Between Here and Forever by Elizabeth Scott Read Free Book Online Page B

me.
    And he sees me looking. I can tell because he stills for a moment, staring right at me. Damn, damn, damn.
    I turn back to Tess, watching her still face.
    “Say something else, please,” I tell him, because I don’t know what else to say, and I don’t want to think about him catching me looking at him.
    “Like what?”
    “Talk to her like you would if I wasn’t here,” I say. “Just pretend I’m part of the wall or something.” If he acts like I’m invisible, I will be, and then things will be normal again.
    He’s silent for a moment, and then he says, “I don’t know how I’m supposed to pretend your sister is part of the wall, Tess. She’s very … she’s like a dragon, sort of.”
    That hurts. But I asked him to act like I wasn’t there, didn’t I? And got called a big scaly fire-breathing monster. Fabulous.
    “See?” I tell Tess, and make sure to keep my voice light. “He clearly needs to be protected from me. So wake up, okay?”
    Nothing. I pull my knees up to my chest, curling into the chair, and fiddle with the laces on my sneakers.
    “Sorry,” Eli says.
    “Oh, she’s just flirting,” I say, and force myself to uncurl, to sound unconcerned, but what more does she need? “You’ll see when you get to know her. The summer before she went to college, she was working over here, in Organic Gourmet, and guys from Milford would actually ride the ferry over to Ferrisville just to try and get her to talk to them.”
    Well, one guy. Jack.
    “You don’t like Organic Gourmet?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You made a face when you said it,” he says.
    I shrug. “That’s what us dragons do.”
    “I didn’t mean—”
    “It’s okay,” I tell him. “I know what I look like. What I … what I am.” As soon as I’ve said it, I look at Tess again, but she’s still unmoving. Still silent.
    Still not fully here.
    “We should go now,” I say, and get up. I force myself to say good-bye to Tess, to not act like how he’s gotten me to admit what I am—and how I did it in front of her—has rattled me.
    I force myself not to look at him.
    Outside her room, I walk out of the unit and head for the elevators. I don’t look at him when I say, “Same time tomorrow?”
    I expect him to say he doesn’t think it’s working, that having me sitting there is annoying or weird or both, but he just says, “Okay.”
    I don’t look back when I leave, and I don’t think about him on the way home.
    I think about what happened the summer before Tess went to college, when she was eighteen and I was fifteen, instead.
    I think about Jack.

fourteen
    Tess met Jack first.
    She’d gotten a scholarship to college of course, not because of her grades but because she “exemplified leadership potential.” She got a summer job over in Milford, as a checkout clerk for all the overpriced food at the Organic Gourmet market. (Milford doesn’t have things like supermarkets, you see. Just “markets” and “boutiques.” Ugh.)
    My parents didn’t understand—didn’t she want to see her friends, didn’t she want to have fun, didn’t she know college was taken care of?—but she said she wanted to work. She said she was going to save money for books and other things her scholarship didn’t cover.
    To be honest, I think she got a job because Claire lived so close to us and because Claire had stopped hiding in her house. Instead, she was starting to walk around her yard, walk around town, showing off Cole and smiling like she’d glimpsed something amazing no one else ever had. I think that was when Tess realized Claire was never going to issue whatever sort of apology Tess was waiting for.
    So Tess went to work, and Jack came into Organic Gourmet on Wednesday, June 30th.
    I sometimes wonder if I’ll always remember that date, and how I felt when I looked up from the book I was reading on the front porch when I heard Tess turn onto our street and saw him walking behind her, shoulders hunched like he was