Falling From Grace by S. L. Naeole Read Free Book Online

about him out of my mind.   I wouldn’t be thinking about him for the next hour, I vowed to myself.
    The bell rang, and the gaggle of girls at the front started to disperse.   I reached into my book bag and pulled out my binder.   A writing assignment had been placed up on the board, and Madame Hidani was doing her best to calm down the chatter so that we could focus and begin.   Well…so that everyone else could focus and begin.   I was ready.   More than ready to not have to think about Graham, my summer vacation, or blondes with perfect bodies and pink lip gloss on their teeth.
    Or, at least I thought I was.
    There on the blackboard, in clear chalky words was our assignment.   In French, we had to give a two page description of our summer break.
    Even Madame Hidani had turned on me!
    I groaned and quickly looked around to see if anyone had heard me.   I swallowed down a gulp of shock.   Rows and rows of heads were turned, facing me.   Was there not a single soul in the school who didn’t know what had happened?   I counted eighteen pairs of eyes all looking in my direction.   Eighteen female eyes.  
    Of course they were all female.   French was a romantic language, and no seventeen or eighteen-year-old boys were interested in romance.   They were interested in cars, and breasts, and breasts on cars.   And it was because of this bit of knowledge that I could say, quite honestly to myself, that it was no wonder that they were all staring…those eighteen pairs of eyes weren’t staring at me.   Of course not.   They were staring at HIM .
    A warm, pulling sensation in my solar plexus forced me to turn my head towards my right.   The only seat next to me, the one that Graham had filled just one year ago — the one that had been empty when I walked in — was now occupied.  
    It was the gray-eyed god, and he was staring, his silver eyes locked on me.   I felt just as uncomfortable then as I had in the bathroom with Erica staring at me in the mirror.   Moreover, I felt embarrassed.   Could it be possible that I was feeling more self-conscious than I had when I thought that all of the eyes were on me?   I blushed just then, and knew that the answer was yes, I was.
    “So we meet again,” his said to me softly, a hint of wry humor tingeing the bass in his voice.   His accent was something you’d only hear on television or the radio:   clean, smooth, very English.   And he smiled — an earth stopping, breath stopping, universe stopping smile.
    I swallowed — it sounded loud enough to wake the dead.   It was definitely loud enough to startle me.   “Are you talking to me?” I croaked, another rush of heat flooding my cheeks as I heard the nervousness in my voice.
    He nodded.   And then, impossibly, his smile grew.   “I don’t recall anyone else bumping into me and leaving before I could offer assistance.   Or, at the very least, introduce myself.”
    I didn’t think that I was capable of blushing so often, in such a short period of time.   My heart wasn’t exactly in the best shape to be sending any unnecessary blood anywhere else but to my brain and my limbs — it already felt as though that was putting an extreme strain on my entire body — yet the blush came so easily, as if from some magical spring of embarrassment.   “I apologized for that.” I said quickly.   Too quickly.
    “You sure did, Grace,” a girl I knew as Lacey Greene who was sitting directly in front of me snickered.   “But it was more like the sound that comes out of a constipated cow.”
    As quickly as my cheeks had warmed by the rush of blood, they turned to ice by the loss.   I turned to look at her but she had eyes only for our new classmate, seizing the opportunity afforded to her by my reaction to her flippant comment.   I turned back to look at him.   Gone was his smile, replaced by a grim line and a disgusted glint in his eyes; it appeared that he agreed.   I had sounded like a constipated