The Edge of Never, Wait For You, Rule: Scorching Summer Reads 3 Books in 1. J. Lynn

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СКАЧАТЬ death? I don’t want his pain hanging over my head.

      I turn abruptly and look at the door again, picturing the way he looked right before he walked through it.

      Maybe that’s not even an issue. How conceited of me to even entertain the thought of him ever falling in love with me. Maybe he just wants a friend with benefits, or a one-time thing.

      My head is swimming with a chaotic swarm of thoughts, none of which I feel are right and all of which I know are possible. I walk over to the mirror and stare at myself in it, looking into the eyes of some girl that I feel like I’ve met, but never really got acquainted with. I really do feel detached from myself, from everything.

       Fuck this!

      I grit my teeth and smack the palms of my hands against the TV stand. Then I grab a new pair of black cotton shorts, my new white tee with je t’aime written in script across it, wrapped around the Eiffel Tower and I head for the shower. I spend forever letting the water beat on me not because I feel dirty but because I feel like shit. All I can think about is Andrew. And Ian. And why suddenly I feel this strange, provoking need to think about them both in the same thought at all.

      After my skin feels stripped of its top layer by the hot water, I get out and dry off, soaking up the water from my hair into the towel. I blow-dry it naked in front of the mirror and then go back into the room to get dressed because I didn’t bring a clean pair of panties in with me. Finally, I comb out my halfway dried hair and leave it down to air-dry the rest of the way, pushing it back behind both ears and out of my face.

      I hear Andrew playing the guitar through the wall again. The TV is still yapping and it pisses me off so I stomp over and turn it off so I can hear Andrew more clearly.

      I just stand here for a few seconds, taking in the notes funneling through the wall and painfully into my ears. It’s not a sad kind of tune, but for some reason it’s still painful for me to hear.

      Finally, I grab my room key, slip my feet into my flop-flops and leave the room.

      Nervously licking the dryness from my lips, I take a deep breath, swallow and raise my hand to knock lightly on his door.

      The sound of the guitar ceases and a few seconds later, the door clicks open.

      He has showered, too. His brown hair is still wet; pieces of it a little messy in the front above his forehead. He stares at me, shirtless and wearing nothing else but a pair of black cargo shorts. I try not to look at his lightly-tanned six-pack abs or the veins running along the length of his arms that somehow appear more pronounced with the rest of his skin in plain-view.

       Oh … my God. Maybe I should just go back …

      No, I came over here to talk to him and that’s what I’m going to do.

      For the first time, I see the tattoo down his left side and I want to ask about it, but I’ll save that for later.

      He smiles gently at me.

      “It started about a year and a half ago,” I just come out with it, “a week before graduation—my boyfriend was killed in a car accident.”

      His gentle smile fades and he softens his eyes, letting me see just enough remorse to show that he feels bad for me without it seeming fake or exaggerated.

      He pushes the door open the rest of the way and I walk inside. The first thing he does before I even sit down on the end of the bed is pull a shirt over his chest. Maybe he doesn’t want me to feel like he’s trying to be distracting or flirty, especially when I came here to tell him something obviously painful. I respect him even more for that. That small, seemingly insignificant gesture speaks volumes, and although it might be unfortunate that he hid that body away, I’m OK with it. That’s not what I came here for.

      I think …

      There’s a sort of genuine sadness in his green eyes, mixed with something thoughtful. He turns the TV off and sits down next to me, the same way he did on my bed and he looks over, waiting patiently for me to go on.

      “We fell in love at sixteen,” I begin and look out ahead of me, “but he waited for me for two years—two years—” I glance over once in emphasis, “before I slept with him. I don’t know any teenage guy who would wait that long to get in a girl’s panties.”

      Andrew makes a slight you-have-a-point face.

      “I had had a couple of short-term boyfriends before Ian, but they were so …” I look up in thought searching for the word, “… mundane. To tell you the truth, I started seeing a lot of people as mundane by the time I was twelve.”

      Andrew looks reflective, his brows gently creasing inward.

      “But Ian was different. The first thing he said to me after we met and had our first real conversation was: ‘I wonder if the ocean smells different on the other side of the world.’ I laughed at first because I thought it was a weird thing to say, but then I realized that simple sentence set him apart from everyone I knew. Ian was a guy standing on the outside of the glass, looking in at the rest of us shuffling back and forth, doing the same thing every day, taking the same paths, like ants in an ant farm.

      “Now, I had always known that I wanted something more in life, something different, but it was when I met Ian that things started to become clear to me.”

      Andrew smiles gently and says, “Established and matured before twenty—that’s a rare trait.”

      “Yeah, I guess so,” I say, smiling back at him and then I let out a small laugh. “You wouldn’t believe how often Damon or Natalie or even my mom and my brother, Cole, messed with me about how ‘deep’ I was.” I quote ‘deep’ with my fingers and roll my eyes.

      “Deep is good,” he says and I glance over coyly because I detect the attraction even though he’s taming it very well for the sake of the conversation. But then his smile fades and his voice drops a little. “So when you lost Ian, you lost your partner in crime.”

      My smile fades, too, and I prop my hands on the edge of the bed and let my body slump between my shoulders. “Yes. We were going to backpack across the world after graduation, or maybe just Europe, but we were determined; had that much planned out at least.” I look straight at Andrew now. “We knew we didn’t want to do the college thing and end up working the same job for forty years—we wanted to work everywhere, try everything while on the road!”

      Andrew laughs. “That’s actually a pretty cool idea,” he says. “One week you’re waitressing at a bar and bankin’ on tips and the next week, in a different city or town, you’re belly-dancing on a street corner and tourists are tossing money in a jar as they walk by.”

      My slumped shoulders bounce softly with laughter and I blush, looking over at him. “Waitressing, sure, but belly-dancing?” I shake my head. “Not so much.”

      He grins and says, “Ah, you could pull it off.”

      Still with a hot, blushing face I look out ahead of me again and let the blush fade.

      “Six months after Ian died,” I go on, “my brother, Cole, killed a man in a drunk-driving accident and now he’s in prison. And after that, my dad cheated on my mom and they got divorced. My new boyfriend, Christian, cheated on СКАЧАТЬ