Riley think they're capable of. Loving each other feels like coming back to life, but you can’t move forward if you’re living in the past.
When you unlearn everything you've ever known, you can become fearless.
{EXCERPT}
Dad didn’t have a choice but to shoot first.
He doesn’t like talking about it, which is fine, ’cause I don’t like thinking about it too hard.
I didn’t know about it until Friday, when I came home from school and he was sat in front of the TV in regular clothes. His eyes were red and his voice hoarse when he lamented the whole issue to me, explaining how he was put on paid leave until they could verify his story.
When he told me right there, I believed him. Fully. Without a doubt. He’d never hurt a kid. I could see how torn up he was about putting someone in the hospital. My father had cried once in his life, when my mom died, and never again. Not until that day.
Then I found out the kid didn’t have a gun.
Dad swore up and down he did, that he’d seen one. He said he told the kid to put his hands back on the wheel, and when he didn’t, that’s when he’d shot. He was scared for his life, he’d said. He thought of me, what would happen to me if he were to die?
I found it hard to believe some scrawny, fifteen-year-old child could scare my dad. Maybe three years ago, if I’d brought him home as a boyfriend. But even then, he wouldn’t have shot him.
The real reason I found out from social media—he was a black fifteen-year-old kid.
It took people a hot minute to connect the officer who shot a fucking kid was my dad, but when they did, all the hate flooded my way.
“Your dad is a monster!”
“Racist pigs!”
“Hope they all burn in hell.”
And a plethora of other lovely messages. I had grown men threatening me, saying they hoped something horrible happened to me so my dad would know the pain he put this kid’s family through. Some were more drastic than others—those I passed on to him. It was the only way we talked about the incident, reporting actual threats to the department and sending squad cars to school with me.
I wanted to defend my dad. There were so many things I wanted to say, but at the same time, my confidence in him was shot. He could’ve told me right at the start, that he thought the kid had a gun, that he made a mistake, that the kid was black. But he didn’t. He kept most of the story from me and only revealed more news as I stumbled onto it.
Every other sentence out of his mouth was “you can’t trust ‘em” about people of color. How could I not possibly think the outcome would’ve been different if it had been a white boy who’d taken his mom’s car out for a joyride?
Part of me felt like my dad was all those things people said about him, too.
So I don’t think about it. I don’t dwell, or wonder about this kid in the hospital, about the pain his family must be going through. Because my dad is the one person in the entire world I trust with all my life. He works so hard, and he always has my back no matter what the situation. He even got me out of cutting up a frog in biology class sophomore year—who does that?
Deep in my heart, I knew I should be furious with him. I knew I should call him out, but I couldn’t force it. He looked so wounded when his brother went after him, how could I do it, too? How could I turn my back on him when he needed me the most?
I couldn’t.
So I just…
Don’t think about it.
Allana Kephart has been making things up and bending people to her will from a very young age. She loves animals, tattoos, music, laughing, and reading. She spends an obscene amount of time finding pretty new words and thinking up awful ways to torment her characters.
When not writing, she can be found walking one of her many furbabies, making havoc with her credit union work buddies, or jamming out in her car to Broadway musical soundtracks. She lives in the beautiful state of Colorado with fur-babies.
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