Amber Frost by Suzi Davis Read Free Book Online Page B

quietly agreed.
    He smiled, wryly. “Don’t worry about it. I forget most things.” He looked like he was trying hard not to laugh though I had no idea why. It was yet another reminder of his strangeness, of who we each were, of reality.
    I jumped as the bell rang, its shrill clamor intruding on my quiet thoughts. I couldn’t believe how quickly the time had passed. Both our sketchbooks lay open and blank on our desks, a pile of pencils all with broken leads beside mine. I’d spent the past hour talking to Sebastian. It had felt like bare minutes though, like it wasn’t nearly enough time. I firmly pushed the thought away. It was too much time and I knew it. And now, it was over.
    “Go,” he said, as if he had read my thoughts. “We can talk again soon.”
    “We can… but we won’t,” I replied, trying to make my voice sound firm and cold. All I could manage was a slightly detached tone. Either way, it didn’t affect him in the slightest.
    “We will. I’m sorry, I can’t help it… I know it’s not for the best but we will,” he murmured apologetically. I stared at him in confusion. His ominous tone had raised goose bumps on my arms. Without saying another word, I grabbed my things and left, hurrying away from the art room, away from Sebastian and his strange words and absurd ideas – ideas that no matter how hard I pretended, had hit quite close to home.
    I avoided Sebastian Caldwood for the rest of the week. It was strange though, he seemed to pop up everywhere I went. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed him for three months when now I seemed to see him everywhere. Our paths crossed all over the school campus. We bumped into each other in the hallways, we were assigned to work in the same group in English, we even ended up having lockers just a few feet apart. There were so many coincidences it didn’t seem possible. But somehow it was.
    Not only could I not physically escape Sebastian’s presence but each day he seemed to preoccupy an increasingly larger portion of my thoughts. There was some intangible quality to him that drew me in. It was like I’d told him that day in the art room, I felt like I had to know him, like I was meant to and besides that, I wanted to know him and that frightened me most of all. I started to dream about dying again but now my strange dreams were also haunted by his dark eyes and the twisted, black design of his tattoo. I couldn’t escape him – even in sleep.
    Sebastian never approached me. He never even spoke directly to me; he just watched from a distance and waited. His eyes held a patience in them as he stared at me across the crowded dining hall or through the silent focus of the art room. I thought I had become used to being stared at but with Sebastian it was different. His gaze made me feel vulnerable and exposed, like he saw through all my pretenses, right down to my soul. There was an expectation in his eyes and I knew I wasn’t meeting it. Consequently, I felt ashamed.
    I tried my best to ignore him. I reminded myself daily that he was a nobody, he was a strange, weird boy, he was to be avoided, pitied, abhorred. I tried to devote myself to my frivolous life. I tried even harder to please everyone; I batted my eyelashes and flirted shamelessly with Clarke, I gossiped maliciously and enthusiastically with Tanya, Cadence and Rebecca, I scheduled my own tanning and hair appointments and further reduced my already low-calorie diet, I absolutely doted on my father the brief moments he was at home and never, ever complained about all the time I was left alone, in an empty, still unfamiliar house. It was never enough. Though my behavior pleased my parents, my boyfriend, my friends – I was never happy. Sebastian had exposed a truth in me that I’d been desperately trying to ignore. And now that it was out in the open, it was like a festering sore, painful and grotesque, shameful even, and suddenly, I could no longer pretend.
    I had made my