Breathe by Melanie McCullough Read Free Book Online Page B

was that the night was dark and he couldn’t see me inside the truck, when the driver’s side door opened and clicked shut. Garrett’s scent, mingled with the smell of charred wood, filled the interior. I counted his breaths. Seven before he turned toward me. I lifted my eyes to meet his gaze and in an instant, his mouth was on mine, hot and frantic, searching. As if somewhere in my mouth laid the answers he was looking for.
    The sting of rejection that I recognized in his eyes when I was the first to pull away stabbed at my heart. I guess he didn’t find what he needed. It was probably for the best anyway. If I was going under, no way in hell I was dragging Garrett down with me.

Chapter Five
    Abby
     
     
    The next morning the swim team traveled to Clarksburg where we had our asses handed to us by their mediocre team. Guess they hadn’t all partied the night before and shown up hung-over. I swore I could see fumes rising from Coach Scott’s bald head.
    The medley relay was almost comical, with some of us forgetting to go when the swimmer in the pool touched the wall. Jeff took the worst of it. When he clocked in on the fifty-meter freestyle at almost a minute, Coach near about had a stroke.
    “You’re gonna have to do better than that if you want to impress Penn State, Rhoades,” Coach Scott had shouted at me after I failed to win the one hundred meter butterfly. I pushed harder just to prove I could, winning my next three events and losing the fourth.
    I had driven down with Uncle Jim and Becca in Becca’s maroon Chevy Tahoe. Garrett hadn’t called since he dropped me off the night before and he hadn’t been at the meet. So as we drove back home I wondered if he was still angry with me over the Jeff thing, or the him kissing me and me not reciprocating thing.
    I tried not to think that the last time I’d made this trip, it had been with Tom. It was the week Becca’s dad had moved into hospice, right before the lung cancer took him, and she and Uncle Jim were in Pittsburgh spending what time was left with him. Garrett was driving down with his father and though Coach Scott would surely have given me a ride had I asked, Tom had volunteered to take me. It was the first time anyone other than Uncle Jim and Becca had shown the slightest interest in my swimming.
    I won that day—every event I swam—and racked up pool records that remain unbeaten to this day. And when it was over Tom took me out for a celebratory dinner. “I swam in high school,” he’d told me over my mouth-watering meal of lasagna and Coke. “Back in Danville.”
    “Really?” I’d asked and I’d been genuinely interested. Tom had been nothing but nice to me since he’d begun seeing Maggie a few weeks prior. When he showed up for dates and brought Maggie a dozen roses, he’d always have a single calla lily (my favorite flower) for me. And since they’d started going out, Maggie seemed sober more of the time, like she was trying to keep herself together. I remembered wondering what a man like Tom—tall, muscular, handsome, and so put together—had seen in someone like Maggie. I’d learned the answer later but by that point it had been too late.
    He called over the server, a young plump girl with curly orange hair and a gnarly overbite, and he ordered a bottle of wine with two glasses. She never even bothered to card me. Tom was younger than Maggie by a few years, maybe only thirty or thirty-one. I imagined I must have seemed older, sitting there with him under the dim lighting, my long hair curling from being wet and not blown dry. Maybe she thought we were together, I told myself. I pretended we were. That it was our first date and Tom had brought me a bouquet of calla lilies. That I’d laughed at his jokes because I wanted him to think I was funny and mature. Because I’d wanted him to like me.
    It became our regular thing—Tom taking me to meets and stopping to eat along the way. Then one night I drank more than I should have. I